Leadership
Leaders and "Management Waste"
When lean implementations fail is it often because of a failure of leadership: managers and leaders display behaviours that contradict the lean philosophy; performance management and appraisal systems encourage quick-fixes and "making the numbers" rather than team-based continuous improvement; managers monitor performance through IT systems and reports, rather than visiting the work area daily to support the team.
These, and other organisational and management behaviours (often called "management waste"), send out the message that leaders don't really believe the lean philosophy. Lean improvement is bound to slip when management don't live by example.
Often leaders don't realise what they are doing. Understanding lean tools, and the philosophy of lean, is straightforward, but managers may not realise that lean is much more than tools. Lean is a human system and lean leadership is the most crucial element of success. The gateway to success in lean is developing managers and employees to truly understand lean; be able to use lean tools; and work with employees at all levels for optimum benefit.
It is your leaders who set the tone for the organisation's culture; who recruit and develop staff; and who direct the business's operations; and lean leadership is about changing the behaviour of leaders from command and control to teamworking; from firefighting to committing quality time to regular improvement activities; from management by memo and e-mail to walking the "gemba" every day; from spreadsheets and finance reports to gathering real data in real time in the work area.
Developing Lean Leaders
It is the behaviour of your leaders that matters since they create the culture; develop and communicate the vision; and shape the environment of the organisation and the way it operates. Developing leaders who will sustain, support and build the lean transformation involves training and developing the whole leadership team, along with coaching. It's worth it: the changes made are remarkable, and empowering for everyone in the organisation.
Remember the "lean" is about more than just "operations". It is every step between the customer and order fulfilment. Often considerable value can be achieved by applying lean to support and service functions. Running kaizen blitz, or 5S events here and there in your business won't solve these sorts of issue. You need a coordinated leadership approach to bring it all together.
Sustain the lean transformation, contact us to arrange a discussion about developing truly lean leaders.