What is the Greatest Impediment to Lean and Six Sigma Implementation?

In a culture based on fear, employees will attempt to interpret every comment and gesture in order to predict what the leaders really want.

Fear can spread like cancer in any organisation and, just like cancer, can cause enormous damage if it goes undetected for too long and is not dealt with quickly. Fear can be generated in several ways: rumours, macro-economic downturns, threat of job relocations and even a misunderstanding of what an executive says.

There can exist a natural fear of management intentions by employees. Leaders must do everything they can to wipe out this fear to enable problems to be uncovered and for improvements to be sustainable.

If the executives want to develop a culture based on trust and teamwork they need to consider these three important considerations:

Actions Speak Louder than Words 

If an executive says,

·      “Quality is critically important, but we better ship this product out today no matter what or heads will roll”

·      “Implementing lean is our top priority, but I have more important things to do than attend the training or the meetings,”

Then employees will realize that they have just experienced the ‘bait and switch’… an executive saying one thing and meaning something totally different. So, before launching any improvement strategic plan, leaders need to do some soul searching and ask if they are prepared to make this a priority. If not, it would be better to do nothing and avoid losing trust.

A group of Toyota executives were asked, “How does Toyota keep their improvement culture going?” The answer was that all employees, including every executive and company leader, must dedicate one week a year to fully engage on an improvement team. They must then report to their boss what their improvement team accomplished to help eliminate waste and improve safety, quality and throughput. It is hard for an employee to grumble about going to a week-long improvement event when they know that their boss was prepared to free up their own time to participate on one.

All-Employee Training, Means All Employees

 If the company leaders plan to launch a new improvement initiative, some sort of training will be involved. It is critically important to the success of this training that at least someone on the leadership team attend and participate in each class. This will send a strong message that this is an important part of helping the company meet the needs of their customers.

However, the executives need to keep in mind that the moment they walk into the training room, all eyes will be on them to try and decipher (through body language, comments, and actions) if this is really a priority. So, if the executive walks in, ignores the other participants, sits down in the back of the room, and opens a laptop to check messages, don’t be surprised if everyone else does the same thing and little of the training is absorbed.

What You Measure is What You will Get

 Once a group of leaders determines that the company needs to change direction to improve, they need to examine all their key metrics to determine how each one will hurt or help their new strategy. This activity may require a neutral, outside person to help since many of the leaders may be too invested in an old metric to fully see how it might inhibit change. For example, most leaders have been taught that a critical metric for manufacturing is equipment and employee utilization. In a stable process, if demand is below capacity, utilization metrics will drive the building of unnecessary inventory and waste, which is in direct conflict to many of the lean teachings. A better use of the utilization metrics would be to measure how successful the sales team is at filling capacity (demand vs. output).

In a culture built on trust, problems can be raised, discussed, and fixed to drive real improvement. Trust develops the leadership and teamwork to accomplish significant improvement and customer satisfaction while also providing an environment to thrive as an employee.

Extracts from an article by John Dyer, president of the JD&A – Process Innovation Co. 

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