Patience

Written by Jason Haines

“Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That’s laziness. But keep going when the going is hard and slow- that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” -Leo Tolstoy

One of the many things that leaders and Lean leaders need in their toolkit is patience. They need to have patience when training people, teaching them new things, and for many other things in their lives. Patience is something that many of us need to learn and teach ourselves. Especially in the “what have you done for me lately” world where it seems as if everyone is in a hurry to have what they want. Therefore, we think we have patience until we are pulled in every direction and our patience is tested.

Some say patience is a virtue and something that must be learned through our years. This can be true when we are young as we seem to have no patience for anything. The younger we are the more we want everything now, now, now. It is hard for us to understand why we cannot have what we want immediately, and if we don’t get it we throw a bigger tantrum. But as we get older, we learn to become more patient. Maybe more so when we become parents than when we are not parents, but we just seem to gain a better understanding of how things work and how to work with others.

As described in the bible patience is “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.” What does this mean to you? When we develop patience, we find ways to solve the problems that bother us by not letting those same issues take up our time. When we have time to sit and complain, we are wasting time on things we cannot control and not coming up solutions to our problems. This is where Lean comes in to play for many leaders, though Lean may have many other names it is typically all the same for all leaders. Lean is a toolset to help leaders to develop patience of their own to train and teach others how to solve problems on their own.

The patience of the Lean toolset starts by learning the jobs and working within the processes to make the jobs of the frontline employees better. Taking care of their problems and showing that you care helps develop patience. It also gives us a chance to teach others how to do things, and the patience to solve problems in their own process.  Also, when we are doing the training, teaching, and bettering the processes we as leaders are helping with three things that are huge benefits of becoming more patient. We are developing better relationships with our frontline employees, making it easier to make decisions, and reducing the stress by reducing the chaos of their jobs.

The first is the relationships we develop with our employees. We learn how they learn and what makes them tick within their lives. As we are building these relationships, we are learning their jobs and gaining respect because we are making positive changes and doing the work that needs to be done. Many times, leaders don’t go to the Gemba and get their hands dirty but make decisions on how to change jobs blindly.  This blind, firefighting attitude is when our frontline employees begin to resent the leaders of any company. When we go out and learn the jobs, the problems, and what is done we gain the respect that needs to be gained by leaders.

These relationships we build with our employees also gives us knowledge on which people will be good in future leadership positions, which ones need more training, and the ones who are maybe looking elsewhere and need to be reeled in. Often, organizations look at employee turnover as normal and part of the everyday workplace, but turnover is extremely costly to companies and stressful to workers. This turnover costs companies millions of dollars in new training, hiring, health care, and much more that is hidden from the daily life of a company.

The next thing that we gain from both building relationships and gaining patience is better decision making. Not only by the leader but also by the frontline employees. The frontline employees become better because we show them how to and what to expect when performing their job. The leadership shows them trust, which in turn empowers the frontline workers to take ownership of their jobs and make decisions. This ownership and patience with our employees show we respect them, trust them, and want them to be part of the organization. At the end of the day this training and patience has made our jobs as leaders much easier because we will not have to make all the decisions and can keep ahead of our employees to answer and see any issues that may be on the horizon.

As leaders we must be at least one step ahead of the frontline leaders or the people that we are we are training in our learning journey; to train and guide our people on what they need to know. This teaches them how to gain patience of their own, making decisions on their own, and allowing them to train and teach others how to move forward. But we as leaders must have patience when guiding our employees because this is when we need to be able to allow the people, we are guiding to make mistakes and learn from them. The work we put in up front will make all our jobs more efficient in the long run.

The last thing that patience will help us take care of is eliminating chaos in the workplace and making jobs simpler. When everyone is patient, we can look at the jobs, learn them, and eliminate steps that should not be part of the process. Furthermore, we can observe what is going on and coming up with the current state of chaos and eliminating that chaos for people to be able to think about what they are doing. When we make jobs less stressful and chaotic it allows them to think more about things that will make the jobs much better and easier to do. Less chaos in the workplace, or any where for that matter, helps people be more energetic, less stressed, and more creative.

Everyone wants to have less stress in our job. However, it is rare that anyone seems to put forth the effort to change the job and end up getting stressed, burnt out, and leaving. This isn’t a good place to be and with patience we can change this for the better. But we must remember to put in the work up front to make the needed changes for the future. Patience isn’t sitting back and complaining, patience is trying to make changes one step at a time for future success. Things may not be happening right now, but with the proper amount of patience and hard work they will happen in the future.

“Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.” -Saadi

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