Lean Leadership

Lean management has its supporters and detractors. Some organisations are hugely enthusiastic and others decide after a few attempts that lean is not for them. This latter group, like the first group, starts with lean full of enthusiasm but after a while the spirit subsides. It proves difficult for many organisations to retain the discipline and way of thinking.

Few studies have been done on the actual effects of lean implementations. The studies that are numerically based show few hopeful results. According to Industryweek[1] only 2% of the companies implementing lean achieve their full target; 24% report significant results and 74% admit that the lean implementation did not bring what they expected and hoped for.

Four reasons are given why lean implementations fail:

Senior management is not connected or does not understand the real impact of lean;
Senior management does not accept that culture change is (often) a requirement to successfully apply lean;
The organisation does not have the right people in the right position;
The organisation chose lean when another improvement methodology or programme would have been a better choice.

Three of the four reasons given have wholly or partly to do with leadership in the organisation. And even of the fourth reason, one could argue that the selection of improvement methodology should be a board-level matter.

For IMPROVEN, the above was one of the reasons for conducting a qualitative study on the extent to which lean implementation and leadership development are related. We also asked the surveyed parties what competences of executives they believe make a lean implementation successful. For the study, 17 executives were interviewed in the service, healthcare and public sectors.

78% of the organisations participating in Improven's survey agreed that lean management is used on an ad hoc basis or as an improvement methodology. Regardless of the number of years the organisation has been using lean management and the "maturity level" at which the organisation is currently operating, this start appears to be little deliberate or consciously directed. The related question is whether the philosophy, consequences and conditions have been thought through before implementation. Management in these cases chooses to implement lean management based on success stories, without realising that the implementation also affects management. Another option is that managers assess themselves as "lean leaders" without knowing exactly what this entails and have too little self-reflection to realise that change is needed in them too.

Developing lean leadership

Many organisations (85%) pay attention to lean leadership when implementing lean management. The extent to which this is done varies from a half-day champion training course to an extensive programme to develop operational management. A dichotomy is visible here between organisations that pay a lot of attention to coaching, training and intervision and those that indicate that attending training is more or less a compulsory number where a (one-day) training course for managers suffices. In the latter category, organisations indicate they struggle with securing lean within the organisation.

Team

The vast majority (90%) of respondents said they have a management team in which cooperation is good. The managers listen to each other and help each other to solve problems. The way problems are solved is strongly solution-oriented. Some managers indicate that analysing the root cause is not yet given sufficient attention. Despite the satisfaction with team cooperation, 50% of the interviewees indicate that the management team is not yet perceived externally as one team. The appearance of being one team is something that many managers are actively working on.

Culture and structure

We asked participating organisations whether the current culture and structure promote or hinder lean thinking. There is no unanimity on this. As most promoting elements in the current culture and structure, the level of education of employees (the more educated the more promoting) and open communication between team members are mentioned. As barriers, three elements are mentioned most often. First, employees continue to think and operate strongly hierarchically. According to interviewees, permission is sought for every improvement before it is implemented. Second, the lack of exemplary behaviour by managers is seen as a major obstacle. The interviewees indicate that fellow managers (and themselves in cases) still do not display enough of the desired behaviour themselves. For example, if you preach open communication as management, you yourself must also be open in the matters that concern you. Finally, many organisations run into (a misuse of) standardisation. Employees are expected to be customer-friendly and to solve problems, but at the same time managers stress the importance of standardisation. Deviations from standard processes are not allowed or have to be heavily justified. Striving for uniformity can thus be paralysing.

Innovation or standardisation?

We asked executives what questions concern them in relation to lean management. The point about standardisation and uniformity leads to a common question: how can you be innovative if you pursue standardisation and efficiency? In the question lies the assumption that innovation and standardisation are two opposite worlds. We believe that those organisations that perceive standardisation as an obstacle may have the wrong goal and wrong implementation of standardisation. Standardisation and unification mean, of course, that working arrangements are established and unambiguous. But there are two elements that organisations need to consider.

