A lean transformation should not be a blame game. Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
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It’s a story I’ve heard too many times: An organization spends years, even decades, entrenched in a top-down, command-and-control culture. In this environment, employees are micromanaged, decision-making is reserved for those at the top, and when things go wrong, the finger-pointing begins. “Blame and shame” becomes the norm.
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Then someone decides, “We’re going to get lean.”
On the surface, this should be great news. Lean offers proven strategies to improve safety, quality, and employee engagement. But here’s the catch: The organization doesn’t change how it leads. It still clings to the same top-down mentality that has suffocated the workforce for years.
What follows might be described as a superficial lean transformation. It’s probably more of a “lean effort” (or “lean hope”) than any sort of transformation.
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Comments
Good Article
I recall hearing the "we tried it and it didn't work" back when "it" was Six Sigma. It happened to be during my involuntary exit interview.
My response was: "You 'tried' Six Sigma to the same extent that T Rex 'tried' being a vegetarian."
So true !
I wish I'd written this article myself. It contains every aspect of what I'm fighting against. I support the idea of changing from "management of quality" to "quality of management".
Did you know that, during WWI, Charles-Edwards KNOEPPEL (Installing efficiency methods, 1914) stated that if a worker took 12 hours to complete a 10-hours job, but waited 2 hours for getting a part or a tool needed for this job, then his efficiency had to be 100%, and the inefficiency had to be charged on bad management ? That was 110 years ago ! And still managers from "management schools" still fail to understand.
[in Knoeppel book, you will find most of the "lean tools" : kaizen, heijunka, kamishibai boards, VSM. The post-WWII japanese gurus had very good readings ...]
Well said!
I think one of the problems is the continued prevalence of transactional leadership (shareholder primacy theory is incredibly harmful, too, but a subject for another day). As long as transactional leadership is more highly valued (and taught), we will continue to have this problem. Transactional leaders don't waste time worrying about the impact of a change, and don't want to have to continue to continue to lead something they think they have already told their underlings to do.
When I was working in Total Quality Leadership (TQL) back in the '90s in the Navy, we had a video that we showed in every introductory class, of the Chief of Naval Operations giving a speech to a room full of Navy admirals, Marine Corps generals, and high-ranking Department of the Navy civilian leaders. In that speech, he talked about TQL and how it "is the way we do business from this day on." This was an auditorium full of leaders at the top of their game, who got there by always taking suggestions as orders. What we experienced over the next 10 years or so was those leaders deciding they could "outlive" this CNO, and mostly doing the minimum required to appear to comply.
They spent a billion dollars putting together top-knotch training, and for a while they were doing a lot of that training. We had some spectacular successes, but they were few and far between. What the leaders did NOT do was put any sort of real change management in place...we had a pretty good change management approach that was taught to local coordinators, but they were not empowered to actually do anything to try to change the culture. I think they thought that if the CNO told the leaders to change, they just would. After about ten years, another CNO decided that it was time to "declare victory and move on."
Deming's number one point was "Create constancy of purpose." Without that, it's all but impossible to sustain any change effort.
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