Hospitality
When it comes to figuring out problems in your company, what is the most valuable and efficient way to do it? Well, if you are heading up the operation, the owner, all you have to do is say what youdesire. Your choice is unquestioned and the group has to do what you say. But are you sure that the choice you made is the best possible answer to your problem? Is the response that you came up with what will solve the problem or just postpone the inevitable? Is only getting the opinion or contribution from a single employee the very best way to go about solving a dilemma or is it better to get a view and thoughts from many people? Of course, a problem can better be torn apart and identified with many participants working on it. When various viewpoints and various perspectives are viewed through, the better it is to come up with new ideas. The collective familiarity and worldview and understanding of many different workers is much broader and much more varied than if it is limited to just one individual. That person may have plenty of skill and be extremely knowledgeable, but when you add access to multiple thoughts and lots of ideas, you are almost always more likely to get a better result.
This group of people, this panel that you are going to assemble will need some assistance getting started. Who is best to put on your team? It is always going to be slightly different and for each problem you may want to have a different group leader. You want your leader to be an individual that everybody can rally behind and that everyone respects. You also want them to be experienced about what they are looking at and if they are respected and liked by the rest of the group, then more than likely they are all of the above. This group is going to be responsible for a big task and they will be looked at to resolve the problem and do it as capably and cost effective as possible. You will want an individual on the team that has practice working with these types of groups and has familiarity with teams and lean manufacturing in general. You will also want group members that are varied in their job positions and are up and down the management ladder. You do not want a team that is strictly comprised of upper management or only workers on the factory floor. If you do this, then you will not get the ideas and the different perspectives that you want. The more viewpoints that you consider, the more chance that you will get an suggestion or perception that you weren’t expecting and that might be innovative to everybody on the team. The ideas that come from a group can often be a combination of ideas that come from the entire group. Often, the final product is a mix of all of the ideas that has come before it, but fleshes out the idea more completely.