Lean Six Sigma Black Belts – are only the best employees good enough?

An often cited success factor for a Lean Six Sigma program is to train only the best employees to become Black Belts. In practice, we have observed that the seemingly second best are often the actual best from the company’s point of view.

This is what a prospective Black Belt really needs to be capable of:

• Be open to new things
• Be persistent and able to handle conflict
• Listen and question things
• Allow others to succeed
• Communicate

The rest is learned in the training sessions or may be requested by the sponsor or delegated to team members.

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Lean – Slim at any price?

Lean management stands for lean, low-waste and therefore cost-effective processes. However, just as in the private sphere, a slimming craze also has its downsides for a company. It often loses its most important resource along the way: its employees.

In the 1980s, many companies in the Western industrialized nations strove to emulate the success of Japanese automakers. Since the post-war period, the Japanese had been using Lean management to continuously improve value creation in their companies. Three principles formed the basis for this:

• production that minimizes waste, such as rework, inventory and bottlenecks (muda),
• production without inefficient processes that overload people or machines (Muri), and
• production that avoids uneven capacity utilization (mura).

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