We live in an age today where businesses of all types have a lot of competition and in order to stay one step ahead business leaders need to be more efficient. This is why more and more companies are adopting the principles of "lean", have been developed by Toyota Motor Company over the last 70 years. Put at its simplest, lean means maximising customer value while at the same time eliminating waste. It really means creating more value for customers while using less resources.

A company that is lean understands that the customer is king, and that customer value is critical, and therefore it focuses its’ key processes on always increasing it. In order to achieve this, a lean thinking company will change its focus from optimising separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments, to optimising the flow of its products and services through whole value streams that flow horizontally across the technologies, assets, and departments to the end customer.

If you can eliminate waste along complete value streams instead of at points here and there, it produces processes that need less effort, less time, less capital, and often less space. At the same time, you make products or provide services at less cost and with far fewer defects. Businesses that are lean can adapt quickly to changing customer requirements with top quality, low cost, and fast turnaround times.

Various aspects of what made Japanese manufacturers successful have been ‘discovered’, adopted and even improved by manufacturers and service businesses over the years. Total Quality Management (TQM), Just in Time (JIT), World-Class Manufacturing (WCM), Lean Manufacturing and Service and Operational Excellence are all terms that have been used by different academics and consultants to describe management practices that help companies deliver more customer value faster with less resources.

Many people consider that lean only applies to manufacturing industry, but this is not the case. It applies to every business and every process because it is not a tactic, but rather a way of thinking and acting for the whole company or organisation. Businesses and organisations including governments are adopting lean as the way that they operate. The term "lean transformation" is used to describe a business or organisation that is changing the way it operates from the old way to the new, although a lot of companies don’t use the word "lean" but use a term of their own such as the Toyota Production System to describe how they operate, making the point that lean is not a programme as such, but the way the whole company works.

Of course, if you want your business to become lean it has to start at the top, and it also has to start with the recognition that it is going to take perseverance and long-term dedication. There are many books that you can get about lean, there are many courses dedicated to learning how to achieve a lean business.

Obviously, managers and supervisors will have to change the way that they think and act to this new way of operating. But they also have to become the teachers and coaches of the new ways of thinking and working, to be able to pass these on successfully to their teams. This requires much more than just technical or job skills training. Big change, such as lean transformations, require exceptional leadership skills. Supervisors and managers need to develop people skills for new lean management practices to stick.

There are companies today who are dedicated to providing training in order to develop high performance supervisors with foundation leadership skills and advanced management skills. Many supervisors may be good at what they do, but not great. This is because becoming a great manager or supervisor requires skills that are not inherent in the majority of people. Very often, someone is promoted to a managerial or supervisory position because they have shown great ability in a job, perhaps on the shop floor, and the directors believe that by making him or her a supervisor they will be able to improve the workflow of the whole team by passing on those skills. To some extent this is true, but it is a question of HOW a supervisor passes on those skills.

A supervisor needs to be able to do much more than pass on skills of operating a machine or whatever it is. They need to be able to be leaders whom the team follow out of respect, not simply because they are the "boss". They have to deal fairly with their team members, and they also need to be able to listen. They need to manage their time effectively, and a lot more besides. A good training programme will provide supervisors with all the skills that they need to inspire, train, support and hold their people accountable.