A new manager went to Joe Swartz, then Director of Business Transformation at Franciscan St. Francis Health, with a problem. Kaizen was taking her about a day a week. Was that normal?

It wasn't. Not even close. And the diagnosis turned out to have nothing to do with the methodology, the volume of ideas, or her department. It had to do with what she thought her job was.

"Tell me how you're doing it," Joe asked her.

"They bring me the idea. I put it on my to-do list. It just takes a long time to get these Kaizens done."

There it was. She was implementing every Kaizen herself. Each idea her staff brought forward moved from their hands onto her list, where it joined every other thing demanding her attention. The improvements were getting done -- slowly -- and she was burning out doing them. Worse, her staff weren't developing. They had learned that the way Kaizen worked in her unit was: have an idea, hand it to the manager, wait.

Joe's coaching took about five minutes. The point of Kaizen, he told her, is not to get improvements done. The point is to develop the people doing the work, through cycles of learning. Leave the idea in the originator's hands. Coach them through implementation. Don't do any of it yourself.

She tried it. He circled back about a month later. The work was still getting done. Her staff were more confident, more engaged, more independent. Kaizen was now taking her about an hour a week, because she had stopped doing the implementation and started coaching the implementation.

The instinct that breaks Kaizen programs

The reason this story is worth telling is that the manager wasn't doing anything obviously wrong. She was a conscientious leader. Her staff brought her ideas. She took those ideas seriously. She added them to her list. She got them done.

Most leaders in her position would do the same thing. The instinct to take work onto your own plate when someone hands it to you is deeply trained. It feels productive. It produces visible results -- the Kaizen gets implemented, the problem gets solved, the manager can point to outcomes. The cost of the alternative -- coaching someone else through doing it themselves, more slowly, with mistakes -- is harder to see.

That instinct is also what kills most Kaizen programs by the end of the first year.

When the manager does the work, three things happen, all of them bad. The manager runs out of capacity. The staff member doesn't develop. And the rest of the team learns that the way improvement happens here is through the manager, which means improvement is bottlenecked at the manager's desk forever.

The shift Joe was trying to make in five minutes is the difference between two definitions of a manager's job. The first definition: I solve problems. The second definition: I develop problem-solvers. The first one feels faster. The second one is the only one that scales.

What coaching actually looks like

Coaching is not asking leading questions you already know the answer to. It is not Socratic theater where the staff member is expected to arrive at the answer the manager had in mind. That kind of coaching is just telling, slowed down and dressed up.

Real coaching is asking questions you don't know the answer to, because you trust that the person doing the work knows something you don't. Joe's most useful example of this came from a respiratory therapy supply room he had no charter to be in.

The supply coordinator, Maggie Reid, was proud of the area. She walked Joe through how she'd organized everything. Joe noticed something else while she was talking -- therapists coming down to grab supplies, then doubling back, then doubling back again. He asked a few of them what they were there for. After a while, he started seeing a pattern.

He didn't tell Maggie what he saw. He couldn't have, exactly, because he wasn't sure yet. He asked her a question instead. Could she spend a week categorizing what therapists came down for? Were they picking up parts, or were they assembling systems -- a ventilator setup, a CPAP setup, a BiPAP setup? She agreed.

A week later, she had the answer. About 80 percent of the time, therapists were assembling a system. Maggie had organized her supply room alphabetically by part name, because that was the natural way for her to keep track of her inventory. Her customers were operating from an entirely different mental model. They needed a ventilator setup, which meant hunting through a dozen alphabetical locations to gather the pieces.

She reorganized the room around systems. The respiratory therapists cut their supply-gathering time roughly in half.

The point of the story isn't the reorganization. It's the mechanism. Joe didn't tell Maggie her supply room was wrong. He didn't suggest she organize by system. He asked her a question whose answer he genuinely didn't know, and he gave her a way to gather data over a week. The reorganization followed automatically once Maggie could see her work from her customer's perspective. As Joe put it: "All I did was help her see her world from another perspective."

If Joe had walked in and said "you should organize this by system," one of two things would have happened. Either Maggie would have done it and felt told what to do, in which case she'd have learned nothing about how to see her own work differently. Or she would have politely disagreed and not done it, in which case the conversation would have ended with both of them frustrated. Asking the question -- and trusting that Maggie was capable of finding the answer herself -- did something different. It built a problem-solver. The next time Maggie noticed something off in her area, she didn't need Joe. She had the question.

Why this is so much harder than it sounds

If coaching by question is so much better than telling, why don't more leaders do it?

Because telling is faster in the moment. When a staff member brings you an idea and you can see exactly what to do, holding back the answer feels almost unkind. You know what would work. They don't. Why make them figure it out the slow way?

