Lean Leader’s Foster Passion for Change

Passion is the driving force that enables people to attain far more than they ever imagined. Without passion there is no drive to succeed. It is the fuel of the will, and everything you do as a leader must express your passion. Passion is contagious and is easily shared. Passion will bridge moments of weakness, and will drive you past your failures while reaching for your goals. Passion radiates from you and is easily detected by others.

Passion is not style. There are a lot of different styles -- charismatic, quiet, confident. But it all comes down to this motivating sense of commitment to what you do. Vince Lombardi said “the difference between success and failure is energy … fired with enthusiasm.”

Enthusiasm; intensity about a subject; willingness to engage others on their terms with respect to the threats and possibilities; deep knowledge about the subject; examples from one's own experience - all of these are marks of passion.  These are attributes that can be studied, learned, and acquired over time.  They grow from believing that there must be a better way for your organization to survive and prosper in a competitive world.

Passion is literally the fuel that propels you toward success. Passion allows you to think, feel, focus, act, attract and create the events conditions and circumstances that you most desire to see you through difficult times. Passion is what propels you to begin taking the necessary action steps that will allow you to begin changing your current situation.

Lean leaders harness the passion of their team to bring about change. Even if this passion is against the leader’s change, it is still valuable since a leader knows that resistance to change is far better than apathy. The stronger the resistance, the stronger the energy that’s available. So leaders dig deeper to understand the source of the resistance and either rethink the change based on the wisdom they uncover, or they harness and realign the energy of that resistance.

A leader without passion isn’t a leader. He’s a paper pusher. Or a taskmaster. Passion drives a lot, and you can inspire so much in others through your own passion and enthusiasm. That doesn’t mean you have to be constantly cheery, it means you’ve got to believe in what you’re doing and what your company is doing.

Strong leaders engage people’s hearts. They build ever-deeper passion and commitment. The key leadership word is “care.” When we care about our work, we will often be harder on ourselves than anyone else would dare to be. When we really care about the customers we serve, we’ll go out of our way to ensure that each “moment of truth” (contact with customers) is as positive as we can make it. When we care about making our organization successful, we’ll go above and beyond our job to do whatever it takes to be part of a winning team. When we care about our products or services, we’ll do whatever it takes to continue feeling proud of what we do.

Passion isn’t something you can expect or mandate. You can, however, create the conditions for passion to be unleashed. Because leaders value passion, it is only natural that they expect passion in the workplace.

Great leaders take vision and passion to the next step by investing their time and energy to create environments in which employees are engaged in meaningful work and eager to contribute. When this is realized, the result is competitive advantage.

Lean Quote: Want to Be a Better Leader? Show Employees You Care.

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"If management thinks people don’t care, it’s likely that people won’t care." — Tom Groark

Rallying a team of people can be challenging. You'll be required to work with people with different personalities, each bringing to work different drivers and motivations. To fully engage the members of your team, recognize their individuality -- what stimulates them and keeps them striving to do their best -- while maintaining a collaborative environment where everyone is working toward the same end goal. 

Show employees that you care about them personally so that you and the team can tackle shared goals. The following three steps can help you achieve this:

1) Listen.
One of the most important traits in leadership and managing employees is the ability to listen. Take the time to sit down with employees and listen to their thoughts, suggestions, comments and concerns. Giving members of your team a voice, individually and as a collective group, will boost morale and thus business growth.

Listening is not just about receiving your employees’ ideas but also acting on them when it makes business sense. Prove that you're willing to trust the input of your employees. It will pay dividends in the long run.    

2) Get to know your employees.
Gone are the days when people expect leaders to sit behind a closed office door and dictate from on high. In modern business, the best leaders and entrepreneurs get to know their employees on a personal level as well as professionally.

Ask employees about members of their family, what they enjoy doing outside the office and the parts of their role that they like or dislike the most. Demonstrating an interest in your employees as people, rather than as cogs in a machine, will ensure that they feel valued.  

3) Be approachable.
A manager's display of willingness to be consulted by staffers is crucial for business growth and success. A strong leader gives staffers an opportunity to be heard and lets people feel comfortable doing so. This type of leader makes time for employees and listens to their ideas, at a meeting, during a private conversation or in the corridor. 

Being approachable will not only results in your building stronger relationships with members of your team. It will give you an opportunity to hear new ideas and demonstrate to staffers that they are valued members of the business.

