Lean Leadership in China
A means to sustainable development
‘Lean’ was recently highlighted as a great idea that came about as a result of tough times.* And indeed, during the recent downturn, a lot of Chinese companies turned to the ‘lean manufacturing’ idea as a means to eliminate waste and reduce costs, with great success. However, not all lean transformations deliver the expected results in the long run. One of main reasons we identify for this is the absence of a lean leadership culture. To truly transform into a lean company, the company’s culture must be addressed. A lean leadership culture is key for sustainable long term improvement success. To foster a lean leadership culture, leaders including supervisors, middle managers and top executives must be effective improvement champions. This development towards an effective improvement champion should be centred around the four P’s of a lean leadership culture : perspective, process, problem solving and people.
- Perspective : Communicate the company’s vision and repeatedly stress the commitment towards a lean way of working. Ensure that lean is not perceived as another flavour of the day, but as a way of how things are done in your company. Help employees understand how their daily tasks and the related sequence of focused improvement efforts will help realizing the company’s vision.
- Process : Focus on delivering value for the internal and external customers through the identification of those processes that are critical for the customer’s experience and through the continuous elimination of wastes in these processes.
- Problem solving : Go to the factory floor, go to gemba in order to get an actual first hand impression of where and why problems occur. Act as a role model in the problem solving process ; use a structured approach based on facts, directed towards corrected actions & follow up. Involve employees, make them enthusiastic about the problem solving process, coach and create a safe environment for them to raise new problems.
- People : Act as a role model, for example in the problem solving process. Engage in teaching, coaching and mentoring activities through questioning. Take charge of the development of the employees, provide the necessary means.
As illustrated above, the long term success of a lean transformation relies on the installation of a lean leadership culture.
Physical changes as the result of a sequence of kaizen activities will create success, but the real longer term success will come from the commitment to install a supporting leadership culture.
What about your experiences in making improvement efforts sustainable ? Feel free to contact us to share our approach & best practices with you for long term improvement success !
