If you’ve spent much time with me, you have heard me say that leading with Lean is different. For those of us who promoted through the ranks of a traditionally-managed organization, we learned from typical management styles, approaches, and behaviors. And then at some point in our careers, we began practicing Lean. And most of what we thought we knew about management and leadership was turned upside down. Because if what we say and teach about Respect for People and Continuous Improvement aren’t also ingrained in who we are and how we show up as leaders – we will be inauthentic or inconsistent. And inauthentic or inconsistent leadership doesn’t work in Lean.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Lead with Respect for People
2. Redefine Winning
3. Put Results in Their Place
4. Select New Heroes
5. Solve Problems at the Right Steps

 

Here are five ways leaders need to adjust to effectively lead with Lean.

1. Lead with Respect for People

Managers and practitioners using Lean in their business are all too familiar with the phrase Respect for People. But the reality is it’s not a clearly defined concept that has clear application dos and don’ts. Jon Miller often shares that the true intention behind the Japanese phrase is more along the lines of respect for “humanness” or “human nature” or “what makes us human”. And that really opens the door to how you show up to lead with Respect for People.

A couple of years ago, my good friends at Gemba Academy compiled a Respect for People with Past Guests podcast for me to use for leadership development with those in my span of care. Listening to this is a great way to spend 20 minutes.

Once you take a listen, write out what Respect for People means to you and then what that looks like in action.

In my leadership – and so many other leaders I have coached over the years – getting clear on Respect for People gave us a greater purpose of leadership. A purpose that transcends organizational goals or metrics and moves to a people-driven, humanity-driven, making-the-world-a-better-place type of leadership purpose. A purpose that makes all of the learning and change that goes along with leading with Lean worth it.

2.  Redefine Winning

I visited a friend’s work recently to meet for lunch. As I toured his plant, there were awards all along the wall. “Best Market – On-Time Service”, “Best Market – Stops Per Hour”, “Best Market – Done Right Quality”. All of the awards had one thing in common – they were the “Best Market” compared to other markets in the same company. So essentially, winning the award was defined by beating the other markets (i.e. colleagues). You could be the best of bad performance and still be the best market. Or you could be the lowest ranked market but still provide tremendous value. It’s all relative – and it’s all an internal competition.

Okay – so if you are driven by competition – don’t throw things at me. I’m not suggesting that organizations can’t have a little fun. Or can’t create learning opportunities between markets. But I am saying that leading with Lean requires us to redefine winning. Our goal is to create more value for customers, and to do that we need to optimize the whole value stream – not individual parts or individual markets. When internal departments are competing with each other – whether for awards, accolades, to stay off the bad list, to get credit, to get promoted, or just for attention – it lessens their collaboration to optimize the whole.

Once you redefine winning, you will be amazed at how many small things you will notice – your comments, behaviors, and decisions – that completely encourage your old definition rather than your new. And that awareness will help drive your own leadership behavior change.

3. Put Results in Their Place

Results are important. They help us check the impact of the process. They direct us to the problems we need to overcome. And they keep teams employed and organizations prosperous. But results do not stand alone. Process determines results. And everyone who’s been in a Lean environment for even a short time recognizes the importance of process. Whether it’s process standardization, process waste reduction, process improvement, process mapping. . . We get it. We love process. And when we look at results within the context of process, we get what I call “Process + Results”. 

Many of us have been involved in organizations where results were the “one and only”. And usually it was the short-term results. The results of the month or the quarter. Not trends. Not performance related to control limits. Not improvement. But short-term hit the number, hit the number, hit the number results management. And many of us have seen people make poor decisions – potentially even unethical decisions – to hit those numbers. I have seen dozens of people lose their jobs for making unethical decisions in order to hit a number or win a company contest. I’ve seen hundreds of people make decisions that are bad for the customer to hit a number. Results do not stand alone and should not be reviewed in a vacuum.

Putting results in their place – within the context of process – is an important shift in effectively leading with Lean.

4. Select New Heroes

I once worked with a department that ran an employee peer recognition program. The nominations sounded something like this:

• Johnny worked 20 hours straight to make sure we hit a deadline for a customer
• Sandra stepped out of her normal role to help us redo a job that was done wrong so we could fix it same-day for the customer and turn it in to a positive experience after the failure
• Greg worked 6 days a week for 6 weeks while we were short-staffed until a new employee could be hired
• We were late on a job and so it didn’t go out on the normal delivery run. Peter got in his personal vehicle and drove three hours to deliver the job to the customer so we wouldn’t be late to the customer

These are what I call Hero actions, and we were great at recognizing them. The thing about Lean, though, is that to really create a Process + Results environment of continuous improvement, we have to select new heroes.

The new heroes are the people who follow process and adhere to the components of their standard work. The people who make improvements in their work. The people who make suggestions to help improve process that will create more value for customers. The people who learn from failure. The people who celebrate the process – not just the results. The people who share and make learnings part of the system instead of just tribal knowledge. The people who work to prevent future failures (fire-prevention) rather than just jumping from one failure-containment to another (fire-fighting).

See how these are different than that first list of heroes? Try out an experiment. Over the next week make a note of every bit of recognition or gratitude you give out. And then evaluate it to learn what kind of heroes you’re currently selecting.

5. Solve Problems at the Right Steps

Many of us were promoted into management or through the ranks of management because we were good at two things: (1) our current job and (2) solving problems (figuring it out, getting it done, overcoming obstacles, making it happen – all variations of solving problems). We may see the answers a little easier than others. We have experience and so sometimes we “just know.” And we have a bias for action.

With Lean, though, problems are meant to be solved within the context of the process. So if a problem is in the line processes – then it should be solved at the line. Not by the plant manager who is removed from the process (though managers do need to play the role of teacher, coach, and mentor). Managers still solve problems – but instead of solving line process problems, they should solve problems that occur in their work processes (including leading culture, cross-functional collaboration problems, etc.). That means that effective Lean leaders don’t jump in and solve all of the problems. Instead they teach and coach the problem solving capabilities of the team so problems are solved at the right steps.

If you’ve ever been used to being the problem solver and you start to shift how you lead to allow other people to make decisions, you know how hard of a shift this is to make. But it’s necessary. Try it out. Spend a week deliberately stopping yourself from giving the answer. . . Including in seemingly innocent ways like “Have you thought about trying ABC”. Even in these softly couched phrases, we are still giving the answers. Try it for a week. I bet it’s more difficult than you expect!

Check out these 8 Tips to Transition from Problem Solver to Problem Solving Coach to help you in this leadership shift!

There are all kinds of Lean management systems, techniques, tactics, and actions that managers leading with Lean use. Things like Gemba walks, daily management systems, Hoshin Kanri, A3s, and the list goes on. But before those systems and tactics can work, we need to make some fundamental shifts from traditional management to Lean leadership.