Management
Visual management — first level
Visual management puts the few things that matter where the whole team can see them, and turns a short daily meeting into something people act on. One day to build your first board, decide what earns a place on it, and run the ritual without it turning into surveillance.
What you will be able to do
- Understand the strengths and uses of visual management
- Strengthen your team's performance and sense of ownership
- Put the tool in place
- Master running the tool and handle any resistance to it
Programme
Opening round and expectations
- Each participant's expectations on the subject
- Common-thread workshop: an analysis focused on your own department
The fundamentals of visual management
- What visual management is, and what you can expect from it
- Making team communication and mobilisation easier
- The power of visual communication
- The posture of a visual manager
- What is worth measuring in your team
- Common-thread workshop in pairs: what concrete benefit would your department get from it?
Where visual management applies
- Steering a team's activity and performance
- Setting up key standards and quality, customer-service or safety markers
- Common-thread workshop: defining your department's criteria
Keys to an effective implementation
- Ritualising: who facilitates, how often, in what form (top-down, delegated, co-development)
- Defining the ground rules and values that frame the tool
- Indicators aligned with the vision and the team, and readable colour codes
- Everyone's posture: open questions, rephrasing, non-violent communication
- Common-thread workshop: who will facilitate, how often, with which rules and values?
Continuous improvement
- The Deming cycle (PDCA)
- Running retrospectives: what works, what works less well
- Making results visible for more transparency and responsiveness
- Mind mapping and solution trees as shared thinking methods
- Common-thread workshop: which topics deserve collective thinking, and with which method?
Designing the implementation steps
- The rules and stages of change, and why co-construction matters
- Logistics: materials, boards, locations
- Common-thread workshop: announcing the change and the working sessions, involving one team member and then the team
What this course gives you
Capturing attention, motivating people and involving them in the main performance objectives, the key success criteria, the working standards and the safety rules. How do you mobilise the team around these subjects while giving them ownership? How do you strengthen cohesion and deal with issues and blockers as they come up?
This introduction to visual management lets you take the first steps of the method.
A first level, not a Lean course
The day is for managers and team leaders, possibly with their teams, and is taken with the manager of the team concerned. It is not a Lean course: project leads can be directed to a second level designed specifically for them.
Questions about this course
Is visual management only for factories?
No. It started in industry, which is why most examples online are production ones, but the mechanism — making priorities, blockers and results visible to everyone at once — works the same in a service, finance or support team. The indicators change; the ritual does not.
Will the team see the board as monitoring?
They will, if the board tracks individuals and only the manager writes on it. The course spends real time on this, because it is the reason most boards are abandoned. The version that survives displays team results, is updated by the team, and shows blockers the manager is expected to remove.
Do we need software?
Not to start. A physical board in the team's own space works better for a first implementation because it is visible without a login and cheap to change while you are still learning what belongs on it. Distributed teams need a digital equivalent, and we cover how to choose one, without recommending a specific product.
What does "first level" mean?
It means this day covers implementation and daily facilitation — enough to put a working board in place and run it. It does not cover the wider performance-management system built on top of visual management in an industrial context. Teams that need that come back for a follow-up session once the first board has run for a few months.
Related courses
The manager-leader toolkit
The core management programme. Three days covering the work a manager actually does day to day — setting the frame, delegating, running one-to-ones, handling the conversation nobody wants to have. The third day comes a few weeks later, once the tools have met a real team.
Motivating without a budget
Most managers have far less control over pay than over the things that actually drive engagement. This course covers the non-financial levers — autonomy, recognition, visible progress, meaning — and how to tell which one a given person responds to.
Managing hybrid and distributed teams
When part of the team works from another island, from home or from a head office abroad, the office routine does not travel on its own. One day on the rules to set from the start, clear objectives, rituals that hold, and feedback and one-to-ones at a distance.