Lean champions teams

Obviously many people can be engaged in a safety program with the use of subteams. If a company does not want to develop and engage their employees in safety improvement, they can hire a safety director to accomplish all that is noted above. A single lean champion cannot build a lean culture nor can a safety director build world-class safety alone. It will take a team or a committee. The team can be composed of new volunteers and a few staff members who are committed to developing the volunteers. Another option is that the committee can be composed of some current staff members who will tell others they were voluntold by their bosses to be part of the safety committee. Who is going to get your plant to world-class safety ... 

If all of the above listed positions are filled, you will have a large safety committee. The advantage of this is that many safety champions are being developed at one time. That is in alignment with lean thinking—engaging employees in continual improvement activity. Smaller companies may not have the resources to staff a team of that size and may have to ask participants to wear more than one hat. 

Chart 6.5 also shows how the steering team identifies Lean leaders who will be the champions of the Lean process in their respective areas. These individuals will identify and create Resource Support Teams (RST) that can collect information and access information to support the lean effort. The RST, in conjunction with the steering team, will then identify the team members that are necessary to make each event as effective as possible. 

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