TEACHERS CREATING A CRITICAL MASS

The following article is from the book, Developing Lean Leaders at All Levels, by Jeff Liker and George Trachilis. Join the revolution!

The teaching objectives for this section are to:

1.     Discuss the early stages for creating a teacher who creates a critical mass.

2.     Define the responsibilities of the Group Leader and their support functions.

3.     Discuss some challenges in developing the Group Leader and Team Leader functions in a cyclical business.

CREATING A TEACHER WHO CREATES CRITICAL MASS

Figure 1. Support Daily Kaizen

Managers need to be trained to develop Group Leaders. See Figure 1. I've already said that in the early stages of self-developing and developing others, we usually focus on the Managers, and then we are going to work with them to develop the first Group Leaders, probably in a controlled area like a pilot for learning, and then we begin to spread that learning to other areas. As the Managers learn they can then work on developing other Group Leaders; then the Group Leaders can work on developing the Team Members. This is not as clear cut as that, but that's the ideal way. You create the teacher who creates the student; you create a teacher who creates a student and it just keeps going on like that. Then, when you have a critical mass and somebody new comes, in you have a lot of teachers. 

The work group owns a set of processes, so if you are the Group Leader, and if it's a physical equipment area like stamping machines, you have a certain number of stamping machines and they are your responsibility. Your job is to make production; your job is to have high quality; your job is for it to be safe; in order for that to happen, the machines have to operate at a high level; they can't be shutting down all the time. You are responsible for making sure you can change over these stamping processes quickly because you may be asked to make a small batch instead of a very large batch; that's all the responsibility of the Group Leader, so the Group Leader is like the owner of that mini business, of those say 10 or12 stamping machines. 

Well, what's the role of the support group--for example--what's the role of maintenance? The role of maintenance is to support the Group Leaders. The Group Leader is the customer of maintenance; the Group Leader is the team. You need to be a good service provider as a maintenance person, but good service providers need good customers. So when every day you ask the group to do preventative maintenance, for example, including tasks like change this, check this fluid level, check the filter, change the filter that needs to be changed, you expect the service providers to do that in a Toyota plant. If they are doing that, then the uptime of the equipment goes way up. If on the other hand the maintenance person and the Group Leader don’t take it seriously and don’t lead the group to have the discipline, then machines are going to shut down, and the maintenance person is going to have to spend a lot of time babysitting and they don’t want that because then they need more maintenance people are needed.

I know that the Group Leader is responsible for production in that area, so the Group Leader is also my customer. I'm giving you a better machine to make you more productive, but you have to be on the receiving end working with me to set up that machine.

CREATING A CRITICAL MASS IN A LARGE ORGANIZATION

Figure 2. Key Performance Indicator

At Georgetown, Kentucky, it turned out that over time all of the measured KPIs consistently improved. See Figure 2. So every year there was a new set of challenges to get to another level, and the work groups by and large will all either meet or almost meet those new levels, and then next year there is another level set. When they introduce another product, it disrupts the process, and some of the KPIs go down, and they have to be brought back up. So it's not a linear progression, but every year where ever we are starting from, by the end of the year, they are better, and it's very, very consistent, because they have developed effective work groups, with the right training, with the right support from management and from support groups, and they just keep improving and improving. That is Continuous Improvement.

A good question from George is this: “Say I run a plant of 700 people; let's say I had worked in a company where we had a Lean program; I've learned it well. I learned the lesson well. I'm the Manager now of the 700-person plant and I'm serious about this and want to now bring it to this plant where I'm starting almost from zero. I've got lots of Supervisors trained in the old way. Workers have not been involved in Continuous Improvement; how long would it take to get to the point where I have some semblance of daily improvement with effective meetings and actual Kaizen going on all over the plant; you could walk any place, and you would see improvement, and I would say if you are really skilled as a Plant Manager, you could probable get to that point in two to three years where, at a rudimentary level, you have improvement. You get to the point where you have well-developed Group Leaders and Team Leaders whom you can count on to reach metrics that you've agreed on within about five years. 

It's a big commitment, and that assumes that the Group Leader stays in place. So what if you develop Group Leaders and then there is a downturn in the economy, and you get orders to cut people dramatically?who are you going to cut? Team Leaders usually go first because they are not needed for production. You need some Supervisors, but you don't need all these 1 to 5 ratio Team Leaders. So they go away, and immediately Kaizen goes backward, and the Team Leaders are also your future Group Leaders, so you don't have the bench of Group Leaders to promote, so that can make everything fall apart, and in businesses that have a three-to-five- year cycle of downturns and doing major work for its reduction, then they are constantly unstable. They get to a certain point, and then they go backward; they get to certain point and then they go backward, and if that great Plant Manager after three years is so good that he gets promoted, he gets moved to another job, another plant; he goes away, and someone comes in who doesn't understand how to be a Lean Leader, yet for some period of time, if the groups are functioning well, they will continue to function well, but the engine will start to run down.

Toyota has a ten-year vision--it's actually Human Resource’s responsibility--to make sure that there are well qualified Group Leaders, Team Leaders, Managers in all positions. When they have launched new plants in America and they already have a lot of experienced people in existing plants, they will assign one of the existing experienced plants to be the mother plant for the new plant; for example, they just launched Mississippi recently, and the other Toyota plants were expected to provide Managers, to pick some of their best Managers and send them to Mississippi, and the mother plant--which was the Canadian plant that makes the same product--they sent Group Leaders so the Mississippi plant is staffed with very experienced Group Leaders who could immediately begin to develop the Team Leaders.

One Minute Review

·        In the early stages, Managers need to be trained to develop Group Leaders.

·        A coach would work with the Managers to develop the first Group Leaders in a controlled area, like a pilot, for learning.

·        This would spread to other areas, where the Managers develop Group Leaders, and the Group Leaders develop Team Leaders.

·        You create the teacher who creates the student who becomes a teacher, and so on.

·        The Group Leader is responsible for a mini-business.

·        The role of support groups, like maintenance, is to be a good service provider. In order to be a good service provider, you need good customers.

·        Toyota has a 10-year vision to make sure everyone is well qualified in all positions.

·        During a new plant launch, the mother plant is expected to send Group Leaders who can immediately train the Team Leaders.

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Each of these articles can be found on Kindle, and as an audiobook in Audible under the title, DEVELOPING LEADERSHIP SKILLS.

All 75 learning articles is crafted together in the book, Developing Lean Leaders at All Levels: A Practical Guide, authored by Jeff Liker with George Trachilis. The book received the SHINGO RESEARCH AWARD. 

George Trachilis (left) and Jeff Liker receive the Shingo Research Award in Washington, D.C. (2016)