What makes effective Lean Leaders?

By admin • on November 2, 2009

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What makes effective Lean Leaders?

I’ve been reading a number of posts on other blogs on Lean Leadership.

For me leadership is about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen. As such leaders not only have to build superior processes and systems but also help their organisation become profitable and successful. Obviously, one way of doing this is for a company to purse lean across the enterprise.

I believe that senior managers are willing and eager to do all that is required of them to lead their portion of an organization to success. Difficulties arise not because senior managers lack energy, but because they don’t always fully understand how and why many required actions are necessary. The mechanics of lean systems (kaizen, pull systems, flexible cells, and so on) are simple in concept and thus appear easy to implement. Yet, few organizations are able to implement “lean” the first time they try. The most important implementation insights involve overcoming resistance, establishing a common set of tools and approaches that everyone uses, and dealing with implementation issues every day, hands-on, at the work group level

My question then is what makes effective Lean Leaders?

Leadership Lessons from Star Trek TNG
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Characteristics

1. Patience – You can change the software program or change the configuration of machine to give you the expected result. But when it comes to human-beings, you have to patient to implement, wait and analyse, correct and implement again. One step at a time, make it a iterative process.

2. Clear Vision – Before bringing change at an enterprise level, as a lean leader you must know what strategic figures you want to achieve?

3. Delegate – If you think you will direct people to stop waste – print on both the sides of paper or practice austerity – fly economy class etc, you are quite likely to fail. Why? Because you haven’t won support of your colleagues but you are imposing a rule on them. You haven’t set any target for them to achieve. But you want them to achieve something which no one knows. Therefore, delegate. Make heterogeneous teams across the organization and ask them to create goals. Each team consisting of resources from all the departments in the organization Operations, Sales, Accounts, Administration etc and they need to come back with lean program.

4. Qualitative vs Quantitative – A lean leader would never say – let us stop wasting paper, let us switch off PCs before leaving the work place because these are the qualitative measures, which do not give any idea what is the value of the goal to be achieved, to what extent the value of the goal is achieved and by what value they are lagging behind etc. Therefore, a lean leader would go for quantitative measurements of his/her lean program.

5. Perseverance – Usually most of the long programs succumb to other high priority projects. An effective leader knows – what is the long term value of “lean” in the organization. Bearing that in mind he would press or release the pedal from the activities.

6. Courage – Courage to defend the decision is key for all the leaders, be it a lean leader or any other.

Lean Leadership – the differences?

The effective Lean leader must also be a good teacher as Lean is about shared thinking along common philosophy, ideas and principles.

He needs to be a source of bubbling energy that galvanizes organization into action. He will need to create tension not stress; the tension for the gap between the current reality and the ideal state. i.e. positive tension.

He must be an innovator and a risk-taker as lean culture involves action, experimentation and new thinking – all of which involves an element of risk.

He should be able to lead through visible participation and not by mere proclamation.

The Lean leader should be able to take a good look at their own practices—starting with standardization—developing clearly structured processes, designing a structured flow for their own time, and becomes more predictive.

When he coaches and teaches effectively, builds creative tension, eliminates fear and comfort, actively participates in the transformation of the business, and applies Lean to everything, he becomes an effective Lean Leader.

3D Team Leadership Arrow Concept
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McKinseys Definition

McKinsey has identified the 6 habits of Lean Leaders:

  1. A focus on operating processes (do you wander around on the shop-floor and chat with the ones who really work?)
  2. Root cause problem solving (use problems as teaching opportunities)
  3. Clear performance expectations (and compatible with the existing performance framework if any. This is so important, so touchy, so hidden…)
  4. Aligned leadership (across silos… which means across budgets too… nasty one again)
  5. A sense of purpose (is this new?)
  6. Support for people (if front workers create value, be there to support them… yes bring them coffee if that helps.)

So it’s very much like shifting attention of the line managers away from firefighting and giving them room to coach.

