True Kaizen

Management's Role in Improving Work Climate and Culture

Collin McLoughlin, Toshihiko Miura

• Editorial: Productivity Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351719124
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Commerce
• Categoría: Commerce Général

What does it take to manage an organization to success? No matter what industry you are in, an organization is primarily a group of people. This book focuses on that ever-important human element. In the rush to get 'lean', many organizations focus solely on tools for increasing productivity, but where do these tools come from? In this book, Collin McLoughlin and Toshihiko Miura look back on their decades of international consulting experience to examine how organizations around the world have transformed on a cultural level by respecting the people who work within them and leveraging their creativity to solve problems.

As our workforce becomes more knowledgeable, skillful, and more perceptive of their needs and wants as employees, the ability to reach the true potential of an organization becomes more and more difficult. Managers must look at each individual element of an equation like this in order to fully understand how to achieve an answer. They must begin to answer more focused questions, such as:

1. How productive is the existing work climate and culture?

2. How do employees, as individuals, navigate the existing work climate? (How do they deal with day-today issues with each other?)

3. Where and how are individuals and their work processes assessed?

4. What obstacles do employees face every day, and are they empowered to fix these obstacles?

5. What role does leadership play at each level of the organization? (Looking at the organization in layers of management.)

To address these challenges, this book focuses on three main aspects of leadership and management:

1. Addressing and Improving the Perspective of Management -- The ideas presented in this book are not limited to a certain industry or field of work, but can be applied in any setting because they speak to a universal human element.

2. Exploring and Improving Work Climate -- Organizations are social entities, operating within their own controlled environment. This book will explore the factors that contribute to, and encourage, a positive work climate.

3. Observing and Eliminating Wasteful Work Processes -- Observing wasteful activities and work processes requires a refined perspective. The case studies presented illustrate the How and Why to help refine expertise. This will also lead to the joy and benefits

1Why Leadership Matters

Consider some of the industrial giants that have fallen in the last 20 years. They had resources, their employees’ varied intellectual talents, and very prominent positions in the corporate world. So why were they unable to successfully navigate through the conditions that faced them and remain successful?

To understand their success, and eventual failure, you must be able to first see how business strategy, implementation, and culture all have their roots in the corporate mindset and values of an organization. Leadership is the key to generating a corporate mindset and therefore is also the key to performance.

For instance, when a sports team does not succeed on the grass, ice, or court, the media and fans look to the coach, as he is the leader. A famous basketball coach, Jon Wooden, stated that he was never worried about his opposition because it was what his own team did with the skills they had which determined their success or failure, not what the other team did or did not have.

Think about that statement in terms of your own organization. Do you focus on the talent and skills of the people who work there, or is there a preoccupation with looking at, and comparing with, your competition? Too often people get caught up in comparisons between themselves and others, instead of focusing on what they are good at. This is amplified in groups and the leadership of organizations, especially in very competitive environments.

Most organizations have access to the same general resources (people, materials, machines, and information systems). The competitive difference and strength of an organization lies in how these resources are put together, the mechanisms that people create based on these resources. This integration of methods, as well as focusing an organization’s human resources to attain specific goals, is what determines success or eventual failure.

While the abilities to anticipate, react, extend, and (dare we say) bluff are all necessary skillsets to win in both sports and business, it is how well these skills are implemented and performed that determine success. Even more telling than skills, however, is the ability for people to make decisions without needing to escalate them up a layer of command and still be aligned with the organization or team’s objectives.

The next time you watch a sporting event, carefully watch both the player’s decisions on the field/rink/court and how the coach interacts and adjusts the overall game plan.

The coach will guide, reinforce, and make higher-level decisions on adjustments because he or she can see the larger picture (the whole game). Meanwhile, the players will be making split-second decisions at critical junctures to help advance the team toward the goal, while staying aligned to the newest direction from the coach. This is the power of decision making at each level of the group and highlights the importance of truly observing a situation before making any changes or adjustments to the current strategy. If the team is winning, then there is no need to change. However, if the team is struggling against their opponent, the coach must observe the challenges, make decisions to restructure and realign players, and then continue to observe to determine if their changes improve the overall team performance.

This need for observation, not assumption, is what we have learned through years of experience in observing and participating in the changes of a multitude of companies. Assumptions are based on personal experiences, not facts, and those assumptions are often the reason for poor decision making. Decisions should be made based on factual observation and information in order to have the greatest impact on the issue at hand.

Business leaders need to look at the field of play in much the same way a coach does. They must know their team, understand and comprehend the larger objective, and then make changes and adjustments to help guide the people in the organization toward the greater overall goal. They need to look beyond the day-to-day activities being performed and really look at their people as players who are constantly gaining new skills, new experiences, new talent, and even some aptitude that cannot be explained. In this way, business leaders will be able to strike that delicate balance of leadership and management.

MAINTAINING A HOLISTIC PERSPECTIVE

In order to provide effective leadership it is important to be able to diagnose, adapt, and communicate within the workplace.

