Karyn Ross

A Practical Guide to Eliminating Fear, Creating Trust, and Leading with Kindness

Kind Leader

Jeffrey Liker

The world’s bestselling Lean expert shows service-based organizations how to go Lean, gain value, and get results—The Toyota Way. A must-read for service professionals of every level, this essential book takes the proven Lean principles of the bestselling Toyota Way series and applies them directly to the industries where quality of service is crucial for success. Jeff Liker and Karyn Ross show you how to develop Lean practices throughout your organization using the famous 4P model. Whether you are an executive, manager, consultant, or frontline worker who deals with customers every day, you’ll learn how take advantage of all Lean has to offer. With this book as your guide, you’ll gain a clear understanding of Lean and discover the principles, practices and tools needed to develop people and processes that surprise and delight each of your customers. These ground-tested techniques are designed to help you make continuous improvements in your services, streamline your operations, and add ever-increasing value to your customers. Fascinating case studies of Lean-driven success in a range of service industries, including healthcare, insurance, financial services, and telecommunications, illustrate that Lean principles and practices work as well in services as they do in manufacturing. Drawn from original research and real-world examples, The Toyota Way to Service Excellence will help you make the leap to Lean.

The Toyota Way to Service Excellence: Lean Transformation in Service Organizations

Jeffrey K. Liker

Lean Transformation in Service Organizations

Kindness and leadership aren’t often synonymous. Ask someone to describe "good leadership" to you and you will hear many adjectives used: authentic, bold, challenging, charismatic, decisive, empowering, fearless, goal-oriented, humble, inspiring, original, passionate, role-model, strategic and transparent, to name of a few. And though there are many more that come to mind, kindness isn’t one of them. And here’s the problem with that. Leaders lead. And the way a leader leads – how they do what they do – influences those they lead. From the president of the country, to the president of a company, from middle managers, right down to front-line supervisors, what a leader models – how they think, speak and act – influences the people they lead. Leaders who think, speak and act unkindly give legitimacy and permission to those they lead to think, speak, and act in exactly the same unkind ways. Today, in a world where a leaders’ words and actions travel quickly through social media channels such as Twitter, their influence – unkind or kind – is amplified through repeated views and sharing. In an increasingly fragmented, polarized and divided world, we need leaders who will bring people together not divide them. Leaders who value and model cooperation and collaboration over competition. And who model ways to think kindly, speak kindly and act kindly. We need kindness to become synonymous with good leadership. So that when someone is asked to describe the traits of a good leader, kindness will be the first word that comes to mind. Essentially, the purpose of this book is to teach leaders how to lead with kindness so they can influence the people they lead to create kinder workplaces, organizations and the world. Each chapter contains a mixture of theory, case studies and reflections from leaders and the people they influence. As well, the book follows the fictional stories of Kay’La Janson and Kevin Landrell, as they become leaders in a failing organization that is ultimately turned around through kind leadership. Between chapters there are a series of practical exercises based on concepts presented in the previous chapter with space to record outcomes and reflections on the practice process. This book gives you a deep theoretical understanding of the importance of leading with kindness and also provides practical exercises for you to use to turn theory into practice. Because "change means doing things differently," and because we only really "learn by doing" to create kinder organizations, kinder communities and a kinder world, leaders must be able to begin practicing kindness right away. By the time you finish the book, you will feel confident in your ability to lead with kindness and also to address organizational problems at work, at home and in the community, with kindness.

Karyn Ross

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