Connect with Russell
1. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. Russell discusses the importance of your team when it comes to making any changes to your firm.
2. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai, as he discusses strategy, engagement and 'a thinking way' and how they are critical when it comes to humanising the numbers.
3. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. Russell shares many real-life business examples throughout this podcast that demonstrate the importance of team engagement when it comes to delivering client loyalty.
https://humanisethenumbers.online/episode-138-russell-watkins-lean-transformation-expert/
1. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. When it comes to the question 'what does humanise the numbers mean to you?', Russell shares the 3 things he thinks are critical: strategy, engagement, and 'a thinking way'. He expands on all of these in this podcast. Listen here.
2. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. Russell discusses the importance of getting your team to engage with the numbers by making it easy and giving them a purpose. He says that, if it's a pain, if they have to work particularly hard, or if they have to interrogate the issue to get to the numbers, they may not do it. Listen here.
3. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. Russell shares the Toyota-style approach to lean working, problem solving, and process improvement and describes the 1-3-10 approach. Listen to him explain it in more detail here.
4. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. Russell applies the Pareto 80/20 rule, which suggests that 80% of your problems stem from just 20% of the causes, to address the factors holding back your firm. As leaders and managers, you have to make it obvious which things are causing the biggest problems.
5. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. Russell talks about the challenge of doing the right things, even when it's hard, and the importance of taking the noise and complexity out of a problem. When you do this, the process can be simplified and the team can easily identify the problems that need fixing. He calls this finding the 'vital few'.
6. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. Russell discusses the importance of an engaged team, but he also talks about the ways in which you can lose your team:
- If there is no 'what's in it for me?'
- If you just tell them what to do
Your people need to see the purpose in what they are doing. If you want to make a change in your firm, improve a process, or solve a problem, you have to take your team with you.
7. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. Russell shares a brilliant Zen fable, relating it to why you sometimes need to create a sense of urgency in your firm in order to change and improve. You must make the problem you are trying to fix clear, transparent, and measurable, drawing a connection between solving the problem and how this will make your team's jobs easier.
8. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. Russell discusses the importance of your team needing to feel a sense of progress, and not just leaving them dealing with an initiative where nothing comes from them. If this is the case, your team will suffer from ‘initiative fatigue’ and, when you raise an idea that is worth following up on, the danger is that your team may not be interested.
9. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. Russell discusses the value of your team's mental health and wellbeing and shares a story of how one business got rid of difficult customers to protect the health of their team. Listen here.
10. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. Russell shares a story of how Toyota created a crisis to build a sense of urgency and reduce complacency. However, Russell stresses that this can be a dangerous game to play, as you don't want to break people, and it can only be done in a mature culture.
11. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. Russell talks about the importance of client loyalty because, without it, it is very difficult to improve the results of your firm.
You have to really know your clients, connect with them, and remember that the voice of the client is all that matters. You have to connect with what really matters to them.
Paul shares a great story of an MD he used to work for who wanted to know about every customer complaint, viewing these complaints as business opportunities, because, as Russell says, 'problems are treasure'.
12. Listen to this Humanise The Numbers podcast with Russell Watkins, Lean expert and co-founder of Sempai. This podcast with Russell is PACKED with insights and absolute diamond stories. He talks in a very straightforward and practical way about how to manage change, process development, problems, your team, your clients, and the business of running a firm, and how demanding this can be.
Yet he repeatedly expresses his deep belief that businesses need to constantly evolve, adapt to change, grow through change. Your team is key to the success of your firm when it comes to locating and solving problematic issues.
He also makes the point several times that it is never to be forgotten that, at the end of all of that, is the customer, who should be front and centre of every decision made. How will this look for the customer? How will this affect the customer? That applies to internal as well as external customers, and he has plenty of stories to back up his thoughts.
It's a brilliant hour - and there is so much to take in, it definitely needs a second listen - great podcast!
https://humanisethenumbers.online/episode-138-russell-watkins-lean-transformation-expert/
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Here is a soundbite of the interview with Russell