High Potential

This paper discusses the need for a skills development infrastructure that allows workers to overcome the many challenges that arise when organizations implement lean techniques. This infrastructure needs to focus on helping the workers meet their personal and team objectives and not be limited to standardized training approaches. To avoid wasting valuable capability building effort, attention must be given to ensure that all training and development activities match the real demands of the organization. This may require staff to be reallocated to roles that more closely fit their skill profiles. To develop new capabilities in existing staff, however, the creation of "pull" demand is a pre-requisite. This paper describes six techniques to create pull for new skills within an organization. By putting the right structures and mechanisms in place to recognize the required capabilities, identify gaps in the workforce capabilities, and create demand for the closing of those gaps, lean organizations can build an infrastructure that can fulfil that demand in a sustainable way across the organization