My reason for saying that is because by attaching the “lean” handle to “leader” you imply a degree of technical knowledge. That takes the desired characteristics away from the realm of effective generic leader and makes it more discipline specific

In general other more generic leaders become leaders simply when they are followed. It is a role bestowed by the followers, as a leader without followers isn’t leading anyone. What is more they often have little technical understanding of the clever stuff that may go on around them, but somehow they have the ability to get the best from people

So I’m not sure whether this “lean leader” is actually “a leader” as such or a good project manager, as a project manager generally gets things done and is held accountable for delivering a specific outcome (although I do note that at least one other contributor feels there is a clear distinction)

Their awakened consciousness is the foundation for the development of a new status quo. Organizational development requires leadership that inspires others to offer more of their discretionary energy to the evolving workplace.

I would like to make an observation because we, as human beings are limited in building “superior systems”; systems that we built are maybe working today, and maybe a few will stand-up until tomorrow. Assessment of our systems’ creation should be performed after extensive time!

Several situations occur in majority cases (similarities):

  • Any system requires people who are not 120 % occupied with daily routine; majority have tasks that used to be done during good times by 3-4 people.
  • Some other ones, have Lean leaders who manage all relationships plus process changes without much of Senior Management involvement (today’s word for Senior Managers who do not know where they go is “dealing with ambiguity”).
  • In some other cases the Organizational Chart (reporting system) is not business conducive.
  • Company’s culture issues
  • One person responsible for changes who does not have power of authority over processes & people will not be able to complete Lean’s implementation regardless of his/her personality and “good will”.

Conclusion

I guess in conclusion I’d have to say that if the “Lean Leader” is actually “a leader” then he or she is the type of leader that derives at least part of the respect they earn from technical knowledge and ability, which is not always true of other types of leaders.

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By robthompson on November 2nd, 2009 at 7:44 am

Just published: What makes effective Lean Leaders?:

I’ve been reading a number of posts on other blogs on Lean L… http://bit.ly/1smCVM

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

By Shaun Sayers on November 2nd, 2009 at 8:55 pm

Is he a leader or is he a manager? I'm not sure

They are not the same thing, neither is "manager" a dirty word

By qamanager on November 3rd, 2009 at 9:35 pm

Over the years the terms "management" and "leadership" have, in the organisational context, been used both as synonyms and with clearly differentiated meanings. Debate is fairly common about whether the use of these terms should be restricted, and generally reflects an awareness of the distinction made by Burns (1978) between "transactional" leadership (characterised by eg emphasis on procedures, contingent reward, management by exception) and "transformational" leadership (characterised by eg charisma, personal relationships, creativity). That those two adjectives are in fact used equally well with the noun "management" as with the noun "leadership" indicates that there is such a messy overlap between the two in academic practice that attempts to pontificate about their differences are largely a waste of time.

By Shaun Sayers on November 6th, 2009 at 11:47 am

Don't agree Rob. I think there are differences. For example, a leader requires followers, a manager only requires a degree of co-operation (coupled with various organisational attributes that "leaders" don't necessarily need)

Hitler, for example, for all his many faults and flaws, did secure a sizeable following but, by all accounts, directly organised very little in a hands on way. He was apparently quite a crap manager. It's Picard and Reicher for me, and there's a real practical difference. This is accutely demonstrated in the political arena when it is commonplace for competent organisers to find themselves elevated to a "leadership" role – only to discover that people are disinclined to follow

Manager is a role that can be awarded, but "leader" is a title that can only be truly bestowed by followers. What I mean by that is that a person carrying the title of "leader" is not actually a leader if people ain't following

Now continuous vs continual improvement on the other hand …

By qamanager on November 6th, 2009 at 6:38 pm

Good points there Shaun. Read the blog posts I reference in this post, you may change your mind? Hitler and Star Trek in one post, great!

By shaun sayers on November 7th, 2009 at 2:04 pm

Here's a controversial statement for you Rob (which I happen to fully believe in, by the way)

Management development training sometimes works, leadership development training doesn't

By qamanager on November 7th, 2009 at 7:49 pm

I agree entirely.

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
Dwight Eisenhower

By ?????????? on November 9th, 2009 at 2:09 am

How do I get into a money society like Japan created to meet all money and financial needs?

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