Management
Visual management: first level
A badly designed team board becomes a noticeboard nobody looks at after a month. One day to build yours, decide what deserves a place on it, and run the daily meeting so the team takes ownership of it rather than putting up with it.
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 training gives you
Capturing attention, mobilising the team and involving it in the objectives that matter: the success criteria, the work in progress, and what is blocked.
One day, at the end of which you have your board, not an example of a board.
After lean, the running of the board
In French-speaking Switzerland, visual management does not arrive on blank ground. Precision industry, pharmaceuticals and watchmaking subcontractors already have boards, often installed during a lean roll-out, and often turned into displays the team no longer looks at.
The day therefore deals mainly with getting them back into use: what to remove from an existing board, how to bring it back to a readable number of indicators, and how to run it so that it becomes a team tool again rather than an instrument of control. That nuance decides whether it is accepted.
Questions about this training
Do we need software?
No, and the day advises against starting there. A physical board placed where the team already walks past works better than a dashboard nobody opens, especially when part of the team does not work at a screen.
How many indicators on a board?
Few. The most common failure is a board carrying everything that can be measured, which the team stops reading within a fortnight. Choosing what deserves a place takes up most of the day.
How is this different from the lean system we already have?
Many industries in French-speaking Switzerland already practise a form of visual management inherited from lean, often focused on steering production. This day covers the management side: running the board, the team's ownership of it, and what the board says or does not say about people.
Does it work outside production?
Yes. Technical services, laboratories and administrative teams use it the same way. The point is to make the day visible, not to run an assembly line.
Related trainings
The manager-leader toolkit
The firm's core programme. Three days to stop settling everything case by case and to have tools that hold: set a frame, correct without humiliating, delegate for real, and adapt how you work to each person.
Non-financial motivation levers and team coaching
In a country where salaries are already high, a pay rise is no longer what keeps someone. Two days to organise motivation differently: twelve practical levers, mediating a conflict, and a team vision that people take on as their own.
Hybrid and remote management
Managing at a distance is not doing the same thing through a screen, especially when part of the team crosses a border every morning. One day to set clear rules from the start, write objectives that can be read without you, and keep rituals that do not wear away.