Making the Tough Decisions

One of the requirements of being an effective lean leader is in making the tough decisions. To demonstrate this behavior in action, let me tell a short story. What would happen to your improvement process if you eliminated a staff position as a result of an improvement? The answer is, "it depends". I am always careful to coach lean leaders that we cannot guarantee staff job security. We can only guarantee employment security.

Let me explain. Employees are quite astute and it does not take long for them to realize that if they participate in an improvement exercise and the result is a lay-off, then this "improvement" stuff is bad for their careers. This approach will quickly and effectively kill your chances for further improvement.

However, we may not need every staff member doing the same work as a result of an improvement. In this case we would re-deploy a staff member to a new position. Following Maslow's need hierarchy, job security must be satisfied to get employees to self-actualize. Said in simpler terms, we want to exercise re-deployment versus unemployment.

Now let's discuss a slighlty different scenario. In this case, the improvement will result in neither a lay-off nor a re-deployment. A demand analysis of the work coming into the area each day requires the shift to start later and end later. In other words, we need to change the shift hours of operation to meet the customer requirements. In a lean operation, we want to show respect for all people, but we also need to eliminate the waste. In this case, work is not being done timely resulting in a loss of service to the customer. So what do we do, show respect for the staff and maintain the hours of operation, or delight the customer and change the hours of operation.

This is where the lean leader needs to make the tough decision. With all due respect to the staff concerns, we cannot truly be called a lean organization if processes, policies, work hours, and activities do not revolve around delighting our customer. In a New York minute, I would change the hours of operation.

Would you make the tough call?

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
www.breakthroughhorizons.com