 

Advice on Managing Resistance to Change

Lean is in its purest sense a change management initiative, for it involves changing from a current state to a better state. Just as all change attracts resistance, Lean improvements also attract resistance to change, which may manifest as employees ignoring new processes, disagreeing with the benefits, making stringent criticisms, and more. Success depends on how effectively the leadership rises to the occasion and manages resistance to change.

Managing resistance to change is challenging and it’s not possible to be aware of all sources of resistance to change. Expecting that there will be resistance to change and being prepared to manage it is a proactive step. It’s far better to anticipate objections than to spend your time putting out fires, and knowing how to overcome resistance to change is a vital part of any change management plan.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in initiating major company changes is to expect that everyone’s reaction will be even remotely like yours.

You can expect that the employees will experience the same range of emotions, thoughts, agreement, and disagreement that you experienced when the change was introduced to you or when you participated in creating the change. Never minimize an employee's response to even the most simple change. You can't know or experience the impact from an individual employee's point of view. Maybe the change seems insignificant to many employees, but the change will seriously impact another employee's favorite task. Hearing the employees out and letting them express their point of view in a non-judgmental environment will reduce resistance to change.

Keep your employees informed.  Communicate as much as you know about what is happening as a result of the change.  One of the major reasons people resist change is fear of the unknown.  If you communicate with employees and keep them informed, you put this fear to rest.

Answer the "What's in it for Me?" question.  Generally people will accept change when they see a personal benefit.  Employees who are involved in determining the benefits of change are less likely to resist it.  Assist employees in identifying what the change will do for them.

Give employees some control over change.  As employees begin to focus on the benefits of the desired change, provide them with the opportunity to control the steps to the change.  Empower employees to become part of the change.  There are several reasons people resist change, one of which is fear.  Many people play "Gee, what if" scenarios over and over when a new idea is proposed.  When you begin to implement your plan of action, it's essential that you invite those around you to identify how the change will influence them, benefit them, and improve their present situations.

Regardless of the catalyst for the change, it will be your employees who determine whether it successfully achieves its desired outcome. Organizations don’t change – People do – or they don’t.

Management’s Expanded Role in Lean Thinking

Most often when people hear the term management it connotes a specific hierarchical structure of an organization. According to Wikipedia, management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively.

I prefer to use the metaphor of a bus to describe management’s role in an organization. The change leader of your organization sets the direction of the bus (hopefully toward “True North”) and has to get the right people with the right stuff in the right seats on the bus. Great leaders put the right people in the right seats on the bus, and then drive the bus to the right locations. In other words, great leaders “help people apply their talents effectively and realize self-accountability and self-motivation.”

Management is primarily about leading and developing people. It is management’s role to create the systems to do this. The system involves:

1. Identify tools
2. Teach tools
3. Keep everyone practicing

Be mindful that while systems run businesses, it’s the people who run the system. Therefore, management must provide the necessary information and inspiration:

• Identify best practices
• Create a learning environment
• Keep everyone trained and practiced

When it comes to management’s role in a Lean environment their function must be reconsidered. My friends at GBMP have identified six essential functions of the management process to support and accelerate a Lean conversion:

1. Volition – Unwavering management commitment to and articulation of the need for everybody everyday.
2. Policy – Codification of what we do, how we do it, and how it is measured. 
3. Planning and deployment – Developing, managing, and communicating a plan to redirect the organization in a “True North” direction, balancing improvement time and daily management time.
4. Control and monitoring – Creation of measurements that accurately align daily management practices and performance with organizational strategy.
5. Satisfaction – Fostering the organization and people development through reflection on wins and lessons learned. Feeds back to volition.
6. Idea Systems – Developing a robust system to stimulate, capture, implement, recognize, and share improvement ideas.

Together, these create the infrastructure and shared understanding that run the business, both daily and long-term.

Management’s role in transforming the management system is analogous to every employee’s role in Lean: many small improvements that come from the common sense and experience of the people who do the work.

Are you an agent of change or just a keeper of status quo?

