What are the Benefits of Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt Training?

Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt training tends to be many people first step into the world of process improvement.

The Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt certification is particularly useful for developing skills in team leaders and team members wanting to be able to solve localized team-based problems. It’s also not uncommon to find lots of Yellow Belt trained employees working on delivering improvement projects as part of a project team overseen by Green Belt or Black Belt colleagues.

The Yellow Belt is trained in basic tools and techniques to enable them to function within an improvement environment and add real value to the improvement efforts. It’s fair to say that you need Green Belt and Black Belt trained people but without some Yellow Belts onboard within your projects the doing may not get done.

Here are some of the benefits for training yourself or your staff to a Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt level:

1. Solve Team-based problems

We all see lot’s off localized problems that never get resolved because no one has the time but more importantly no one knows what to do next. Often, we’ll take a stab at a few actions but when the problem still occurs we tend to give up and accept it’s going to have to be that way. A Yellow Belt will take a structured approach to resolve these issues by addressing the root causes of problems. This leads to improvement for the business and also improved team morale.

2. Improve project success

It goes without saying that if you have Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belts on a project support Green belt or Black belt leaders then the chances of a successful delivery are increased. Obviously, this isn’t the only factor but it’s a significant one as the work required for the project will be well understood and executed to enable the best possible outcome.

3. Short time span

The Yellow Belt training takes place over 2 to 3 days and so it’s not a vast amount of time out of the business to learn the basics. The benefit gained easily outweighs the small-time given up. It also creates a great stepping stone if you then want to progress onto a Green belt or Black belt qualification.

4. Take control of your own improvements

The more people within your organization that are versed in improvement methods, the closer your culture will move towards one of continuous improvement. Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt is a way of training a larger amount of people in some of the basics due to its shorter time frame and lower cost than the Green Belt and Black Belt courses.

5. Small improvements add up

You may or may not be familiar with the David Brailsford example of Marginal gains. It’s the example of the British cycling team making hundreds of small improvements that in the end totaled to one big-time gain which led to Olympic gold. Yellow Belts are perfect for working on these small improvements and if they focus in the right places, on the right things and in enough quantity it can be transformational for a business.

There are many more benefits to Yellow Belt training such as:

solving the root cause of problems, rather than treating the symptoms
managing performance with validated data and eliminating guess-work
improve your stakeholder management and communication skills
and many more…

If you’re looking to improve the performance of your organization and the projects you run – invest in some Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt training for your colleagues. At the very least, they will support the delivery of key projects during our training that are greater than the cost of the training – guaranteeing your return on investment – even if they never go on to use the skills further.

Focusing on developing your employees and improving your organization can never be anything other than a great thing for your company.