Leading from the front, leading from behind the scenes

On leadership, once again

When you see good leadership, follow it, if you wish.
If you don't see any, take the lead. If you wish.
If you don't, don't complain.

In my last article, I mentioned a common view within the Lean Community – and one widely shared across the business world – that promotes the idea of the heroic leader, riding in on a white horse, confronting a troubled situation, giving orders and saving the day. "The leader must lead," as the saying goes. Well, yes, the leader must lead. But what does that really mean?

I am increasingly skeptical of the calls for "strong leadership" in the heroic style, in which the leader exercises command and control, telling people what to do. This view not only misses the central point, but also obscures the real issue. The problem is not "leadership" itself, but rather what leadership is able to accomplish. As long as any system depends on "leadership," it will be fragile and dependent – literally – on whoever happens to be in charge at the time. Admirers of charismatic or authoritarian leadership may be bothered by this message. But over time, I have come to believe that the real issue lies in learning to build systems that actually deliver what we stand for – a problem-solving culture, individuals engaged in continuous improvement, among other things.

Lean practice represents a fundamentally different kind of leadership. Lean leadership is highly situational in practice, but consistent in its fundamental principles; it is flexible and adaptable to circumstances, yet firmly rooted in an unshakable way of thinking. There are moments that call for more directive leadership and others that demand the patient building of consensus – always with the purpose of achieving the organization's goals. However, lean thinking in practice demands more than simply leadership that swings with the situation of the moment. A deeper analysis reveals some common denominators. Among the observable behaviors are showing respect for people, rigorously applying scientific thinking and flexibly using practices to solve problems and continuously improve processes. Observable behaviors – actions we can see and that we can choose to practice.

Most important of all, lean leadership is not tied to a position, but to action. An action that can be taken at any level, in any situation, and leadership can flow from the top down, from the bottom up or sideways.

Leading up at NUMMI

Here is another example from the organization I often use as a reference: the joint venture between Toyota and General Motors, New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI).

One of the advantages NUMMI (and many other transplant companies in the 1980s) had was the substantial allocation of resources from the parent company (the culture of origin) to drive the creation of a hybrid local culture in North America. In the first year, Toyota sent some 400 trainers, technical specialists, to NUMMI on rotating three-month assignments.

Group leader Hyodo was assigned to support the model changeover in assembly. Hyodo graduated from a technical school and started working as a line worker on the assembly line at Toyota's Takaoka plant when he was about 18 years old. After ten years, he was promoted to Team Leader (team leader), along with most of the colleagues who had joined at the same time. Five years later, he was promoted to group leader, becoming responsible for a group of fewer than 30 members and team leaders.

At NUMMI, Hyodo took on the responsibility of supporting the work of a larger group and, now, of facilitating the learning needed to ensure a successful launch.

As leader of the final assembly launch team, Hyodo was developing his members' skills while working to ensure the best possible design of tasks for the assembly line workers. The work needed to be structured in a way that allowed people to develop while doing it – an ambitious target condition and a great challenge for those designing work with that capability!

His launch team was learning to build transport carts and fixtures, to design efficient standardized work, to balance and rebalance tasks, eliminating waste, ergonomic concerns and other problems. Hyodo was not just designing good processes; he was developing good process designers (architects) and problem solvers.

The immediate challenges Hyodo faced were related to problem-solving capability itself, in addition to developing skills in process design (work design). NUMMI had started some training to improve the creation of standardized work and problem-solving skills, but Hyodo realized that this training was very far removed from the gemba.

Hyodo recognized the good intentions of the Human Resources (HR) team in offering this training, but he knew that developing excellent process design skills requires, above all, a deep understanding of the work itself and of how each task directly affects the operators on the assembly line. As his team carried out its activities, Hyodo noticed that many of their ideas were being rejected – sometimes by senior HR executives, other times by senior production managers. He concluded that the HR and production areas were misaligned.

His solution? Assign HR representatives to work full time within his launch team. This was a smart move at first glance – he would achieve alignment and learning directly on the front line of the organization.

If it seemed a smart move at first glance, on closer analysis it turned out to be a brilliant one. The mere fact that neither HR nor production supported the proposal already indicated to Hyodo that the issue would have to reach the highest levels of the organization. And that was his real goal: he was deliberately provoking the highest levels of the company to discuss the problem among themselves.

So he pushed his ideas. Hyodo did this intentionally because he wanted to instigate conflict at the lower operational levels, precisely because he knew it would force the senior executives (vice presidents) to work together for the good of the company as a whole.

Hyodo understood the dangers of high-level corporate systems operating disconnected from the reality of the gemba. That is why he made a bold decision: to provoke conflict directly on the shop floor with the specific aim of creating enough tension to force dialogue between different areas of senior leadership and drive the organization forward.

Wow.

A shop-floor worker with a technical high school education (and, incidentally, a union member) deliberately introducing technical changes in the plant to destabilize the social system at a broader level. That is lean leadership.

It doesn't look like a typical example of the leadership models many companies try to implement. But in the end, this is how true lean leadership shows itself: the value creators on the front line not just being led, but actively leading.

So that is exactly what those opening words mean: don't look for leadership outside yourself. Take the lead.

When you see good leadership, follow it, if you wish.

If you don't see any, take the lead. If you wish.

If you don't, don't complain.

Dig deeper into Hyodo's story and its relationship with “hoshin kanri”.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on February 20, 2013. It is the second in a series of six texts focused on Lean transformation.