By Bob Emiliani
This article is from the Superfactory Archives, an archive of content from the Superfactory website that existed from 1997 to 2012.
Having now recognized the importance of the “Respect for People” principle in Lean management, the Lean community is now more focused than ever on trying to change senior managers’ behaviors. However, efforts to change their behaviors in support of new, progressive management practices has, for several decades, largely fallen flat. Knowing this fact should motivate us to re-think the problem and identify processes that are more effective at changing leadership behaviors.
Wouldn’t it be great if top managers could easily see the wide-ranging benefits of Lean management and the vast array of improvements and human and organizational capability-building that are possible? If they could see it, then you would think that they would rush to change their leadership behaviors in order to secure the gains for the business and its stakeholders as soon as possible. But as we all know, this rarely happens. The usual outcome is for executives to take the business down the Lean path with little or no change in their leadership behaviors.
Trainers, consultants, and other interested parties focus their efforts on trying to change leadership behaviors because such changes are essential to correctly practice Lean management. However, their record of success is poor. Changing the leadership behaviors of successful people with big egos is a quest whose probability for success is very low. You can be sure there have been and will continue to be a few isolated examples of leaders who have successfully changed some of their behaviors, but there will not be much more than that.
It is erroneous to think that the answer lies in changing executives’ leadership behaviors. This critical error was been made repeatedly in the past [1] with the antecedent to Lean management, Scientific Management [2,3], again in the last 35 years with Lean, and also with the scores of narrowly-focused management fads that have come and gone over the years.
I have been hot on the trail of leadership behaviors as the key to Lean success since the 1995. I even wrote one half-dozen scholarly (yet always practical) papers that made important new contributions to our understanding of Lean leadership behaviors. However, it turns out that I made the same mistake that so many people made before me, and that leaders of the Lean management movement are again making today.
I realized in 2002 why we were on the wrong track. It was because the way the problem had been conceptualized was too narrow. The long-term consensus view among human resource professionals, industrial psychologists, organizational behavior specialists, and leadership experts is that changes in behaviors will lead to the desired new leadership competencies. Thus:
Behavior → Competency
The fatal flaw here is that it ignores executives’ beliefs about business, markets, economics, employees, customers, suppliers, investors, quality, information, know-how, etc. It assumes that all executives share the same beliefs, which they do not. Executives who go though competency model based leadership training will learn some useful things, but it is mostly back to business – and back to behaviors and competencies – as usual a few weeks after the training ends. It is not surprising that traditional leadership competency models do not work so well.
That is why I have, for the last several years, de-emphasized the behavioral aspects of my Lean leadership training. Instead, I place much more emphasis on the antecedent to executive behaviors – their beliefs, and also the major and minor inter-relationships between beliefs, behaviors, and competencies. This approach has proven to be far more enlightening to executives.
The beliefs that executives have are non-uniform. For example, most executives manage in a zero-sum fashion (winners and losers) while some manage in a non-zero-sum fashion (win-win). We know this empirically by observing executives who practice conventional management (zero-sum) and those who are skilled at practicing REAL Lean management (non-zero-sum) [4]. As a result, the framework for understanding the problem must be revised as follows:
Belief → Behavior → Competency
Beliefs are important because they are the foundation upon which leaders reason and evaluate competing courses of action; it is the basis for executive decision-making processes. If an executive believes that business is a zero-sum activity, then the “Respect for People” principle will never be understood or practiced no matter how much an executive coach or trainer, or the executive, tries to change behaviors to yield Lean leader competencies.
The “Respect for People” principle in Lean management requires leaders to first change their beliefs that business can be successful as a non-zero-sum endeavor, which will then support new Lean behaviors and in turn lead to new Lean leadership competencies. Experience has shown that this is nearly impossible to do using the thinking and training methods rooted in organizational behavior and leadership development disciplines.
Let me give you a concrete example. The transfer and exchange of knowledge and information horizontally across a company so that people can improve is called “yokoten” by Toyota people. Senior managers must practice the “Respect for People” in order for yokoten to occur. Sharing knowledge and information will be minimal if employees fear for their jobs, such as when management views Lean as nothing more than zero-sum cost-cutting, resulting in layoffs. Employees suffering under management’s practice of “Fake Lean” (meaning only the “Continuous Improvement” principle is practiced) will instead hoard knowledge and information to reduce risk and to survive.
Most executives prefer the “my way or the highway,” zero-sum approach to leadership and the execution of strategy and day-to-day tasks, in part because it seems much easier to lead that way. But this reveals intellectual weakness, or at least a systematic disdain for knowledge and information, as well as intolerance for ambiguity, which creates and sustains the psychological necessity for authoritarian rule. As should be expected, horizontal knowledge and information transfer is not relevant in organizations led by autocratic, zero-sum-minded executives. Behavioral change programs for executives who lead this way will be mostly unsuccessful.
Despite this, we keep making the same mistake when we think that new behaviors will lead to new Lean competencies – without needing to address the boss’ underlying beliefs. The question, then, is how do you get executives to change their beliefs? This sounds like an impossible task, but it is not.