Lean Quote: Variation is Evil

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"The Customers Do Not Feel The Average. They Feel The Variation." — Tom Groark

The customer’s affection for a company can very quickly turn into enmity at the first encounter with inconsistency. Like beauty and truth, quality is in the eye of the beholder, your customer. Quality is an ever evolving perception by the customer of the value provided by a product. It is not a static perception that never changes but a fluid process that changes as a product matures (innovation) and other alternatives (competition) are made available as a basis of comparison.

Quality and excellence are not what you say they are.  Quality and excellence are what your customers say they are.  Customers of your products and services define quality!

Customers want quality that is appropriate to the price that they are prepared to pay and the level of competition in the market. 

Very quickly, you swing from appreciation to disdain. And this is how variation kills us.

This is the very reason why consistency is important in business. Not only does it cost you a lot, but more importantly it builds your integrity. This is also the reason why Six Sigma and other quality strategies avoid defects or variation like a plague.

 

Maybe So, Maybe Not. We’ll See.

What I have come to realize more and more is how quickly our minds tend to judge life. I am not sure where it comes from; maybe it is from childhood, where we learn the separation of things.

There is a Chinese Proverb that goes something like this…

A farmer and his son had a beloved stallion who helped the family earn a living. One day, the horse ran away and their neighbors exclaimed, “Your horse ran away, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

A few days later, the horse returned home, leading a few wild mares back to the farm as well. The neighbors shouted out, “Your horse has returned, and brought several horses home with him. What great luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

Later that week, the farmer’s son was trying to break one of the mares and she threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. The villagers cried, “Your son broke his leg, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

A few weeks later, soldiers from the national army marched through town, recruiting all the able-bodied boys for the army. They did not take the farmer’s son, still recovering from his injury. Friends shouted, “Your boy is spared, what tremendous luck!” To which the farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

The moral of this story, is, of course, that no event, in and of itself, can truly be judged as good or bad, lucky or unlucky, fortunate or unfortunate, but that only time will tell the whole story. Additionally, no one really lives long enough to find out the ‘whole story,’ so it could be considered a great waste of time to judge minor inconveniences as misfortunes or to invest tons of energy into things that look outstanding on the surface, but may not pay off in the end.

Sometimes our own lives are too complicated for us to see the real value in an experience. It is the old…can’t see the forest for the trees syndrome, and only when we step out of our own ‘story’, can we see the universal theme, or lesson, that is inherent in our personal circumstances. These beautiful and delightful Zen stories carry a short and simple message that, if taken wisely, can be used in our own lives.

This story reminds me that no experience is either good or bad. It’s never either, always both. We can never have the whole story, and it is best to wait and see how things unfold rather than rushing in to make a judgement, which is often a waste of our energy.

It reminds people that it's best not to get too upset -- or attached -- to what happens to us. Even something that seems dark and confounding can turn out to be an opportunity, when looked on in hindsight.

The wiser thing, then, is to live life in moderation, keeping as even a temperament as possible, taking all things in stride, whether they originally appear to be ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Life is much more comfortable and comforting if we merely accept what we’re given and make the best of our life circumstances. Rather than always having to pass judgement on things and declare them as good or bad, it would be better to just sit back and say, “It will be interesting to see what happens.”

Remember, not everything is how it first appears…

Lean Quote: The Continuous Part of Continuous Improvement

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop." — Confucious

Lean Thinking is often described as a “journey, not a destination”. In many regards this is true since the best Lean companies have found that their improvement efforts never end. Each set of improvements result in improved bottom-line results but also exposes more opportunity. 

Lean is a journey that never ends. There will always be a gap between where you are (current state) and where you would like to be (True North). Since there will always be a gap, there will always be an opportunity to improve. Walking the path on a Lean journey can be an overwhelming experience.

This journey toward dramatically improved business performance shares three characteristics with more traditional travel. Every journey has a starting point, an objective, and a path that connects the two. In order to gain the maximum return on limited resources organizations must understand and optimize these three essential characteristics.

A Lean journey is full of steps not all of which are forward. Failure will occur. Its ok, the purpose is learning, and we learn through experimentation. Trying new approaches, exploring new methods and testing new ideas for improving the various processes is exercise for the mind.

The road to continual improvement is a rocky one with many ups and downs. Value the incremental improvement approach to continuous improvement. Through simple, common-sense, and low cost experimentation a great deal of process improvements can be made. Experimentation is the exercise of a healthy Lean journey. Understanding this allows one the opportunity to stay on the path along the journey.