Diagnosing

The first competency, diagnosing (or analyzing), means being able to understand the dynamics of a situation and see what needs to change and adapt in order to achieve success.

We have the privilege of spending weeks in Japan each year, guiding numerous leadership tours on which we teach managers how to assess an operation quickly in order to determine cost of goods sold as well as profit margins. This is a good basic starting point from an outside observer to understand how a business is operating. During these tours, we teach a method based on an article by Eugene Goodson (2002), called “How to Read a Plant Fast.”1

“How to Read a Plant Fast” categorizes types of observations into 11 key categories, which can be used to determine an organization’s vitality from culture to overall performance. These metrics consider such factors as cost, quality, safety, customer service, and productivity, all while not even looking at one income or balance sheet. This is important to understand, since these observations come from a different perspective than most people are used to taking. This adjusted perspective—that it is not about the numbers, but the more organic nature of the people working together—will often be the final mark as to how well a company performs.

This method is invaluable to gaining a new understanding of business and illustrates to the leaders on our trip why they need to know more than just their own business metrics to be successful and how they can acquire this knowledge.

Adapting

The second competency, adapting, is being able to apply principles in different contexts and business situations. It is important to understand the principles of a decision, not just the decision itself. Too often, managers focus on outcomes, but adapting means being able to apply a particular set of principles in a varied way and also knowing how to change the degree of emphasis on a principle, given changing business situations.

One such example is the concept of Lean warehousing. Right away, people run to the 7 Wastes and 5S as principles to apply to a warehouse, but we have to look at the context of Lean and not simply think that all principles in all manners apply to our situation. Let us instead first ask ourselves, of the principles of Lean, what may apply to us and our situation the most in this context of warehousing? Yes, we have the 7 Wastes in our warehouse for sure, but are there some wastes that are more important to remove than others? Do all the wastes apply? Should we change the names of the wastes to motivate, communicate, and allow the warehouse employees to understand the concepts so they will incorporate identifying and removing them into their day-to-day activities?

One such adaptation to the 7 Wastes for warehousing is to focus on Motion, Transportation, and a new way to classify or look at waste: Stagnation. Why should we focus on new terminology such as Stagnation? While Taiichi Ohno stated that Inventory is a waste, by adapting our thinking we can say that the core of this concept was ultimately not that inventory was evil, just that we needed to reduce inventory in order to promote flow. At its core, inventory only occurs as waste because it is stagnant; inventory is not moving toward its customer.

For workers, the question remains how can they reduce Motion and Transportation, while also promoting flow by taking down barriers to Stagnation within the warehouse? This is a good example of having the power of the principles but then contextualizing and adapting it to the situation, while still being aligned to the corporate goals and needs of the customer.

Communicating

Communication is probably the most difficult competency to achieve, yet we tend to spend the least amount of time understanding how to communicate better. A common tool used in Lean businesses is communicating information in a manner that is effective and sophisticated yet exceptionally simple. This is often termed “visual management.”

Western culture has not yet learned how to utilize visual communication well, and therefore, we do not have the same understanding of the different layers of complexity that make up exceptional communication. This is because, often, our communications are hidden by layers of other communication, such as work orders in a computer system, handwritten notes, or graphs on a board that cover only one aspect of a process.

Organizational change needs to first begin by understanding and triggering effective communication. This means communication that will cause, or trigger, something to happen. Once this is understood, we must ask ourselves if there is a way we can begin to learn how to sustain this form of communication as the complexity of business increases. It is imperative that communication be learned in this manner; otherwise, the changes that are put in place cannot be sustained.

The Ability to Assess a Situation

We often find that businesses don’t even possess the capabilities to accurately assess a situation because of a preset cultural bias (acceptable behaviors, known values, and leadership characteristics). These cultural norms predetermine how the organization will absorb, understand, and react to the need for change. When you take this culture into account, of course, any information presented will be viewed from a biased perspective.

Since organizations are made up of individuals, we have to ask ourselves why some businesses are able to anticipate the future and develop amazing products and services. After all, organizations such as Google and Facebook are really not that unique—they began with the same access to resources as every other business. They have the same access to their supply chain, technology, and labor pool as every other business in the United States. So why are they so different? The answer lies in their unique ability to convey the organization’s values and the leadership characteristics that affect the behavior of all layers of management required to keep the business running. The difference is their connection between the values and objectives of the organization and those of the individuals within the organization.

Many organizations are able to hide less-than-stellar cultural norms with great innovations, or access to intellectual capital, but rarely does that last over the long term. To get to what makes a company truly successful, you have to look at the day-to-day actions of people and how decisions are made within an organization. To reveal the true values of an organization, you need to begin peeling away the layers of management and artificial business sentiments, such as the mission statement. Look at the core of the business, the interactions of frontline workers connecting to the business’s customers. Once you do this, you can begin to...