Experience, again, has shown that the most effective process is kaizen. By kaizen I mean where problems are quickly studied and changes are made immediately to eliminate waste, unevenness, and unreasonableness, and where the three principles of kaizen are in always use: process and results, systems thinking, and non-blaming, non-judgmental. I do not mean the degenerate form of (fake) kaizen that has become common in recent years in which people plan what changes to make and then seek management’s permission to make the proposed changes, and where the three principles of kaizen are not practiced.
The challenge, of course, is to get executives to regularly participate in kaizen [5-8]. Most executives will not participate in kaizen because they fear looking stupid, losing status or control, or don’t think they have anything to learn. The problem is that seeing waste, unevenness, and unreasonableness, first-hand, is believing. By not participating in kaizen, executives forego the opportunity to see new things and believe in new things.
Most executives are extraordinarily loyal to conventional management in part because it has served them very well, and also because of the huge sunk cost associated with decades-long personal effort to become skilled at leading a business filled with waste, unevenness, and unreasonableness. So they find many reasons to avoid participating in kaizen, such as claiming they are too busy, and delegate that activity to employees at lower levels.
However, lower-level employees participating in properly facilitated kaizens develop new beliefs while the executives do not. This soon becomes immensely frustrating for them because their beliefs start to diverge from those of the senior leadership team which soon leads to enormous communication and knowledge gaps. Eventually, lower-level people lose interest in participating in kaizen because it is too difficult to get senior managers to understand what they have seen first-hand and what they now believe. So they simply give up.
Daily kaizen [9] is an absolute requirement for executives who wish to learn and practice REAL Lean management, and who wish for employees at all levels of the organization to develop proficiency in the proper application of Lean principles and practices. The problem is that kaizen humbles people who do not want to be humbled.
Kaizen at work is like golf at play. The game of golf quickly teaches its players that they are not perfect; they are humbled many times in each round of golf (if not each hole) by the mistakes they make.
Kaizen is not a game, but like golf every kaizen quickly teaches executives that they are not perfect, they make many mistakes, and that they are not as smart as they think they are. It seems that many executives can easily handle humbling experiences outdoors, but have great difficulty dealing with humbling experiences indoors.
Daily participation in kaizen by executives is a simple, elegant, and effective countermeasure to the long-standing problem of how to get leaders to change their behaviors. It begins with changing beliefs, and kaizen is more effective than anything else in doing that. So don’t waste your time or money doing other things. Just accept kaizen as the necessary and most effective process.
A few years ago I wrote a couple of practical papers that made important new contributions to our understanding of Lean leadership beliefs. They are titled: “Linking Leaders' Beliefs to their Behaviors and Competencies” (published in 2003) and “Using Value Stream Maps to Improve Leadership” (published in 2004). You can read them in their entirety here (click on the “Papers” tab).
They show you the dramatic difference between the beliefs, behaviors, and competencies of leaders skilled in wasteful conventional management compared to Lean leaders. You will be amazed how simple current state value stream maps can also be used to diagnose and correct seemingly intractable leadership problems. And you will see why kaizen is the key.
I hope you will take advantage of these innovative and practical works so that we can stop making the same mistake.
M.L. “Bob” Emiliani is a faculty member in the School of Engineering & Technology at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Conn. and President of The CLBM, LLC. Before joining CCSU, Bob worked for 20 years in manufacturing and service industries, and has implemented Lean principles and practices on the manufacturing shop floor, in supply networks, and in higher education. Bob has authored four books and over 30 papers on various aspects of Lean management. His latest book is Practical Lean Leadership: A Strategic Leadership Guide for Executives, published in 2008. Copyright © 2008 by M.L. “Bob” Emiliani.
Notes
[1] B. Emiliani, REAL LEAN: Critical Issues and Opportunities in Lean Management, Volume Two, The CLBM, LLC, Kensington, Conn.,
2007, Chapter 1-6 and 10
[2] F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York, NY, 1911
[3] W. Tsutsui, Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan, Princeton University press, Princeton New Jersey, 1998
[4] B. Emiliani, Practical Lean Leadership: A Strategic Leadership Guide for Executives, The CLBM, LLC, Kensington, Conn., 2008
[5] M. Imai, Kaizen, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 1986 and and M. Imai, Gemba Kaizen, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 1997
[6] "The Toyota Way 2001,” Toyota Motor Corporation, internal document, Toyota City, Japan, April 2001
[7] B. Emiliani, with D. Stec, L. Grasso, and J. Stodder, Better Thinking, Better Results: Case Study and Analysis of an Enterprise-Wide
Lean Transformation, second edition, The CLBM, LLC, Kensington, Conn., 2007
[8] J. Liker and M. Hoseus, Toyota Culture, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 2008
[9] Daily participation in kaizen among executives can occur through many means ranging from the application of Lean principles and practices to their own daily work activities, to 2-hour kaizens, half-day kaizens, kaizens 3-5 days in duration, etc. The point is to apply Lean principles and practices in a consistent manner every day on an individual basis and also periodically on a team basis.