First, think carefully about what you standardise as organisations. We keep talking about standardisation of practices and processes. But what if two regions of an organisation provide mortgages based on different processes, while the output of both meet the quality requirements of customers, regulators and management (within the cost structure, systems and governance)? So what is wrong with different processes? As a manager, you should focus on uniform output (standards) and less on the underlying ways of working. It is precisely standardisation that causes people to become rigid in daring to make improvements. Questions like, "Don't we deviate from the standard?" and thoughts like, "If I want to change the way of working, it has to be discussed and approved nationally first, which will take another few months. Never mind then." do not work to motivate. The challenge for the manager is to encourage employees, departments, countries, regions et cetera to share best practice.

A second misconception: standardisation is not forever. Standardisation of processes is different from setting working methods in concrete. In other words, the standard should change as soon as an improvement is possible in the process. The new way of working immediately becomes the new standard. Sometimes standards only last a week. Fine. As long as the agreements on the new ways of working are recorded and communicated. Not by heavy process manuals, but by short instructions and discussion in a daily or weekly start.

Incidentally, you could have a debate whether innovation and continuous improvement have the same scope. Whereas continuous improvement is often incremental, innovations are perhaps more breakthroughs in entirely new products or ways of working. But we will leave that discussion aside for the moment.

Do lean and leadership belong together?

One of the executives raised the question of whether lean and leadership belong together? An interesting question that we think relates to how lean is viewed. Does an organisation see lean as a method for implementing improvements? Then the question is justified whether leadership has a major impact on the success of lean initiatives. The role of the manager is often the principal of improvement projects and perhaps the process owner. Improvements often stand alone rather than in a line to continuous improvement. The influence of leadership on the success of projects is there, but that does not necessarily mean that the executive is a lean leader.

In organisations that strive to implement lean in the philosophy of continuous incremental improvement through all layers of the organisation, we see (see Industryweek's survey results) that leadership is definitely a success factor for the success of lean management. An organisation cannot land lean without understanding, discussing and investing on impact on culture and leadership if needed.

Figure 1: Many Organisations struggle to build a bridge from lean tooling to lean thinking.

The threshold to switch from lean as methodology to lean as culture proves (too) high for many organisation. That is where day-to-day leadership comes in. Not every manager is able to adapt their style and behaviour to the new desired culture. Isn't it strange when an organisation takes a different path, but they do so with the same people as those who managed the organisation in the old situation? Saying goodbye to some managers could thus just be an essential part of a lean transition.

What we dare to claim is that lean leadership (like the techniques from lean, for that matter) is a collection of all kinds of leadership styles. Terms like facilitative leadership, coaching leadership and self-directed teams include elements that can be placed under good lean leadership. Researchers Kjeld Harald Aij and Sofie Rapsaniotis, for instance, conclude that despite differences in origins, philosophy, characteristics and behaviour, there is a large overlap in the literature on lean leadership and servant leadership. We asked our respondents about the characteristics of a good lean leader and the most frequently mentioned characteristics are those that you might also generally attribute to a good leader. Namely, according to the interviewees, a lean leader has vision, is result-oriented, is committed, possesses decision-making skills and provides coaching leadership. This is also in line with what the literature on Lean leadership says (Wiegel and Maes). One of the traits we see reflected is "Go to Gemba". A lean leader is actively present on the shop floor and thus shows commitment. Support is an important part of Go to Gemba. The leader supports employees in their responsibilities. He ensures that employees solve things themselves as much as possible, but supports when they cannot get something done. What else these characteristics mean in practice we will return to in a subsequent article.

Sources:

Pay, Everybody's Jumping on the Lean Bandwagon, But Many Are Being Taken for a Ride, 2008, http://www.industryweek.com/
Wiegel and Maes, Successful Lean, 2015, Pearson Education NL
Aij and Rapsaniotis, Leadership requirements for Lean versus servant leadership in Health Care: a systematic review of the literature, 2017, www.dovepress.com.

About the authors:

Mirjam ten Cate is Master Black Belt and Senior Consultant at Improven BV.

Ron Vossen is manager of the Centre for Improvement and Innovation at Isala Klinieken in Zwolle.

André van Hofwegen is Master Black Belt and Managing Consultant at Improven BV.

[1] http://www.industryweek.com/articles/everybodys_jumping_on_the_lean_bandwagon_but_many_are_being_taken_for_a_ride_15881.aspx