lean leadership

"In order to remain competitive in the long term, we have to continuously improve the quality of our performance. Top-down, however, we find it increasingly difficult to identify what is needed to produce quality from the customer's point of view. So we need to empower our employees to identify for themselves what needs to be done to produce quality and to take the necessary initiatives. " This has been recognized by the management of many companies in recent years.

Accordingly, many lean management projects have been launched with the goals in mind, and not just in manufacturing companies,

•  Avoid waste,
•  to increase the quality of the service and thus customer satisfaction and
• to increase the speed and power of innovation and thus the competitiveness of the company.

At the same time, one of the companies' overriding goals has always been to make continuous improvement a stable process which

CIP as a stable process

sustains and sustains itself because the pursuit of quality and continuous improvement is anchored in the minds of the employees.

Why lean projects often peter out

A noble goal, a goal worth striving for. But unfortunately, after some time, the companies usually realized: "We have trained our employees in the use of Lean methods and tools. And our managers have included the introduction of "Lean" in their objectives. But despite this, our projects fail to produce the results we had hoped for. Although we have achieved some selective improvements, a fundamental change has not taken place in our organization. And while the spirit of continuous improvement is repeatedly invoked in our meetings, it is not felt in our day-to-day operations. And because we haven't reached the minds of our employees, our lean initiatives keep falling asleep - at least if we don't invest a lot of time and energy top-down to keep the process alive.

One reason why many companies gained this experience is: they often underestimated in the beginning,

• what a radical cultural change it is in everyday business to anchor a culture of continuous change in an organisation, and 
• how much perseverance, effort and patience it takes to create the necessary mindset, i.e. the necessary awareness and self-image, among employees.

Many companies thought: It is enough if we implement the necessary tools - either through temporary external consulting support or by sending our employees to one or two CIP or lean management seminars. Most companies have now realized that this is an illusion.

Lean and CIP culture remains a must

That is why they are looking for ways to still achieve the desired goal - namely, to create a culture of continuous change in their organization. Because there is no way around this, and not only in production. This, too, has been brought home to companies in recent

Top-down hardly possible

Years aware. For the following reasons: In many companies, the need for change, i.e. innovation, is now so great in all areas and at all levels due to globalization, rapid technological progress and the rapid changes taking place in their market that it can no longer be managed in top-down projects alone - also because employees are increasingly working in cross-divisional and sometimes even cross-company network-like structures. For this reason, the need for change and innovation is becoming increasingly difficult to capture, for example through a central organizational development department. Therefore, the initiative for innovation and thus also for the production of quality must shift to the departmental and process level.

The same applies to the learning and development needs resulting from the need for change and innovation. In many companies, these needs are so great that it is becoming increasingly difficult to cover them with top-down personnel development measures. Moreover, it is so individual that it is becoming increasingly difficult to capture centrally, for example by the HR department. Consequently, the initiative to build up the competence required to produce quality and to satisfy the associated learning needs must also shift more to the area and process level.

Employees must become "self-developers

Many human resources managers recognized these lines of development years ago. Under the heading of "employability", they formulated the thesis that employees must become "self-developers". In other words, they must recognize their own learning and development needs and either satisfy them themselves or with self-organized support. And the managers on the operational front? They must mature into personalities who promote these learning and development processes among their employees and thus contribute to the fact that

• the performance of their division is continuously increasing and 
• the company can react more quickly to changes.

However, this issue was mostly discussed theoretically in HR circles. Concrete consequences were rarely drawn from this, and if so, then primarily in the area of management development. In the meantime, many companies have anchored in their management guidelines that their managers should be coaches for their employees, i.e. promote learning and development processes among their employees and thus help them to build up the competence required for their (future) work.

Managers are overtaxed

This is a correct approach, which, however, under the given framework conditions with the often oh 

Explore learning needs yourself

This leads to a further increase in the workload of managers who are already working at the limit. On the one hand, they themselves are not sufficiently qualified for this task, and on the other hand, they are often confronted with employees who are not yet able to cope.

• neither have internalised the awareness that they need to continuously develop their competence in order to remain good employees (and thus employable),
• still have the competence to recognise the learning and development needs arising from changed requirements, and also do not find the ability and willingness to satisfy these needs independently.

As a result, managers not only have to do a lot of convincing in their day-to-day work. They also have to fight resistance. And time and again, they are forced to intervene in a corrective and supportive manner because the service provided no longer meets customer requirements. Or to put it another way: The pursuit of continuous competence and thus quality improvement does not yet represent a stable process among their employees. It has to be initiated again and again, which requires a lot of time and energy on the part of the managers and forces their feeling of being overburdened.

Lean leadership: a way forward

A number of companies have recognized this connection. For this reason, they are fundamentally questioning not only their management development but also their personnel development concepts and are fine-tuning new concepts to solve this dilemma. In doing so, they are increasingly orienting themselves to the basic maxims of the lean leadership development model. This model distinguishes between four levels in the competence development of managers.

Stage 1: Behind this is the assumption that in the future it will be a core competence of managers to reflect on their own behaviour and actions and to systematically improve their own performance.

Stage 2: Coaching and developing other people The second level of competence consists of the ability, as a leader, to support other people in such a way that they in turn acquire the competence to reflect on their behaviour and actions and to initiate their own learning processes.

Stage Three: Supporting daily improvement (Kaizen) This involves aligning groups of employees (teams, departments, divisions) with the need for innovation and ensuring the continuous improvement process.

Stage 4: Creating a vision and aligning goals Ideally, the last stage of development involves all managers and the entire organization. Now it is a matter of overcoming "silo thinking" and aligning all activities in such a way that the overarching corporate goals are achieved.

Struggle against resistance

On the way to a learning organization

Companies expect that management development based on this competence model will increase the innovative strength of their organization; furthermore, that it will successively lead to a reduction in the workload of managers - to the extent that their employees develop the competence to independently reflect on their behavior and actions and to develop themselves. In this respect, companies also see this as a measure to counteract burnout, which threatens many managers. Because it is a fiction - and all HR managers agree on this - to assume that the pressure for change that weighs on companies and thus on their employees will decrease in the coming years. It is therefore necessary to increase the "resilience", i.e. the ability of the employees to deal with the pressure - but not, as in the past, by offering them one or two stress management seminars or comparable work-life balance offers.

Such an approach does not go far enough, as many companies have now realized. Instead, the central goal must be to make employees aware of the need to change and to regularly review their own thinking and behavior.

Out of shock

rethinking patterns of action is an integral part not only of everyday work; furthermore, to give them the self-confidence, "Somehow I'll manage, we'll manage", so that when they are faced with new challenges, they do not fall into a state of shock, but rather

• tackle them on their own initiative and
• acquire the necessary competencies on their own initiative in order to continue to be good employees and to produce quality in the future. The more employees are willing and able to do this, the more their managers are relieved of the burden, as they rarely have to intervene in a corrective, controlling and supportive manner. And the company? It has increased its innovative capacity and strength and thus its competitiveness, because it has developed into a learning organization.