The essential differences between a lean leader and a micro manager

The line between being a guiding and supportive leader on the one hand, or a commanding and controlling leader on the other, can be quite thin. The leaders whom I work with tell me that they are constantly walking this tightrope. Many of them are coming to lean to find a new style of management, one that can help them stay focused on guiding and supporting their teams while their company scales up.

In this digital age, customer demand changes constantly while supply systems are getting more sophisticated every day. It is vital for companies to adapt quickly to external conditions.  Command-and-control management cannot work in this business context. We need to help our employees develop into “smart creatives”, to use Google’s term, who can think for themselves and find innovative solutions to existing problems. By the same token, we need a new breed of leaders who are able to orient and support such people. The problem is that leaders and managers are still not trained to do this. 

In traditional management, a leader is one who defines a compelling vision, designs a clear strategy around their vision, aligns everyone in the organization to the strategy, and verifies (via reports) that the strategy is well implemented. The managers in this business culture focus on execution, reporting, and keeping the machine running smoothly. In school and in the corporate world, we are trained to become this kind of “manager”. In this model, people are just a means to an end: a set of (human!) resources who are necessary to produce outputs and reach a measured goal. Leaders are generally seen as thinkers, while managers (and their teams) are doers. So naturally, when one day we find ourselves in a leading position, the only thing we know how to do is…manage. And we tend to do this far from the field, because the people at the top don’t mingle with the workers. We think that our job is to design the production machine: create a roadmap and set goals, define roles and hire people to fill them, create perfect processes that people will follow, and hope that it will all work out. We then surround ourselves with “controllers” who will make sure that the machine runs smoothly without needing too much intervention. When the machine starts to hiccup, which it inevitably will, we try to fix it by redefining roles, moving people, changing processes, and/or reorganizing everything. Command and control.

This approach is no longer working, and today’s leaders know it. Many CEOs and other C-level executives of startups and scaleups in my network live in fear of reverting to this old-fashioned micro-management as their company grows. They are scared of being seen as the evil boss, and losing the talent they had such a hard time attracting. Yet at the same time, they complain that they are losing control of their business, and have a hard time getting people to go in the right direction. So they swing back and forth between the two extremes: sometimes commanding and controlling, and sometimes guiding and supporting. This vacillation can create bizarre, confusing, or even brutal behaviors that cause people to lose motivation. In the last couple of weeks, two CEOs whom I work with asked me similar questions: “If I talk to a team member, isn’t it going over the head of their manager?” and “If I ask the team to use this template you’re suggesting without letting them change it as they see fit, isn’t it considered micro-managing?” But minutes later I heard: “She drives me nuts! Why doesn’t she do what I want her to do?” I may not be part of the same generation, but I totally understand their conundrum. I have fought the same inner battles over the years, and even today as a community leader. Lean is helping me become a more benevolent leader (or so I hope :-) ) while maintaining a certain amount of control over the outcomes. This is not an easy balance to strike, and I still have to work every day to remain on the right side of the management equation.

Lean provides principles and practices that teach leaders to be more guiding and supportive, and less commanding and controlling, but it also assumes that leaders are willing to get out of their office and challenge themselves. A lean leader is not so much a “doer”, as in traditional management, but more of a teacher whose main job is to develop the next generation of leaders. A lean leader will ask themselves the following questions, every day:

• Are we creating the right value for our customers? Are the benefits we deliver much superior to the costs for building and delivering that value? 
• Are all resources and people in the right place so we can deliver the value consistently, without ups and downs?
• Is the actual work performed by people easy, in the sense that people are working in safe, serene and efficient conditions?
• Who must learn what to grow, both personally and collectively?

In order to find realistic answers to these questions, a leader needs to be close to the field: the place where customers buy and consume our products and services, and where our people and suppliers work to create and deliver value to customers. And this is where it gets tricky, because many leaders don’t dare go to the field for fear of micro-managing. Or when they go, they don’t know how to behave, because there is nothing obvious for them to look at. One of the first things that aspiring lean leaders need to do is to make the work and problems more visible, so they can engage in meaningful and concrete discussions with teams. 

TPS practices and tools help us organize the workspace in such a way that it reveals problems to people, so they can respond quickly and avoid defects and late deliveries. This approach also allows people to think more deeply about the causes and conditions of these occurrences. A visual workplace makes it clear to everyone what the next important task is, and whether it is a task for a client or a problem to resolve, so that they can easily orient their activity and make smarter decisions on their own. A lean leader’s job is to:

• help teams and their managers build the visual work environment, and 
• go visit them on a regular basis to see what they discovered and what innovative solutions they have come up with to resolve problems, and encourage them to continue. 

If the team finds a really difficult problem that it has had a hard time resolving on its own, a lean leader will offer to help. In this context, the leader has many opportunities to find concrete answers to the above questions and to guide the team in the right direction, while leaving a lot of space for thinking and trying new, innovative solutions.

Finally, let me emphasize this: TPS tools are exploration tools, not execution tools. They exist to help us better understand our situation and think deeply about the underlying conditions. They highlight the problems that prevent us from delivering the right value to customers in a timely manner so we can spend time and energy understanding what is going on. However, the really interesting and creative work starts after the lean tools are in place: reacting fast to the problems that emerge, learning to work better with others, finding efficient countermeasures, coming up with new ideas to make the work easier and more fun, etc. In order to convince people to try out the tools, lean leaders need to explain this intention clearly, present the challenges faced by the company and the reason why everyone’s participation is crucial. People are not stupid: if you show them a concrete problem and propose a tool to see more clearly, most of them are willing to try. The goal is not to impose a new way of working to people (execution), but merely to highlight a problem, and propose a visual tool to dig deeper and learn together (exploration). The solutions to the problems revealed must come from the people themselves, because they are linked to their own job. The next brilliant idea that can give the company a boost will probably emerge from one of these people. This is the lean way of developing “smart creatives”.

One last important point: lean tools have an educational purpose for the leader as much as for the workers. Hence, the leader must not delegate their implementation. She must experiment with the tools herself, alongside the team, so that together they discover opportunities for innovation. However, once the tool is in place and problems begin to show up, let people find their own solutions. Visit them regularly, listen to them and encourage them to keep going. This is a requirement for them to follow your lead. 

Would love to hear from you. Leave me comments so we can continue the conversation on- or off-line :).

More to discover in our book about how to become a lean leader (The Lean Sensei).