Let Them Taste the Role: What Three Sectors Learned About Growing the Next Generation of CI Leaders

Eric Olsen
Mar 20
4 min read

This is Part 1 of a four-part series documenting practitioner conversations from the Future of People at Work Lean Coffee session at the LEI Lean Summit in Houston, March 13, 2026. Each post focuses on one of the four cross-initiative themes the community explored: succession planning, time poverty, organizational silos, and AI integration.

On the last afternoon of the LEI Lean Summit in Houston, while some attendees were heading to the airport, more than 15 in-person participants and roughly 15 online chose to stay and talk. Not about presentations they’d seen—about problems they’re living with every day.

The Future of People at Work initiative hosted a hybrid Lean Coffee session that afternoon, bringing together in-person Summit attendees and online participants across four breakout tables focused on the shared challenges that keep surfacing across our community: succession planning, time poverty, organizational silos, and AI integration. These topics emerged as recurring threads across FPW’s monthly gatherings, symposia, and initiative work—places where practitioners from healthcare, manufacturing, higher education, retail, and government discovered they’re often wrestling with the same problems in different languages.

FPW is a collaboration of nine lean organizations that share many of the same customers and face many of the same challenges. We’ve been meeting since 2023—at MIT, in Detroit in 2024, at O.C. Tanner in Salt Lake City in 2025—and monthly on Zoom, learning that cross-sector conversation produces insights none of us would reach alone. What follows is the first of four posts capturing what practitioners shared with each other at the Summit. Every insight here came from people doing improvement work in the gemba, and we’re grateful to each of them for contributing to the FPW body of knowledge.

The Fear of Stepping Up

The succession planning table brought together a healthcare CI leader from El Camino Health, a CI practitioner from an envelope manufacturer, and a furniture manufacturer running a Toyota Production System (TPS)-based leadership program. Despite their different worlds, they converged quickly: people who might make great CI leaders are often scared to step into the role.

At the electronics manufacturer, identified candidates are reluctant to move into CI leadership—in this particular organization, the role requires computer skills and English proficiency that present real barriers for some of the workforce. The current CI leader can’t stay forever, but there’s limited financial incentive for others to step up. The furniture manufacturer offered a different model: team leaders take TPS-based classes with an explicit safety net—if it’s not for you, we’ll find another role. No penalty. And when operators see leaders going through the program and getting dedicated attention, it creates natural curiosity.

Taste the Role, Don’t Force It

The group’s most compelling idea was letting future leaders “taste” the CI role—a temporary rotation where their frontline position is held. In healthcare, Jessica McGowan described running 10-week cohorts where frontline nurses work on improvement projects tied to their department’s True North, then return to their units positioned for promotion. Projects must be small-scope, within the participant’s actual influence. The furniture representative described “layers of learning at all levels of leadership”—being coached while coaching others, with a company-wide mindset shift from boss to sensei. Both models share a principle: people are drawn to something they can observe working, not something they’re told to do.

The Finance Language Gap

Online, Jeanne Carey raised a different dimension. Finance departments often equate CI with headcount reduction, missing the broader value of retention and capability building. Until CI practitioners can articulate value in terms finance understands, the leadership pipeline stays constrained. The group also explored whether organizations are training tools or sustaining philosophy—a distinction that matters for whether improvement culture survives leadership transitions or atrophies between waves of enthusiasm.

Knowledge Map: Connecting to Your Context

Process Keywords: Succession pathway design, temporary role rotation, CI-as-feeder-system, TPS layers-of-learning, cross-sector knowledge sharing, Lean Coffee facilitation, True North alignment, practitioner development

Context Keywords: Leadership pipeline gaps, reluctant future leaders, CI-finance language disconnect, industry-specific barriers, improvement culture sustainability, workforce diversity, generational engagement

Application Triggers:

Struggling to recruit next-generation CI leaders → “Taste the role” temporary rotation model
CI work seen as cost-cutting by finance → Reframe around retention, capability, and doing more with existing staff
Improvement culture fading between leadership transitions → Philosophy-over-tools and layers-of-learning approaches
Workers reluctant due to language or skill barriers → Industry-relevant, hands-on TPS approaches over data-driven certification

Related Continual Improvement Themes: Respect for people, leadership development, knowledge transfer, organizational learning, change management, people development systems (tools → philosophy shift)

This post was developed from practitioner conversations at the LEI Lean Summit Lean Coffee session (March 13, 2026), with voice memo contributions from Jessica McGowan, Zoom breakout recording from Sally Gatlin, and synthesized with Claude.AI assistance. Editorial contributions by Eric Olsen, Rachel Reuter, Colleen Soppelsa, and Dave Ostreicher It represents ongoing work by the Future of People at Work initiative, a collaboration of Catalysis, Central Coast Lean, GBMP Consulting Group, Imagining Excellence, Lean Enterprise Institute, Shingo Institute, The Ohio State University Center for Operational Excellence, Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC), and University of Kentucky Pigman College of Engineering.

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