How 2 - manage culture change
Stuart Mitton, Lead Practitioner at The Manufacturing Advisory Service (MAS) North West answers some key customer questions on this thorny topic. Stuart joined MAS, based at The Manufacturing Institute, from Rolls-Royce in Derby where he was a lean manufacturing specialist. Before that he was lean manufacturing manager at Portmeirion Potteries and continuous improvement manager at Cosworth Racing.
Why is culture change such an important part of the lean process?
To have a successful and sustainable improvement process you need to have a culture that’s supportive of that. You’ve got to win the hearts and minds of all employees by engaging them in the improvement process and rewarding positive behaviour, from experience people don’t resist change, they resist being changed, and you have to take the people with you.
The key to success is getting people to think about the business every day, thinking about what they do, what they see and what they can do to improve it. It’s about creating a whole new mindset.
What tools and techniques are required to develop culture change?
A successful culture change is a mix of the will and skill of all employees led by exceptional leaders. You have to look at developing a common business goal and have a clear strategy. Then you need to sub-divide that strategy and cascade it through the organisation – this is called policy deployment. You then have to align the structure of the business to deliver those goals. For example, if you have a traditional hierarchical management approach you may want to de-layer the organisation and go for more, clearly focused, small group working teams.
The important thing is to have goal deployment, excellent communication and a current and future state plan. That plan also has to encompass looking at the people skills that you require to resource the business. Helping with employees’ personal development within the company will also encourage a desire for people to improve themselves and the business.
We have great difficulty motivating sections of the workforce to get fully and passionately involved with lean activities. Some of this apathy stems from previously failed initiatives that have consumed time and money with few positive end-results. How should we overcome this lack of interest and re-motivate personnel to get fully involved with our lean activities?
It sounds like they’ve been performing what we call ‘kamikaze kaizen’ - improvement initiatives that are not aligned to a strategic business goal. Benefits may well have come through but it would be very difficult to ascertain where improvements have happened. For example, if the improvement is not at a bottleneck it may be hidden, as you will still see the same level of throughput from the process. This can lead to ‘initiative fatigue’ where people become really intolerant of the new changes and treat them with a great deal of scepticism.
To overcome this you must engage and create a high level of involvement. That involvement brings an expectation from team members that the things that they’ve suggested will actually be implemented. It is a real de-motivator if that follow through doesn’t happen and people lose faith with the lean process. So you’ve got to question the application and follow-up process rather than the tools and techniques. Make sure you have clear goals and a very robust follow-up and implementation procedure so you can demonstrate that things are actually happening.
How do you get people to change and if they won’t participate, how is it best to handle the situation?
From experience, there are probably 60 per cent of people in your business who will do almost anything to support change. Around 20 per cent will sit on the fence, wait to see how it goes and when they are confident they will actively get involved. Despite what you do, the other 20 per cent will be a bit of a struggle and a challenge to bring along.
You’ve got to work with the mass of people. The influential group is the 20 per cent who could go either way. So if you focus on converting them it means you isolate those anchor draggers and they become the minority. By having a focused and robust improvement culture you will create a tension whereby those anchor draggers will either fit in or leave under their own steam.
Recognition and reward is very important and you should reward positive behaviour, but not necessarily with financial incentives, it’s about celebrating success in a public way within the business.
