Dan Pinkham on Building Trust and Solving Problems

This week, the Lean Frontline Podcast features Dan Pinkham who talks about building trust to truly understand the problems people face, how to make a problem as visual as possible to help everyone solve it together, and how to apply proven continuous improvement tools to solve business problems.

Pinkham is the Principal Consultant at Lakehurst Consulting LLC and focuses on problem-solving and utilizing Lean Six Sigma methodologies. Pinkham works with teams on three continents in a variety of businesses including chemicals, fiberglass, plant nutrition, animal nutrition, and mining. Pinkham earned his BS in Chemical Engineering from University of Maine and his MBA in Business Administration and Management from Marshall University. 

In this week’s podcast, Pinkham talks about his experience in the field of continuous improvement and things he learned on various engineering and improvement problems. He explains the importance of “getting the folks closest to the work involved and making things better, because those folks living with the issues every day are really the experts on what needs to be fixed.” Involving frontline workers and improving their processes through listening and problem solving can lead to improved value and quality.

The entire plane of communication in the midst of a pandemic has drastically changed, but Pinkham states that many companies have been able to accept these changes in stride. “Culture of being able to communicate in a remote or virtual way has really been, I wouldn’t say, a seamless Segway, but they’ve been a lot better equipped to move forward and keep producing.”

Adjusting to a “new normal” isn’t easy, but by equipping workers with the proper equipment, it can be made as seamless as possible. “It’s gonna take us some time to move back to something more like what we’re used to. And we may never get all the way there. So it’s building up that skill and an expectation and having those resources available. But it reinforces the need for people to be talking more often, to be having a face to face over a virtual means to make sure we’re tracking all in the same direction and aligned in meeting those goals.”

For more interviews from our Conversations with Consultants podcast series, tune in to The Lean Frontline.