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Lean Management New frontiers for financial institutions
1
Huddle boards are visual
performance boards used
during daily team meetings
to focus discussions. They
typically track team and
individual performance,
monitor customer metrics,
show trend charts, and note
problem-solving eorts.
McKinsey: What impact has lean had on
you personally?
Richard Hemsley: The thing I enjoy most is
going and seeing what’s happening in the
business units. I get to spend time with the teams
working on lean, walk around the centers,
listen to the calls, and participate in the huddles
and the problem solving. It’s very rewarding
to be able to do all that.
From a development point of view, I need to
learn to ask dierent questions of my
team—questions that hand a problem over to
them and let them solve it, instead of me
trying to find the answer myself. As the most
senior sponsor of lean in the organization,
I have a role to play in championing lean with
colleagues. I need to make sure I’m able
to turn up and speak about lean when we’re
inducting people into the program or recruiting
new hires into the organization.
McKinsey: What dierences do you notice when
you make your visits to the front line?
Richard Hemsley: The most impressive thing
I’ve seen has been the huddle boards
and
the way that the team meetings we’ve been holding
for years have developed into short, focused,
objective sessions. The quality of the dialogues
that team managers have with agents and
with customer service managers has improved
tremendously. Everybody understands what
their role is and knows that they need to
participate. By now, people can almost predict
what questions they are going to be asked.
We’ve got to a position where we can have
performance-driven dialogues in just ten minutes
that achieve all the results that we could hope
for—not just making day-to-day improvements,
but solving problems to improve performance
in the medium term as well.
McKinsey: What do you actually do during
your visits?
Richard Hemsley: The visits tend to follow a
common pat
tern. When I arrive, the senior
lean leader and the center manager take a few
minutes to introduce the unit and explain
where they are on their lean journey. As soon as
that’s done, we’re out onto the floor. We join
the team huddles to understand what our
performance was yesterday, what it is expected
to be today, and what objectives the teams
are setting themselves. Then I sit with an agent
who is doing processing or talking on the
telephone, and I do a process confirmation with
them. That involves checking that a process
is working as it should and that it meets minimum
design standards. For most of the day I’m
moving among people within the center, doing
more process confirmations.
At the end of the day I usually return to the senior
lean leader and center manager. They challenge
me about what I’ve learned, what observations I’ve
made, what improvements I can suggest. So
they make me work for my living, and I become
part of the continuous learning cycle within
the center.
McKinsey: There’s a rumor going around that
when you went to the cash and coin center
,
you helped design a system to ensure there is always
stationery in the cupboard. Is it true?
Richard Hemsley: Yes. I’m somebody who loves
operations—that’s where I’ve spent the past
10 or 12 years of my career. When I’m visiting the
centers, I’m always tempted to get deeply
involved in what they are doing. If they happen
to have a workshop running, I love to take
part, and if I feel I can add any value by making
suggestions or describing experiences I’ve
had, I do that. But the primary benefit from
my point of view is to see the talent and
imagination and innovation that we have within
our people. And if I can take just one or two
of these nuggets and share them with other
businesses in the group, that’s a wonderful thing
to be able to do.