S3E13. Getting LEAN in Leadership with David Veech

Do you put the needs of your team before yours? Do you engage with them or just deliver orders? Do you encourage them to do their best in a non-threatening matter? Do you get mad and let it fester or get over it quickly?

David Veech joins us to discuss those questions and more. He’s had many different roles in life: infantry officer, husband, father, author, student, farmer, grandfather, and teacher. David now teaches organizations how to obliterate their obstacles, accelerate innovation, and elevate performance by teaching leaders how to love, learn, and let go. Leaders who apply his lessons achieve higher productivity, higher preferability, and higher professionalism as they build great workplaces.

David’s been a student of LEAN since 1991. LEAN manufacturing is a way to make every process in an organization more efficient. It’s about making things when they are needed and delivering them on time, instead of allowing inventory to pile up. Over five years working at the college of engineering, David started studying Toyota’s suggestion systems, quality circles, leadership development, their team structure—all of their people systems.

David put together a philosophical approach to what LEAN was for an organization, and a huge part of that is organization. The foundation that it builds off of is what David calls “dynamic stability.” How do you create an organization that has the stability to measure things, repeat performance, and build skills so that you can see when you’re doing things right—while also being ready to pivot immediately and stabilize as quickly as possible? The thing that matters most in this is a leader’s mindset.

Leaders need to be able to share the way they think about their work with the organization. There are four key components in dynamic stability:

  • Leaders’ mindset
  • Build a learning organization
  • Put everybody in teams
  • Build trust

What are you going to do to change your mindset so you can adapt to a changing landscape using dynamic stability and its four key components? These skills are more essential today than ever before.

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