New Skills Required to be a Lean Leader
Several universities today offer degrees, certifications, and certificates in lean management, far more than a decade or two ago when many executives were getting acquainted with lean thinking and having to examine their own leadership style against what was espoused by Toyota, the Toyota Production System (TPS), and the Toyota Way. More learning institutions could probably still be embracing and teaching lean concepts. But if that doesn’t happen, tomorrow’s leaders can still navigate the lean landscape on their own like their predecessors have done and achieve similar stellar results.
In October, contributors to The Management Brief provided perspectives on how success with lean requires unlearning some traditional management approaches and what they’ve encountered along the way.
Learning in New Ways a New Way
We learned most of what we know about lean principles, behaviors, and tools from some thoughtful mentors who often challenged us, and frequently transferred their knowledge in non-traditional ways. This also was the case for Jon Armstrong, Co-Founder and CEO of Do It American MFG Company, which produces goods for public utilities. Jon learned about TPS from the eminent Hajime Ohba while the company he was working for at the time was being assisted by the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC).
“One of the main things I learned real quick is — especially with Mr. Ohba because he didn’t really say very much — you really had to work hard and pay attention to what he was paying attention to,” said Jon. “That was the key thing, to try to understand in manufacturing and processes what was important. They would tell you, but they wouldn’t tell you by telling you. They’d tell you by paying attention to certain things.”
The “wonderful experience” of working alongside Mr. Ohba “honestly changed my life and resulted in some successes and the company that we’re building today,” said Jon, who is an advocate for U.S. manufacturing and was able to start and thrive with Do It American MFG in part because of what he learned from TSSC. “The learning I had gave me the confidence that we could do a manufacturing company and do it better than the people we were competing with. If you apply TPS — just some of the principles — and you do a good job of that, people using traditional methods are not going to be able to compete with you.”
Carl Klemm began his career at General Motors and then, after 24 years moved on to Toyota, eventually becoming President and CEO of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Poland. Upon entering Toyota, he was excited by what he could learn there. “I really wanted to join. I wanted to learn. I wanted to understand. I wanted to be able to do it, not just understand it, be able to do it and make it work.”
Carl said his early years at General Motors in industrial engineering were a stark contrast to what he saw when visiting NUMMI (the GM-Toyota joint venture) and then later when working with Toyota. “It came as quite a shock to find that the opinion and relationship with industrial engineering within [GM] was dreadful. Everyone who dealt with industrial engineering hated them… It was a really terrible relationship that actually paralyzed improvement on the shopfloor. There was no open-mindedness at all. Everybody was so busy defending themselves against what they perceived as the unfair demands of industrial engineering that any suggestion of improvement was met by resistance by basically all concerned.”
Author of The Balance of Excellence,1 Carl retired from Toyota in 2015 and founded Carl Klemm Management Solutions so he could continue to work with companies and share what he has learned about lean through the years. One significant takeaway has been the four levels of lean management maturity — reactive, stabilizing, proactive, and progressive.
“At the first level of management maturity is basically I react to whatever happens around me,” said Carl. “On the second level is I’ve got control of what’s happening around me and I can just keep smooth, I can maintain schedule, and I can maintain the quality output I need for my product or service. The next level means I can begin to do kaizen… And, finally, progressive means I can now understand that the organization underneath me will be doing all of those things almost by itself, and now I can really focus on what does the world need from our organization in the coming five, 10, 15, 20 years. And, of course, Toyota does that. Toyota is thinking 25, 30 years ahead always.”
Bruce Watkins is the former President and General Manager of KARL STORZ Endovision, where a dedication to lean manufacturing helped to make the company a leader in the medical equipment and device market. Bruce wondered why, despite the remarkable success of the Toyota Production System (TPS) at Toyota and companies that have prospered using it, so many organizations have not embraced TPS. “In the United States alone, over 240,000 companies employ at least 50 people, yet relatively few have successfully implemented TPS,” he wrote.
Citing the work of Olivier LaRue, author of The Toyota Economic System – The Philosophical Element,2 and others, Bruce pointed to the many misunderstandings of TPS — such as the failure to see it as an economic system, not simply a production system, and a focus on tools and not the philosophy and people development within TPS. We likewise see these as impediments to learning and leading with lean that probably prevent many traditional leaders from gaining the lean knowledge and insights that we, Carl, Jon, and many others were able to experience.
A New Kind of Leader
What we have learned over the years has made us the leaders we are today, which is likely very different from what those in business outside of the lean community experience on a daily basis. We’ve taken what we’ve learned, often emulating our mentors, to become a new kind of leader, a lean leader. For example, many traits exhibited by Mr. Ohba were embraced by Jon of Do It American MFG.
“I just loved being around him,” said Jon of Mr. Ohba. “He seemed like a nice guy. He took things so seriously, and there was such a sense about him of really caring — about not only the process and transferring the knowledge, but also a real caring for the people that were working within the process. I just really appreciated that. I try to do that as much as I can moving forward with the folks we’ve got here.”
Toyota’s customer-centric culture is an environment that Jon has tried to establish for his organization. “One of the core values is that we don’t have customers or suppliers, we truly have partners,” said Jon. “We try to think of it that way… We talk a lot about it, too, just internally. In this part of the shop, ‘Who’s your customer?’ You as an engineer, ‘Who’s your customer?’ There’s customer/supplier relationships all throughout the organization. If you’ve got a customer-first mentality, how do you have a service mentality to make sure their needs are taken care of and you’re responding to them quick enough.”
Carl recognizes, like Bruce, that lean leaders need to achieve tangible business results as well as develop people. While at Toyota he learned a concept of “two wheels,” of which one wheel was the business priorities, progress, and benefits and the other wheel was the development of people in the organization. “They are joined by a very rigid axle, and the role of management is to turn that axle,” said Carl. “Of course, making the strategy, making the long-term, medium-turn, short-term vision is top management’s job, but also is turning that axle and turning those two wheels in harmony. Because if they’re not in harmony, if they’re not moving at the same speed as each other, then you go off course from the very fastest progress you can make. Management’s job is to keep those wheels aligned. That’s a true key difference between Toyota and other organizations I’ve come across.”
Carl said the business wheel should drive what the business does and where it goes, establishing a normal business environment that indicates what to learn, where to invest, tools to use, where to coach — rather than improvement activities viewed as something extra done in addition to the day-to-day work. He also said, “it’s important that all levels of the management team — right to the top — not only understand these tools but can use them because the normal business day, the normal business activity, provides hundreds of opportunities to coach.”
But delivering business results and developing people is unlikely to occur with mutual trust and respect, said Carl. “Without that everything is difficult. And my experience [at GM] where there was no mutual trust and respect, literally was a massive roadblock. If the organization does not have that as a baseline where there is open communication, where there is trust, where there is real respect for people’s capacity, potential, and achievements, then it’s really difficult.”
Bruce, now Principal with Monarch Advisors Group, wrote that TPS can be a powerful framework for organizational excellence for others, but leaders will need to do more than implement tools and techniques. “Success demands a fundamental shift in philosophy, a commitment to human development, and patience to build capability over time. Organizations that understand TPS as a comprehensive economic and social system — rather than just a manufacturing methodology — position themselves to achieve its full transformative potential.”
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