Slow Down to Speed Up

Written by Jason Haines

“The slower but consistent tortoise causes less waste and is more desirable than the speedy hare that races ahead and then stops occasionally to doze. The Toyota Production System can be realized only when all the workers become tortoises.” -Taiichi Ohno

Over the years I would tell many of my frontline employees to slow down to speed up the process. This sounds like a serious oxymoron, but over the years it has held true in many areas in my life and the lives of others. Yes, there are anomalies, outliers or as Nassim Taleb says, black swans. These are not the people or things that we should chase in our lives because they won’t have sustainability. Life should be lived as if we are going to live a long life, and not as if we are going to die tomorrow. There is a reason that God in the bible says fear him, and he does not say fear death. Many people fear the latter rather than the former.

In the workplace we have many people worried about becoming someone today rather than working steadily to become someone of the future. These people are what we call firefighters and believe that the world will end if we don’t address a problem immediately. Currently, we can look no further our political climate right now. Rushing to decisions that only help the symptom, but not the real cause of the issue. Firefighting only snowballs the problems we are seeing, makes it disappear for a short time, but doesn’t find out the real problem at hand. When we slow down to see what the root cause is, this is when we will start to solve the real problems by getting rid of the true cause.

Over the years I have worked in many places with these firefighter types who have been glorified for solving a problem in the moment. Praised because they solved a problem that saved the days production, but they didn’t solve the real cause of that problem. It will continue, and the people at the frontline are left to deal with it. And as I have seen over the years, many times these same golden people, firefighters, who were promoted in that moment for their quick thinking and saving the company eventually became lost in the crowd. They currently are stuck in the job that they were promoted to, fired, or demoted because the magic ran out and they didn’t learn how to think critically about solving the real problems.

So why do we have so many firefighters out there working for us? Is it because of fear in the workplace? Fear comes from assumptions of employees because they don’t know what the vision is. When people make assumptions and don’t find out what is happening or in the know, they convince themselves that things are certain way when the opposite is true. Assumptions will cause people to not speak up, and fear if they aren’t doing certain things then they will not be worthy of keeping a job. This is one big factor because people fear they will lose their jobs if they are not perfect. So when a problem arises these solve the problem quickly because (1) they are afraid if they do not they will lose their job, and (2) see it as an opportunity to get ahead and a pat on the back at being successful. This creates people to want more firefighting opportunities and solving more problems quickly. Going from one problem to the next and quickly taking care of the issue but not finding out the “why” of the actual problem.

So how do we go about learning how to slow down to speed up and eliminating being a firefighter? First, we must eliminate fear from the workplace and allow people to think and grow in the business. What do I mean when I speak of fear? Fear in the workplace isn’t always the manager who yells at the frontline employees and drives them to do more work and ask less questions. I have seen many managers, and these are managers not leaders, who have made it hard for people to speak up. These managers focus success solely on quotas and deadlines without clear direction, setting expectations instead of agreements with people. When people are in these types of environments, they feel stressed and believe they must not stop for fear of retribution from their managers. Many have heard the saying, “if you got time to lean you got time to clean,” usually are working for companies that are afraid if employees are standing around, they are losing money. In these environments the employees are not learning how to think, they are reacting by simply doing and hoping it is the right answer.

Slowing down to speed up is seen in companies that have employees who are working on all levels to solve the issues at hand and problems before they arise. Being proactive rather than reactive, they study the process and understanding the details that make the process work but also ways to improve. Another thing these employees are doing is building relationships with others on their team to teach and solve problems without firefighting. Furthermore, these relationships build trust and drive out fear from the workplace. The frontline employee is more comfortable to stop the line and solve problems without going to a supervisor. As Ohno said, “no problem is problem.”

An additional way to teach people to slow down to speed up is by showing employees they can proactively seek out problems, and not wait for an issue to arise. If we show our workers that we trust them, and they can stop the line and fix issues, then they will build more confidence to pulling the Andon (stopping and fixing problems). This is easier said than done if it has been ingrained in our culture to keep moving and not stop for anything – we must meet the quota regardless of how we get there. This type of thinking is a form of workplace fear and must be driven out of the workplace. Instead we need a set of standards for each of the local jobs that allows people to understand what they are being measured against. Giving them an idea of what the score is.

You never see a professional sports game that doesn’t have the score with statistics displayed, so why do we not have this in our workplaces? If we do this, as in a sports game, the people will know there is something that needs to change to help them keep up. It will also help the frontline leaders know if they need to jump in and help the employees to keep the pace. Moreover, local statistics allow for a project to start so the problem can be studied, countermeasures put in place, taken care of, and sustained to make sure it was the proper change to be made to the process. Constantly improving and making the jobs easier so that our frontline employees are not overburdened with work. Overburden is what happens when managers of people are not solving problems to help the employees, which in turn causes employees to fear speaking up.

So, let’s eliminate fear from the workplace and allow employees to slow down to speed up and solve problems before they arise. Empowering employees and creating future leaders and ambassadors of your company provides growth and creates stability for the workplace and making everyone’s jobs easier.

Helping grow your business through process improvement!!