Use my Teach Your Teams continuous improvement workbooks to help drive leader and work team skill building in your own organization.
Teach Your Teams Continuous Improvement Workbooks
Each of my ‘Teach Your Teams’ continuous improvement workbooks began as a tool to help myself or others I knew through work. Today, my goal is to help trainers and leaders learn and teach others about high performance workplace best practices.
Please email me at kevin@greatsystems.com if you have a specific tool or challenge in mind. I have many more resources than I post at any given time.
How Can Your Teams Use My Teach Your Teams Continuous Improvement Workbooks?
I design my continuous improvement workbooks as training tools others can use in their own organizations. Currently, my Great Systems YouTube channel has free video and audio content to support three workbooks. Plus, fillable PDF download exercise packs are available upon request. Just email me at kevin@greatsystems.com.
For more support, virtual, live workshops are available. In these workshops, I model how I typically teach the workshop. Just let me know if you have such an interest. I add video and audio content regularly, and my goal is to have at least six workbooks on-line by the end of 2023.
Multiple Sources and Formats to Teach Continuous Improvement Yourself
Each workbook is available on the amazon.com website in paperback and ebook formats. You can follow this link to my Amazon Author page, which is the easiest way to see all of my performance improvement content in one place. Follow the links below to learn more about each workbook.
Facilitating and Leading Teams
Some say effective team facilitation is a lost art. How effective are your work team meetings? How many project and focus work teams do you need to have? Do your work team leaders lead meaningful meetings and facilitate effective group decision making? Do you effectively use your meeting time? How often do you find your group going off on tangents or arguing about opinions instead of facts? Do one or two team members talk more than they should?
My 182-page, full color ‘Facilitating and Leading Teams’ training workbook helps you answer these questions. Also, it will help you address their related challenges.Most organizations have too many teams in action. Plus, they waste time daily in too many wasteful meetings. All too often, leaders lack the facilitation skills to use necessary meeting time wisely.
The design of this 182-page, full color workbook helps any team leader (1) reduce meeting waste, (2) increase team effectiveness, (3) put more effective process improvements in place.
What makes this ‘Facilitating and Leading Teams’ workbook different from the others?
The main reason my ‘Facilitating and Leading Teams’ training workbook is different and works is that it is practice oriented. The team facilitation skills and tools you read about and practice help you waste less meeting time.
Well-facilitated virtual team events help you benefit more from the different perspectives on the team. You arrive at more effective solutions, in less time. Less time is spent in formal meetings. Plus, you get better results from the meeting time you do invest. The key lies in leaders that practice the right facilitation skills at the right time and continue to practice in the spirit of improvement.
Plus, its content helps you optimize your mix of process teams, project, and focus work teams. Finally, the workbook gives you facilitation best practices and strategies to improve team support for the optimum mix of teams you need.
Pursuing Process Excellence
This 158-page, full color workbook is designed to help any organizational or site leader identify and address those work system design constraints that hold back their pursuit of operational excellence. For example, in many organizations, few employees can use process improvement tools themselves. Also, many work team leaders are not responsible for consistent process improvement.
Worst of all, we fail to engage a high percentage of our workforce in our operational excellence pursuit. Ironically, the systems to achieve such high engagement are not very costly or challenging to implement.
How can the ‘Pursuing Process Excellence’ workbook make your job easier?
Too many organizations rely solely on kaizen teams, six sigma teams, or their process engineers as they attempt to pursue operational excellence. Do you want to accelerate and sustain your site or organizational pursuit of operational excellence? If so, you must address those systematic constraints that hold back your current improvement efforts.
Project teams alone take too long. I wrote this workbook to help leaders install work systems that engage a high percentage of the workforce. Also, a high percentage of the organization’s key work processes need renovation via a systematic and consistent formal process improvement effort.
Perhaps most importantly, this workbook is designed to help you find time for improvement. The workbook’s 10 exercises help you create a plan for effective work time use. This plan helps you begin your transition from reactive problem solving to proactive process improvement!!
The Basics of Lean Tool Use
My 156-page, full-color ‘Basic Lean Tools Training Workbook’ covers the basic skills and approaches you need to create value stream maps and spaghetti diagrams, perform quick changeover analysis, put in place a visual workplace, and install 5S work practices.
How can this continuous improvement workbook help you make lean tool and concept use daily work habits?
The design of my “Basic Lean Tools” workbook can help anyone who wants to reduce waste and increase customer value for those key processes they own. Plus, the lean tools you learn to use, and the exercises you experience, give you better lean implementation results in less time and at a lower cost.
Two assessments in the workbook help you gauge the degree of support your lean efforts require. Also, they help you gauge your lean transition progress. If you want to make lean thinking a daily habit across your organization, or simply within your own work team, you can use this workbook to conduct a highly interactive workshop in your organization.
Plus, this workbook focuses on the types of changes one needs to make if they want every team member to make lean tool use a daily work habit. Thirteen exercises are included to help you and your work team practice the use of five key lean tools, create a lean work culture, and plan for future lean success.
