Lean Waste 8: Skills. The Plus 1
Eradicating Waste: The 7 Muda (+1 for the road)
To finish this this week and a day, we look at skills. One of the most undervalued yet most important elements of the team’s, departments’ and business’ factors.
Unfortunately, many organisation and indeed the education systems of most countries encourage specialisms. When at a dinner part, when you ask someone what they do, you normally get a response that’s specialist in a particular field. “I’m a teacher”, “I’m a gas man”, “I’m a Gynaecologist”. Our seemingly innate need to categorise makes us unable to handle uncertainty and value multi-skilled individuals much less than specialist skill. However, single specialisms also naturally create silos, territories, contention points and risk in enterprise systems. “Can’t touch that! Brian from accounts will need to cast his eye over the purchase and he’s on holiday this week”
Here is something that may come as a surprise. There is a good chance someone in your team can decide on the purchase too. Sure, specialism is important but here’s the thing. Take a look in the mirror. Is your job the only thing you do? Chances are you’re also a spouse, a handy person, sports person, band member, artist, parent. Each of those brings with it skills unrelated but probably unconsciously influencing your ability to do your job. Indeed, it can help influence team members and improve the quality of communication with specialists as well.
In recent years, some companies have started embracing the diversity of their worker’s skill base. Many ask their own staff if they know of any leads or perhaps potential employees who may be interested in working with the company. They are often given control of the account, a referral fee and a cut of the profits too, in turn building their skill base even broader.
Tip: counter risk of “just enough knowledge to be dangerous” by loosely pairing specialists with the wannabe generalist next along the value chain by highest contention point. You’ll cut down bottlenecks that way.
This concludes our tour of the 7 wastes. I hope you found it useful. Feel free to get in touch if you’ve got any questions or comment below to tell us about a skill one of your employees had that you utilised.
