Issue link: https://industrialmanagement.epubxp.com/i/249982
• Don't jump to the do phase without spending enough time gathering facts, colleting people's ideas and training everyone. Processes tend to slip back if people have not been trained on the culture of continuous improvement. People who do the work each day must be allowed to express their ideas for improving the process to produce the future state map. They should believe the changes will facilitate their work, making it easier and safer. • Senior managers should not use metrics to evaluate results and control employee performance without understanding the obstacles that need to be removed to get stable results. Managers should act as facilitators for the improvement process. Metrics should be used by the employees themselves to measure their progress and define the requirements of the next step. Gemba develops future leaders Toyota believes that employees can learn more by doing, by understanding the situation through grasping the reality of the gemba. Ideally, this means teaching on the shop floor, in the office or at the shipping dock rather than at a formal training meeting. At Toyota, the process of fixing problems is used to teach a new way of thinking. At Toyota, every leader takes the responsibility of developing another leader. Leaders who know how the process works coach their mentees on problem-solving and process improvement methods. The rule is that leaders cannot teach what they cannot do. In Japan, they don't teach management in classrooms, as most learning happens at the gemba. As presented by Jeffrey K. Liker in his book The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership, the learning process at Toyota is called shu ha ri, three terms that refer to three stages of learning. Shu means to protect. In this phase, students are coached on the fundamentals under the watchful eye of the master. Ha means to break away. In this 26 Industrial Management phase, the student has more freedom to practice unsupervised. The master may check on her; the student can apply the rules creatively but will follow the standard rigidly. Ri means freedom, and in this phase, rules and behaviors have become so ingrained that the student no longer thinks about them consciously. These students are now in the position to develop their own understanding. Think about the work standard. A worker first must learn how to assemble parts on-site by following the standard work procedures. He will learn by doing. In the shu stage, he will see how the work is done and try to follow the teacher. The worker will practice the job continuously until he reaches the second step, ha. The teacher will keep monitoring him until he reaches the final stage, ri. At this stage, the worker can observe the overall working procedures and take the responsibility to improve them. By coaching and mentoring people on processes at the gemba and using real problems to improve leadership skills, Toyota's employees and managers become more professional at solving issues in the future while developing other leaders. Mike Rother presents a great example in his Toyota Kata book. In chapter eight, the mentor used a real quality problem in the assembly line to improve the skills of the mentee. Although the mentor figured out the solution quickly, he never told the mentee. Instead, the mentor allowed the mentee a degree of freedom to think and develop his own ideas about solving the problem. This shows how to transfer the mentee from the ha phase to the ri phase. Gemba aligns plans and goals Nowadays, companies hire senior managers who have the capability and experience to improve the process and achieve financial targets. Those managers will set targets that cascade down to the operational level. But what happens when those managers are far from the actual situation at the gemba? True lean requires changing culture, developing leaders and properly understanding human behavior. Even managers with experience in industrial manufacturing probably don't know about the current situation or how to sustain improvement based on their new company's current state. Conditions differ from one company to another. So targets that come down from above become magical targets, impossible to achieve because of the current situation, the culture, the process conditions or some other obstacles that need to be resolved first. Discovering those obstacles requires frequent gemba visits. Many still think of lean as a toolkit, copying and pasting techniques based on how they work in Toyota and other successful organizations. A few have realized that lean is not about tools or approaches. True lean requires changing culture, developing leaders and properly understanding human behavior. Managers who have spent enough time at the gemba should help set targets using an open-mind process called hoshin kanri. Toyota ensures that all leaders involved in the process of setting targets have spent enough time at the gemba to understand the real situation. Take the situation where senior management set a target of increasing the value-added percentage in a specific work process by 20 percent via a one-week kaizen effort. The senior manager told operational leaders: "Here is what we need and how your performance will be judged. Go do your jobs and bring back the results, whatever it takes." The manager of the operations department knew how to remove wastes on the shop floor and achieve the demanded improvement. However, the front-line workers lacked knowledge of lean theory and other improvement methodologies. They were not capable of managing their work under the new situation. All efforts spent on improvement were lost after a short while, and the new process wasn't sustained. One week was not enough to plan the achievement, share the ideas with others, train the workers, and