It's that time of year again: the New Year's Resolution! All the gyms in town are advertising that this is your year to get lean, but then I thought, maybe this is your year to make your business lean.
A few months ago I wrote a blog post detailing how to identify if your company is based on a Command and Control culture, or Trust and Inspire. In that post I dug into the origins of Command and Control in the US and how it contrasted with other cultures’ manufacturing processes, specifically the influence of Edwards Deming and his revolutionary ideas about quality control. His process focused on identifying defects during the production process, rather than afterward, and is detailed in his book The New Economics.
When I began to learn about Lean Manufacturing, I realized they were connected and Lean was heavily influenced by Deming. Lean depends on a Trust and Inspire culture to work effectively, because most of the implementation rests on giving team members ownership over their processes and the authority to make decisions. Exactly like the EDGE Method does with step 4: Enable.
In fact the entire implementation stage of Lean follows the process of educate, demonstrate, guide, and enable. Lean is connected to calculating the cost of failure too, because waste is a directly relatable cost of failure.
Because Lean relies on a Trust and Inspire culture, a Command and Control leader generally won't implement it. Or they try, but they do it for the wrong reasons and it fails because they use the "Tell Trust Fail" process instead of the EDGE Method. That’s why this doesn’t work in every organization.
In a practical sense, Lean’s approach to business is to minimize waste while maximizing both productivity and customer satisfaction. It’s not just a set of tools or techniques, it’s a philosophy that will affect every aspect of an organization’s operations. Lean is a process that, once seen, cannot be unseen, and will begin to leak into every part of your life.
Its fundamental principle is an easy one: identify and eliminate anything that doesn’t add value. To understand lean manufacturing, you have to understand its five core principles, which are explained here in detail.
I’ve linked the practical details so that you can go and read that, but in this post I want to focus on the cultural impact of Lean and how it ties into Trust and Inspire. Lean is an overhaul of thought. What I mean by that is when you begin to implement Lean, you have to completely change your way of thinking. In an organization, that means culture change.
You can’t effectively implement culture change on that scale in a Command and Control environment. It just won’t work. True culture change can only happen in an environment of trust. When you truly practice Trust and Inspire, this kind of change flows pretty easily.
If you already have a Trust and Inspire organization, your team members already know the why behind your processes – teaching them a new process is just another round of what you’ve already done with different rules.
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