Afew years back, I visited Toyota’s plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, with the group of executives from various construction corporations. One member of our team asked Gary Convis, the first American to head a Toyota vehicle plant in North America, “What do you expect from your workers?”

“Only two things: Come to work, and pull the cord,” Convis answered.

Simple, but how many organizations attempting to build a lean operation allow their employees to pull the cord, stop the line, and have literally everybody in the plant wait until the problem is resolved? I would guess that less than 1 percent of companies allow their workers to stop the line. Why?

I say “simple” because if Toyota can do it, so can you. Lean is a powerful process that has allowed the automaker to grow from a small company in 1952 to one of the largest and most successful corporations in the world. The essence of lean is to empower every employee to become a problem solver, to make every employee self-reliant. But how do you do this? How do you learn to trust that your employees will make the right decisions for the company?

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