Dear community,

As announced in my previous post I will today share with you the role of a manager. This vision is based on my experience as senior manager for more than 10 years for a Lean management consulting company.

Of course, each group’s member influences the efficiency of his team and no one should expect a great success thanks to only one leader.

Nevertheless, at the end of the game, he will be accountable of its team’s results and it is why manager first needs to understand what are the levers to drive it to the expected out puts.

1. The first mission of a manager is to motivate the team :

Motivation is the combustible for the engine and you cannot success any challenges without it. The first Principle of Lean is: Human is the more valuable resources. It means that the lean manager should understand that everyone in the team wants to improve the current situation. Everyone wants a better world, a better life.

The target of a manager is to keep people in this state of mind by allowing them to share their ideas and to realize some.

Of course, those ideas have to be driven by clear targets which are understood by the team and non-relevant initiatives should be identified regarding team priorities and not personal judgment of the leader (we will see how to do it in another post).

Define clear targets, make people express their thinking and realize some of their idea will help you to keep a high level of motivation in your team.

2. The second mission of a manger is to organize the team job:

Who is responsible of what? When? Why? What is the status of the team actions (including the leader’s ones)? There are many way to do it and I will write a dedicated post for this question.

However, I can today give you a flavor:

• Define/write actions with people in charge of making them real,
• Share them in a single place all actions;
• Limit the number of open actions,
• Review actions ‘status every week at minimum
• Avoid mail, excel sheet and alone oral communication…3Dlean and its action Log is very efficient for that…

3. The last mission of the manager should be to train the team:

• To allow the team to realize its mission
• To prepare the next missions you want to achieve.
• To keep it curious and open minded on new topics, new way of working, new technologies,…
• To better understand where the company, the business is coming from and why we are today.
• To refuse status quo and continue to ask question.

I am very curious to get your feedback about this vision of manager’s role. I guess that some of you may disagree, great! Let’s start the discussion:)