I had a fantastic opportunity this week to participate in the Lean Executive Leadership Institute through the University of Kentucky College of Engineering. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Lean is an organizational philosophy born out of the Toyota Production System, which was first developed by Taiichi Ohno in the 1950’s. Toyota has earned a reputation for operational excellence and has been transparent about their secret to success for generations.

Why Kentucky?

Firstly, it’s a whole lot closer than Japan. Secondly, back in 1986, Toyota built its first wholly owned, fully integrated manufacturing facility in North America in Kentucky. Today, it’s Toyota’s largest manufacturing facility in the world, producing over 2,000 cars per day.

I had the opportunity to learn about Lean from retired Toyota executives who were among the first leaders in North America to experience Lean.

Why Lean?

Going into this experience, I knew of Lean for two things. First, it’s an excellent way to do process improvement. Second, I knew that Lean was the foundation of Agile Software Development and DevOps. I’ve been studying and implementing those practices within my teams for decades, but up until recently, I hadn’t studied the Lean roots directly.

I could use the rest of this article to teach you all about Lean and explain my personal learnings and applications, but instead, I’d like to keep it brief and focused on just a few important aspects.

Surprised by Lean

I knew that Lean was a great way to pursue operational excellence and continuous improvement. I wrongly assumed that this outcome was achieved exclusively through the use of tools, methodologies, and management techniques. Management methodologies are good. However, if you’ve been reading my blog for any time, you know that this is “Zach on Leadership” not “Zach on Management.”

While interrelated, I view management and leadership as two different aspects of the job, and I tend to focus on developing my skills and writing this blog on the latter.

I was surprised to learn how much Lean is about leadership.

What Lean is not

When I picture a manufacturing environment in my mind, I think of management doing all of the thinking and labor doing all of the doing. Management writes the procedures and labor follows the procedures. That’s not how it works with Lean.

Lean isn’t a management practice, it’s an everyone practice. Management cannot implement Lean onto the employees. It’s a system for employees and management to engage in together simultaneously. Everyone has a role to play and the interaction of those roles is based on a high degree of trust.

Lean is Servant Leadership

Everyone who has operated in a Command and Control leadership style should know by now that there is a better way and Servant Leadership is it. The front-line team members are the best-positioned to engage with our customers and suppliers. Management is best-positioned to support those team members to help them be successful.

Lean is employee engagement

I’ve had some great success in my career. If there is one thing I can attribute that to, it’s my commitment to engaging my team. I’m not stupid. I’m capable of making smart decisions all on my own. However, I know that I’m not nearly as smart as the collective intelligence of my entire team. The best results follow my disciplined engagement of hearts and minds across the team at all levels. I don’t do it right every time, but when I do, we rock.

Lean is a way of engaging the entire workforce in problem solving, standardization, and the relentless pursuit of continuous improvement, all with the end goal of creating customer value and a great place to work.

Don’t get me wrong. With Lean, you can increase efficiency, quality, safety, and customer satisfaction. But while you do that, you will also improve and sustain your culture with strong employee engagement.

Lean is innovation

One criticism of continuous improvement is that tends to be narrowly focused. Decades ago, some were busy improving the quality, efficiency, and customer satisfaction of typewriters. While that effort benefited some and certainly engaged the typewriter-makers and users of the time, it all became irrelevant with the innovation of the personal computer.

With changes in technologies, some companies come and go, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Companies can reinvent themselves and enjoy breakthrough leaps in capability and performance. Lean provides a pathway for that as well.

In Lean, employees solve problems, middle-management solves problems, and upper-management solves problems. They have difference scope, scale, and timelines. Lean provides a framework for problem-solving with the right people in the right way. If all parties engage effectively in the problem-solving process, then not only do you have a well-run shop, you also make the big innovative leaps that keep the entire organization relevant and leading in the marketplace.

Lean is more than I thought

I thoroughly enjoyed the educational journey of learning Lean. Now, of course, comes the hard part of putting this education into practice. I expected to get a management toolkit for continuous improvement. I learned that and a whole lot more.

Leading with Lean means building trust as a Servant Leader, engaging team members to establish a great place to work, and bringing a spirit of innovation so we can tackle the biggest problems we face. Some of this we do well today, but all of it we can do better. I’m looking forward to working on this with my team.

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