The honest answer is that the slow way is what builds the muscle. The fast way solves one problem and develops nobody. Joe's framing makes the trade-off explicit: a leader who answers every question themselves trains the team to ask the leader. A leader who asks questions that guide people to their own answers trains the team to think.

That trade-off is unequal in the short term and unequal in the opposite direction in the long term. In the first month, the leader who tells is producing more visible output. By the end of the first year, the leader who coaches has a team that's doing 90 percent of the improvement work without needing direction, and the leader who tells has a team that's still waiting at their desk.

Joe's NICU example showed how fast the dynamic can flip once the leader makes the shift. Paula Stanfield had been doing Kaizen herself for about six months and struggling to get her staff engaged. She implemented a Kaizen that turned out not to work -- an automated paper towel dispenser that made noise the babies in nearby isolettes couldn't tolerate. The nurses pushed back. Engineering came in with a noise meter and documented the problem. Paula reversed her decision and went back to manual dispensers.

She thought she had failed. Within weeks, Kaizens were rolling into her department in a way they never had before. When she asked her staff what had changed, they told her directly: "You showed us it was okay to fail. We're just trying stuff."

The unlock wasn't a better methodology. It was Paula visibly modeling that the work could be wrong, could be reversed, and could be learned from -- without anyone being blamed for it. Once her staff saw that pattern, they were willing to try things themselves. Paula's role shifted from doing the work to coaching the people doing the work. The volume of improvement in her unit increased while her time spent on improvement decreased.

Repetition is what turns coaching into a skill

The trap most coaches fall into is treating coaching as a one-time intervention. The staff member brings an idea. The leader asks good questions. The staff member figures something out. Done.

Coaching is a skill, not an event. And the staff member's improvement skill is also a skill, not knowledge. Both have to be practiced repeatedly, in different conditions, before they become reliable. That's the lesson Joe learned the hard way teaching his son to parallel park.

Joe used job instruction training. He demonstrated parallel parking once, walked his son through the steps, and let him try. His son did it once and announced he had it. Joe explained that parallel parking is a skill -- the geometry varies, the cars in front and behind vary, the conditions vary. You can't learn it from three reps. His son humored him, did three more reps, and again said he had it.

His son failed parallel parking on the driving test the next week. The car ride home was quiet. Eventually Joe asked him: "What did you learn?" His son's answer: "You were right. It's a skill."

Kaizen works the same way. Staff members are not going to figure out improvement on the first attempt. Or the third. Or possibly the tenth. The coach's job is to keep showing up -- not just on the first Kaizen, but on the twentieth and the thirtieth, asking what the staff member learned, helping them see the benefit their work produced, confirming that they did the work and not the coach.

That last part matters more than it looks. When the coach shows up at the end of a successful Kaizen and frames it as "look what you did," the staff member's identity starts to shift. They become someone who improves their work. The next idea comes faster. The next one after that comes faster still. Three years into Franciscan's program, a nurse who had been doing Kaizens steadily through that whole period implemented a laminated NPO sign across thirty rooms in three days. Three years earlier, the same improvement would have taken three to six months. The volume of small successes had compounded into speed.

The diagnostic question

The shift Joe coached the new manager through in five minutes is one of the highest-leverage changes available to anyone leading improvement work. It's also one of the easiest to miss, because the failure mode looks like commitment. The manager taking every idea onto her own list was working hard, taking the ideas seriously, and producing results. Nothing about her behavior would have raised an alarm.

The diagnostic question is whether your team is bringing you problems to solve or bringing you problems they're working through with your coaching. If it's the first, the work scales with your capacity, which is finite. If it's the second, the work scales with your team's capacity, which grows over time.

When someone on your team brings you an idea this week, notice the instinct. The pull toward "I've got it, I'll handle it" is real and trained. Resisting it -- holding the idea in the staff member's hands, asking the question whose answer you don't know, showing up again next week to ask what they learned -- is slower. It produces less visible output in the short term. It is also the only way an improvement program ever stops depending on you.

The manager Joe coached didn't change methodology. She didn't get a new tool. She didn't reorganize her department. She changed what she thought her job was. The day-a-week-to-an-hour-a-week delta followed automatically.

This post draws on the webinar "How to Be an Influential Kaizen Coach" with Joe Swartz, then Director of Business Transformation at Franciscan St. Francis Health, hosted by Mark Graban, then VP of Customer Success at KaiNexus. Watch the full recording for the five fundamentals of Kaizen coaching, including how Franciscan achieves a 90 percent yes rate on employee-driven ideas.

See KaiNexus in action →