Last week I wrote about a pretty amazing experience one of our plants had with their team. The human side of work was shown and the team's trust grew leaps and bounds through some small acts of appreciation. This week I want to contrast that with something less human. There are many things that exemplify the traditional style of management, but one thing in particular happened today that sums it all up.
It's such a simple thing really. The office trash can. Small, mostly inconspicuous, but extremely useful for each person to throw away their trash. My office is in Washington, D.C. (when I'm actually in the office and not at one of our units or plants), and I usually take the DC Metro into work. If you know about the DC Metro, you'll know that it's known for delays, especially the Red Line. That said, I typically get into work just after 8am, sometimes closer to 8:30am depending on these delays. Because of this I usually don't leave the office until later in the evening. It also helps that I miss some of the evening Metro rush. It's around the very end of my day that I will do a desk clean up and throw away any trash I've got left over, notes that aren't useful, or paper that I used and no longer need. Today however, I experienced something that garnered the opposite feeling I had just last week. Instead of something powerfully heartwarming, I feel rather sad and disappointed.
This evening, before I left work, I heard the custodian walking through the office. She normally walks through around 5pm, emptying trash, and will make the normal small talk with those that are left, including me. Today however, instead of our normal conversation she asked, "is this all the trash you have?"
"I think that should be it," I responded as I looked around the desk.
"Well if you have more trash, can you put it in the hallway trash can instead of this one? Someone comes behind me to check to see if I've emptied all of these," she replied back.
"Oh wow! Are you for real about that?" I was pretty surprised by the implication she expressed.
"Yeah, they need to make sure I'm doing my job I guess!"
I felt this feeling of sadness for her, and disappointment in the way her manager runs things. If you think about the value and customer, the staff are the customers and the value is keeping a clean environment. The work to be done is to empty trash cans and keep things generally cleaned up. For me, I will create trash after she has come to empty my trash can. I'm still working. For her though, I think about what caused her to even talk to me about it. How many times was she punished because I threw out a piece of paper at the end of my day? How many times did a supervisor follow her to make sure she was doing her job? How sad is it that her management cannot even trust that she is actually doing a good job?
This whole thing makes me think about how disrespectful typical management styles are. What's amazing though, even in spite of this style, she was still making improvements to her work. She would layer a few bags in my trash can so she can shorten the time it took to empty and change a trash can. I would bet this idea wasn't even recognized as something good. I would bet that the environment, the culture she is in, isn't one of creativity or improvement, but of punishment and discipline. What will it take that manager to change his or her way of thinking? Why do people still think that the heavy hand of punishment drives performance? Imagine all the improvements that could be happening to help with the work. Instead, we stagnate, we disengage, and then we wonder why people "just don't want to work."
By changing the mindset (the way of thinking) we change how we think about the way we manage, about how we lead. It leads to changing how we do business and how we interact with each other. Instead of this "check and punish," we could learn more about the process and how late people stay in the office. We can change how we schedule trash clean up; we can make changes to how we pick up trash to make things easier. Just by thinking about things in the way of seeing our people as human - someone with value and ideas of their own - just by changing how we "inspect what we expect" by way of learning by participating, we can change our entire paradigm of managing. Lean leadership is driven by respect and humility, while traditional management runs by disrespect and humiliation. As we continue to progress forward, it's important to see these moments for what they are, so that we are reminded that we must transform ourselves in order to improve the well-being of all of our employees which in turn leads to better experiences for all of our customers.