Vital Signs, Scorecards, and Goals – the Power of Meaningful Measurement
Could this process measurement system training workbook help you? Believe it or not, most people don’t like to measure things at work. Experience teaches me that there is a key reason for this dislike. Primarily, most organizational measurement systems are horribly broken.
When companies use the wrong measures to measure the wrong things, and then try to hold people accountable to such bad measures, displeasure is bound to occur. How meaningful are your measurement systems? Do you measure the vital signs of your work processes?
How meaningful is your process measurement work system?
The concepts and tools in this workbook focus on three things. First, we look at how to define a meaningful set of vital signs for each key process. Second, we explore the use scorecards at the process level to help drive a balanced measurement focus. Third, we look at how to identify goals that engage and motivate work teams.
Most organizations fail to use the right measures to measure the right things. Most often, attempts are made to use organizational or business unit level metrics and analytics to diagnose process level problems and monitor process health. If one wants to identify key improvement areas, this approach is often ineffective.
Plus, work team leaders fail to engage enough team members in daily measure use to improve work processes. In turn, most measurement systems contain waste and provide suboptimal value.
Finally, I include a section that explores ways to recognize team performance for goal achievement. The tools in this workbook, like others that I create, help you organize your measurement thoughts, create dialogue between team members, and stimulate systems change.
How to Lead Great Investigations
The ‘How to Lead Great Investigations’ incident investigation training workbook gives you concepts and tools to improve your incident investigation process. Also, its use helps improve problem solving team effectiveness.
This 106-page, full color workbook includes eleven exercises from the virtual 1-day workshop. These team-based exercises help you teach others how to collect better evidence in less time. Additionally, users learn to facilitate and lead interviews and problem solving team meetings more effectively. Finally, the workbook content can help you create better investigation reports and corrective actions.
How Effective is Your Incident Investigation Process?
We lose too much time and money when we investigate problems that continue to come back. All too often, incident investigators fail to ask key questions and effectively listen to collect the evidence they need from interviews. They fail to capture key paper and screen evidence.
Plus, they fail to spot human factors concerns in the workplace. In turn, investigation process delays occur. Additionally, investigators miss key root causes and propose weak recommendations. Finally, we fail to treat our investigation efforts as a process that we can manage, evaluate, and improve. Thus, the need for this incident investigation training workbook.
How effective are your incident investigations? How consistent is investigation quality and timeliness across your problem solving teams? Do your incident investigation interviewers ask great questions and listen to others? Do you efficiently collect all of the evidence that you need? How often do you miss opportunities to improve due to ‘lost’ evidence or investigation process delays?
Error Proof – How to Stop Daily Goofs for Good
How do you use proven work system designs and practices to help minimize the daily potential for human error? Would you like to stop those daily goofs for good? This 162-page book gives you over 100 ‘best practice’ work system designs you can easily install to help you better ‘mistake proof’ your workplace.
How ‘error proof’ are your work processes?
We can’t simply ask people to be careful, or punish those who goof, and achieve minimal risk and six sigma levels of quality. Instead, a more effective strategy is to ‘error proof’ your work processes. Do you use proven, best practice human error and equipment failure-reduction safeguards? If so, you more effectively sustain the level of process excellence you desire. This mistake proofing best practices book by Kevin McManus captures these strategies and tactics.
Why do so many people struggle to capture their key process errors that occur daily? How can we anticipate, and minimize, the potential for human error? How can we design a work system to achieve very low error rates on a consistent basis? What actions will help your teams consistently use error reduction techniques?
How can you error proof your key work systems and processes?
The key lies in one’s use of proven work system designs and practices to help minimize the daily potential for human error. Significant examples of success do exist. In these cases, error and incident rates are consistently kept very low.
For example, the Blue Angels excel at work preparation and review. Pal’s quick serve restaurant chain has a superior job skill certification system. Energy sector workers consistently achieve near zero safety incident levels that many organizations would consider to be unobtainable.
How do these people find ways to standardize their work practices and minimize errors in very dynamic, high risk settings? They use better work system designs to get better results. I wrote my ‘Error Proof’ mistake proofing best practices book to help capture the best practices I have learned and practiced to reduce daily errors, defects, and failures.
My First Two ‘Teach Your Teams’ OPEX Courses are NOW Available!
A complete set of ‘Teach Your Teams’ video and audio content is NOW available for my first two Kaizen Learning Universe courses on the Great Systems YouTube channel. These courses focus on how to make continuous improvement a daily work habit and how to effectively pursue operational excellence.
Also, I will soon offer this content as part of the different courses in the Great Systems Kaizen Learning Universe. Class for beta customers opens in July 2023. Download options include PDF, mp3, and mp4 content to support each of the six different ‘Teach Your Teams’ (TYT) continuous improvement workbooks. Keep reading to learn more about the workbooks and process.
Do you have an immediate work systems improvement question or need?
If so, please email me at kevin@greatsystems.com!
Thanks for visiting this page on the Great Systems Best Practice Work Systems website.
Keep improving!
Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer and Systems Guy Great Systems
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