Do a Makeover from Mass to Lean

Are you a modern manager or a lean manager?

Careful, as this is a trickier question than it initially seems.

“Modern manager” is how Jim Womack, the Founder and Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc.  (LEI), characterizes mass production methods descended from Alfred Sloan at GM and his followers.

At LEI’s recent Lean Transformation Summit that I attended, Jim talked about how this management approach is outdated and broken. He was especially critical of its preoccupation with results at the expense of how the work gets done. In today’s world this isn’t healthy for managers or their organizations. He believes the obsession with results leads to a lack of stability. This lack of stability and the resulting chaos creates a present state that can’t support the future.

Instead, Jim advocates lean as a management approach in which individuals manage by process rather than by results, always keeping in mind the customer purpose and value added.  The particulars will vary by organization.

In his talk to us as well as in his latest e-letter, “Lean for the Long Term,” Jim explains that each organization needs to discover its own right lean management system through experimentation through the structured plan-do-check-act methodology. And by doing so, managers need to have a vigorous dialogue about what the value creating work management does and how to “merge it with sustainable process improvement.”

So what does this mean to corporate communication experts?We need to acknowledge that traditionally we are a staff function that does not produce revenue. And as one of the conference speakers noted, “There is no job security for no value-add work.” And these days, this applies to modern as well as lean management.

So what can you do to ensure you’re adding value that you can sustain over time?

1.   Take time to reflect. Think about your purpose, past actions, and the outcomes. What worked well? What could be better? What do you want to do differently next time? Also, evaluate how you are spending your time. Is it commensurate with the actions that add value to leaders, employees, customers, investors and other key customers?

2.   Assess what aspects of your staff work add the most value. What has the most impact? For example, supporting leaders so they can show up well with customers, investors and employees, including telling compelling stories and answering questions? Providing customer-facing employees with information and tools to serve customers well? Ferreting out emerging issues so you and others in the organization can better prepare to address them? Is it actions you’re taking to mitigate risks? Other? Whatever these value-add actions are, are you spending an appropriate amount of time and energy and resources on them?  Or do you need to recalibrate?

3.   Concentrate on doing your day-to-day work well rather than trying to save the day. Over time, effective blocking and tackling will produce better results than last minute heroics in the crunch. The blocking and tackling isn’t as sexy of as the heroics, but it’s effective and efficient. We in communications need to be especially aware of this because our work environment tends to be highly variable, much of which we’ve created ourselves. As a result, without standardized work and the management of that work, we will have unpredictable, inconsistent outcomes that make everything more challenging. As one lean expert noted, “You don’t want to spend your timing building sandcastles that can be washed out to sea.”

If you’re interested in more insights about the recent Lean Transformation Summit from the perspective of communication lessons learned and conference tips and themes, check out these blog posts, “Expanding Horizons for Communication” and “Conference Tips and Themes from a LEAN Summit Groupie”

Liz Guthridge is a consultant, author, and trainer specializing in strategic change communications. Department leaders of Fortune 1000 companies hire Liz and her firm Connect Consulting Group LLC when they need their people—who are confused, angry or in denial—to adopt complex new initiatives so they can quickly change the way they work. For more information, contact Liz, liz.guthridge@connectconsultinggroup.com or 510-527-1213. Follow Liz on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/lizguthridge.