The Management Sandwich
Philip Holt
Business Transformation Leader and COO | MBA | Leadership | Business Transformation | Operational Excellence | C-suite Level Engagement | Lean Thinking | Organisational & Value Stream Design
The middle level of management are, in my experience, the most challenging cohort of leaders to break through from traditional thinking to lean thinking.
To illustrate this, think about your Lean Transformation activity as a Sandwich; whichever you prefer: Tuna Mayo, Cheese and Ham or BLT.
Now, think about the bottom piece of bread as the team members, the filling as the middle management layer(s) and the top piece of bread as the top management, and you have your Management Sandwich.
In this management sandwich, when we apply Lean Thinking we quickly stimulate our pieces of bread, with the team members getting the opportunity to utilise their ideas and to team-up with their colleagues to improve the business performance. Whilst there may be some organisations that use Lean as a short-term headcount reduction exercise, yours is one that is looking long-term and is aiming to do more with the same, and the team members see the opportunities that this creates for them.
The top management also see the benefits, as customer service levels increase, the business starts to grow and the operational metrics improve significantly. They've made the right choice to go with a Lean Transformation of their business and are experiencing Lean in much the way that Art Byrne talked about in the Lean Turnaround.
However, the "filling" isn't doing as well out of this. They're seeing their staff becoming autonomous, they're not asked to solve every problem anymore, as their team members are rapidly solving problems and they are expected to act as coaches. They must work with Leader Standard Work and are asked to undertake strange Lean management activities, such as Kamishibai whilst, at the same time, the kudos and credit goes to their bosses, whose idea this was.
All-in-all, their reality and paradigms are changing rapidly and they're not feeling too well.
The Change Curve is in full throttle: Fasten your Seatbelts!
It is therefore extremely important that the middle level of leadership are provided with the support that they need to make the change, as they are critical to the success of the transformation and their leadership skills therefore need to be a key focus. This will require some pretty heavy duty training and development and you will find that those companies most successful in their Lean Transformations have invested heavily in the development of this level of leadership.
Continues below...
The Leading with Lean Podcast:
Recommended by LinkedIn
My advice is to invest in a Lean Leadership certification program, which takes the leadership through the requirements that they will require and it is important to emphasis the certification element of the program, as opposed to simply training them. This will, of course, require training but will also expect that the participants continue to demonstrate the application of their learning through a Kaizen Project that makes a modest but impactful change to their area and involves them training, coaching and developing their team members.
An example of this was the training program developed in GKN Aerospace, modelled on one developed previously in Royal Philips, and discussed in Chapter 14 of Leading with Lean, which takes the participants through 5 Days of intensive training. During the training, which is organised as a team competition, the participants are trained and coached in Lean Thinking and live through an accelerated Change Curve as they experience the positive impact on performance of moving from Traditional to Lean Thinking.
At the start of the training they form into teams and are provided with tasks that are extremely challenging, putting them under a high degree of pressure. Inevitably they neglect to consider their team formation process or the Lean way of approaching the problem solving, instead falling into traditional ‘firefighting’ approaches which result in low quality, late delivery and high cost in terms of their working extended hours.
However, as the teams are coached through the training, they begin to adopt Lean ways of working and begin to develop better team dynamics and improved performance, which reinforces the learning modules presented throughout the training. After the training they must complete their Lean Project to achieve certification at the Lean Advanced Level, demonstrating to the organisation that they are very much playing a lead role in their organisation's Lean Transformation.
Through this training, the middle managers become the largest cohort of Lean Leaders in the organisation, helping to change from a group who can readily derail the transformation, to one which will support, coach and facilitate its success.
Turning our middle layers of management from the 'sandwich filling' to the leaders of our change is crucial if we are to be successful in our venture.
Interested to learn more? Click on the following links to read the introductions or buy one of my books:
Feel free to visit my Website at: LeadingwithLean and my other LinkedIn posts may be found at this link.
#BTFA #PDCA #LivingLean #LeadingLeanbyLivingLean #SimplicityofLean #LeanThinking #LeanLeadership #Lean #SixSigma #LeadingwithLean #thesimplicityoflean #pps #People
Rapid, Mass Employee Engagement-Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement-Leadership Development-Executive Coaching
1yGreat to see empathy for middle and front-line managers. The latter suffer as organisations load them with more and more administrative tasks 'just because they are there'! This both distracts them from their most important role in developing their teams and cuts off entry-level administrative routes into organisations for those whose strengths are not academic or who have disadvantaged backgrounds.
Like just about any sandwich, the value is what is between the slices of bread (unless it's a classic British sandwich with one thin slice of non-descript lunchmeat). Training these leaders via the types of courses you describe is critical to helping these valuable people prepare for their roles as mentors and teachers of their teams. I've found that most middle managers, team leaders and engineers go through three stages when a participatory quality improvement initiative is started. 1) allowing the front line workers to make "improvements" is just going to make my job harder. 2) these people are taking away my job (after it becomes apparent that the front line workers have good ideas). 3) I now have a trained and motivated army to help me get my job done more easily. Coaching them through stages one and two can shorten the trip to stage three.
Lean Business Mentor at Lean Teams
1yI lead quite few of these "Lean Advanced" training weeks during my in my time with Philips and it's Lighting division spin out Signify. As Philip says getting the leadership at top and middle levels onto a week emersed in Lean thinking enabled people to make the personal changes that really powered our Lean transformation. Critical too is the mentoring of team members after the training to deliver a focused improvement. The program not to be undertaken lightly, there a lot of work in just getting people onto these trainings, getting internal people to run the training weeks plus the coaching follow-up afterwards. We even developed some pre-training "analytical" methods based on what we could know about the attendees' leadership or working styles to compose the team so that they stood a chance of functioning under pressure. At the time we found that the estimated value of the improvements undertaken by the participants far out weighed these costs. Yearly saving from these projects alone were >10x the cost and this was in an international context where we travelled quite a few. They were often very emotional for the managers involved, by day 4 you must arrange a "fun" evening!