For 12 days, I'm giving gifts of #lean #leadership, leading up to 🎄.
Today, I'm giving the gift of, on the face of it, a paradox.
The paradox is found through a question - what is everyone's job when it comes to #lean?
Seems simple enough. When you turn the classical management system, with hierarchies, profit & loss, functional departments, quarterly financials on its head, you have to replace it with something. What is that something?
1/
When companies first started studying Toyota, they found leaders on the shop floor, coaching employees on how to solve problems. They found additional layers of leaders summoned at the clang of an #andon, all hands on deck to solve a problem stopping production, instead of corralling the car off the assembly line and into a rework bay, or shipping it with a defect.
2/
Improvements were coming from employees; managers were maintaining visual management; leaders were showing deference to employee suggestions. Was this company mad?
Here's one example of the paradox - managers being lauded for being "T-shaped" - able to see cross-functionally at a value stream, and then zoom down into the detail needed for a kaizen at a workstation. How can leaders do both?
3/
Here's another - the expectations of different roles when it came to growth and development. Using the Nemoto diagram, TPS' founders described that leaders should be developing teams to encourage growth, managers doing continuous improvement and sustaining operational standards, and employees following and sustaining standards and continuous improvement. But then you would see leaders at the gemba, on a daily basis.
4/
And decisions! When a major change was being contemplated, leaders were constantly selling changes to each other, listening to other's ideas, incorporating them - there was no "winner take all", no defiant lone wolf taking charge and issuing edicts.
Why was all of this happening? Why did it seem like the leaders were busy with the mundane?
Because through #TPS, the curse of knowledge was resolved by everyone serving the value stream. Top to bottom, side to side.
5/
There is no place for arrogance, because everyone had to serve the gemba and improve. There's no benefit in hiding information - in fact, there are enormous costs when it happens.
Get used to paradoxes, because there are more to come.
#12daysofleanleadership #strategydeployment
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David Haigh