The Emotional Side of Lean

I read an interesting article in January's edition of the Journal for Quality and Participation about the need for emotional intelligence in a project. It’s by Rangarajan Parthasarathy, and you can read it here. It pulls together the principles of project management, evidence-based management, and the emotional quotient necessary to making a project successful.

In order to truly make the recommendations of a Lean project work, you have to have more than just knowledge of statistics and Lean tools and how to apply them to your project. You should reach across the groups with equities in the program and work the kind of relationship management magic that creates an atmosphere where everyone is looking forward together toward the same goal. You have to be able to create a sense of ownership among the stakeholders. Essentially, you must “sell” the solution.

It’s hard to find good project leaders who can consult as a part of the team without losing the evidence-based management required by Lean. A great way to overcome that is to assign specific roles; partner a person with the “soft” skills required to keep all of the people and personalities running in the same direction with a person that has the quantitative ability to keep the data collection and analysis clean and productive. I believe that the lack of attention to the emotional side of a project, particularly the acceptance and ownership of the resulting changes, is a preventable source of failure.