I took a bit of a break from my posts on Magical Leadership. I am still trying to incorporate the 12 Great Leadership Strategies, and will get back to writing more on that later. This post is a reflection of my current state. My current state is difficult, and I am not exactly sure why it's that way. I am using this post to reflect a bit of what I am seeing and hopefully better defining the problem (gap from expectation) will help me determine what is next.
First, I think it is important to note that there is a great deal of literature and research on engagement, culture, and overall business performance. I don't want to get into all the details in this post, but will be using much of that learning to define the "expected states" of culture, leadership, and the work at the gemba. If you are interested in those particular things, see research from Gallup, Shingo Institute, Edgar Schein, etc. There are plenty of case studies including that of NUMMI and many others as well worth the study.
To start my thoughts on this, I want to think about the work at the gemba. Recently I read the book "Design for Operational Excellence" which put the expected state quite simply. What we are trying to build is a self healing system where value flows uninterrupted to the customer. If you think about that statement, it's actually quite loaded. We want our systems to flow value in an uninterrupted way, but knowing that reality is not perfect, we must design ways where people are engaged in their work with a great ability to detect those interruptions and make improvements or fix the system so it eliminates those interruptions. So at the place of work, the gemba, we should expect to see a consistent process where product (or "service") is flowing with little to no interruptions. We should expect to see people communicating issues, solving problems, and making improvements to the processes. We should see leadership at the gemba engaging with people, observing the processes, and helping to make the system better. That is the expectation at the gemba.
So what is the reality? I have seen confusion about what to do in the actual work. I have talked with supervisors who are afraid to make decisions. I have talked to forklift operators who don't have any interactions with their supervisors, and who move just one product without helping the rest of the products flow in the process. I have witnessed "training" very similar to the first way of the 1944 Job Instruction video (below) - where people are just told what to do and left to their own devices. I have watched how much people struggle to do simple tasks in their work, and how they are punished for under-performing. I have been on gemba walks with supervisors who say there are no positives they see in their process, that their people are just so slow. I have seen operations in disarray, with little to no organization or cleanliness, causing a great amount of wasted effort from our employees.
There are so many more things in the reality at the level of where the work gets done. It's quite overwhelming actually. It's important though to link up the People, the Process, and the Management System so we can best understand the system as a whole. It isn't the fault of the people doing the work if we have designed processes that are unnecessarily complex, where it takes too much time to make correct decisions of simple things like when to unload or load a trailer with product. There's much to be said at the process level, but from many of my discussions with people there is a general good knowledge of what "should" be happening, and there's quite a lot of effort to make "process improvement." Instead I want to think more about the management system layer. I am including "Leadership" as the piece that connects the Management System, People, and Process. So let's take the current state of the gemba and step up a few layers to understand the current state of the management system.
At the gemba, I have seen supervisors not communicating with each other. I have seen a lack of huddles as a management team to reflect, recognize, and ready themselves for the day's work. I have seen a lack of practice of training on the job with employees. I have seen managers yelling at supervisors, supervisors yelling at employees. I have seen people given 7 day suspensions for "not following instructions," but told to come into work anyway because we can't afford to have them take off. I have seen people crying in frustration and anger. I have seen the meetings after meetings, people trying to bring each other up after "the beating" they received in a meeting. And this is just at the gemba level. How we interact with each other is a key piece to any management system. When the leadership part of the management system is shaky, the entire system feels that.
Let's go up a few more layers. These next few layers I will put all together for the sake of this post. So what have we seen in the management system here? I have seen dozens of initiatives pushed out from multiple silos of the organization down to the work level. Many of those initiatives actually only get to a certain level and stop - thereby interrupting the flow of informational value. I have seen upper management ask lower management how much discipline they have given out when the performance has been lacking. I have seen quite engaged managers get told they are "not engaged" in meetings with upper management. I have had discussions with upper management who were put into place with little to no training on the responsibilities and practices of that position. Many of those (and even higher up managers) tell me that the expectation is that their "previous management experience" was all the training they should need. I have watched upper managers silent in fear when their own managers "give them a hard time." I have been told "continuous improvement doesn't work - the numbers aren't moving." I have watched ideas from top management get implemented without push-back, even without a clear link to the vision. I have watched how pressure is put on people to "just make it work" and "build a timeline" to get people to "just do the standard work." I have watched teams receive an initiative without clear direction, and told that it "must be pushed out to the company wide next week."
That's a bit of the current state reality that I see. What's the problem then? A problem, as we stated before, is a gap of the actual from the expected. So at the gemba we expect to see standard work being practiced and improved, we expect to see employees finding, solving, and escalating problems as they come up. In order to make that work we expect to see management training constantly with their employees, huddling and communicating within their management and work unit teams, management giving people credit and encouragement, and upper management focused on the management systems and people development side of things. We expect upper management engaging with their teams to detect, solve, and work on the larger system level problems.
So the problem then is the gap in between. I truly believe that in order to get the expectation at the work level, we must work from the top on the side of leadership to build the culture. A major part of this is defining the management system needed. In parallel to the management system structure (and behaviors) is the idea of respecting and developing people. Without those two items, nothing else really matters all too much. We have tried to define what the basic management system should be (huddle - gemba walk - reflect - improve), and how that interconnects through the system up and down. Huddles should be tiered, gemba walks should happen at all levels with specific focus points (management system, engagement, improvement, the actual work - including the safety of our people), and improvements to our processes engaging all of our people. Unfortunately this is not our management/leadership standard yet. My experiment to close the gap is to better communicate this with as many people as I can. Next for me is to better define this for the top layer, and to show its connection to the entire system and the system's performance. We have small experiments happening with over a dozen higher level managers right now. The vision/purpose behind this could be better practiced upwards and outwards still, so that is another area I can try to help with. The leadership mindset of supporting and developing others, focused on constantly learning is another piece to this. Just because we expect people to "know what to do" doesn't mean we still can't be learning with them, and developing them. That should never stop. It is much too important to the long term growth of the company, and the long term health of the culture.
Thinking about the change management process of ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement), I have to treat each person as an individual and see where they are in that process. Some still need the awareness and desire pieces, others need the knowledge and ability. I will need to figure out what each person needs, build a coalition of people in support of this, and help those make that change for themselves. I think this is why things feel so difficult. Not everyone is aware of the problem and direction, and truthfully it's hard to know if that desire to make the change is there. Writing this out helps to get me thinking through what's in front of me, and helps to better define the problem so I can better help others. I look at my role and see how I practice this within my own team, and I've been told that should be my only focus. My focus is for the betterment of the entire organization though, so that comment is hard to swallow. It doesn't have to be difficult, but we all need to be on the same page, with a common vision, a common approach, and give our cultural transformation a chance.