Compound Thinking

Lean Manufacturing Principles — Trust the Team

One of the key elements in the success of Lean Manufacturing is that it empowers individual employees to improve their jobs.

Toyota workers have been able to decrease costs, improve productivity, and reliability — every year for more than three decades. They were able to do this because management trusts employees to shut down the line at any time whenever they see a problem that needs fixing. They where able to do this because there were processes in place that encouraged, and even required their participation in the improvement process.

I’ll take this one step further — if you don’t learn to trust your employees you won’t be in business for long.

If the people you hired are trustworthy, trust them!

If they you have employees who have demonstrated a lack of trustworthiness, let them go!

If you aren’t trusting your people, you are slowly but surely sapping their morale. Even worse, you are cutting yourself from the source of real ground-floor process innovation.

Toyota workers have constantly been able to decrease costs, improve productivity, and reliability — every year for more than three decades. They were able to do this because management trusts employees to shut down the line at any time whenever they see a problem that needs fixing. They where able to do this because there were processes in place that encouraged, and even required their participation in the improvement process.

How many IT shops have the same track record of continual improvement in customer satisfaction and overall employee productivity? Not too many. Perhaps one of the reasons is that we don’t empower our employees to give estimates, or to make budget decisions.

Software development shops could do with Kaizan events where take out a day to:

• automate build processes,
• create test frameworks,
• update our version control systems,
• and clean up any of our processes that has gotten messy.

These events should include the development team, whatever System Administration support is necessary, but managers who attend must be willing to work as team members to get things done. Just for the day, your job is not to lead, but to do, to work along side the front lines people.