Supervisors are Critical to Lean Construction
The roles in Lean Construction…
Everyone’s participation in the improving how we do our work is a required element for Lean Construction.
As the Lean expert, I have little to offer on how to improve the actual work that is being done. That is because improvement is far more effective when it is identified and implemented by the true experts, those are the people doing the work. My role in Lean Construction, is to champion the Lean principles and promote the execution of Lean and continuous improvement across the organization.
Lean construction is based on two key components People and Process.
- On the people side, we teach our team leaders to operate with transparency while focusing on collaboration and communication with their teams
- On the process side, we utilize the Lean people skills to engage those teams in improving the processes, by reducing wastes and setting how the work is being executed.
We need our the team leaders, to embrace the Lean People methods and challenge their teams to find and improvements that reduce waste.
Supervisors are critical to Lean!
Lean lives and dies with you. We need to be deliberate in our execution and continuous improvement across the organization. As the Leader, you have control over every aspects of Lean. When you talk and behave Lean the rest of the team follows. When you take the time out of your busy day to, stop and collaborate with your team on improvement they will execute more effectively while reducing the number of things piled on your own plate.
Lean is not a magic bullet, instead it is a continuous push on improvement that will increase our quality, speed of the build, improve schedule success while improving the morel of the whole team.
Understanding the role in Lean construction helps the organization to mobilize and execute on Lean.
Michel Handfield, C.E.T. LSSBB
