We have a team leader who is a lion of continuous improvement (CI) before senior management, but in front of the shopfloor he becomes a timid lamb. I’m worried his inconsistency is critically undermining CI where it matters most – on the factory floor.
In front of the top team, this guy is an absolute star. He owns the weekly debrief meeting, where our top team comes together with the factory’s team leaders to discuss progress against our strategic vision.
You can’t keep the team leader quiet when it comes to improvement ideas and he’s put forward more successfully implemented suggestions than any one of his peers. He’s also the first arm in the air when it comes to volunteering extracurricular responsibilities like kaizen blitz activities with suppliers. In summary, he can recite all of the 5S’s with his eyes shut. And yet.
Witness him on the shopfloor and you would think there had been a personality transplant. Nothing shows in his team’s performance board: the data looks freshly updated, the metrics are good and the suggestion box is overflowing. But, I dropped by at 8.30am, when we do the shopfloor daily debrief, to find a disturbing scene.
This is a mandatory meeting for all operators, which is meant to focus improvement activity ahead of each shift. Yet, I caught two of his team meandering back from the men’s while discussing England’s Euro 2016 chances.
Meanwhile the team members who had bothered to turn up were making wise cracks about ‘the daily management brainwash’. The team leader was nodding and smiling along.
I picked it up with him and he said I had caught the team on a bad day. He said he was joking along only because being seen as ‘one of the guys’ would help him win the team around to CI in the long run. I don’t buy that I suspect he is filling out suggestion scheme ideas under the alias of his team members.
My fear is that we have a passionate advocate for CI, who’s being utterly cowed in front of his team. I don’t think he feels comfortable being perceived as ‘management’ among his mates. How do we address this and bring the team leader, and his team, truly on board with CI?
CI solution: Paul Healing, COO, Project 7
A case of behavioural discrepancy and it’s far more common than you think in organisations large and small. Let’s start with a definition. Behaviour from a psychological perspective can be defined as ‘an observable human action’.
In this case, the observable human actions displayed by this team leader are not only confusing and inconsistent – but could seriously undermine your company’s CI strategy. ‘Changing the signal’ as information flows down from senior leadership vision and up from team performance could be hugely detrimental. Team leaders operate in this pinch point between top down alignment and bottom up engagement and sometimes there can be environmental, organisational or structural forces that trigger inconsistency.
It must be noted that these forces can also affect supervisors, managers and leaders at all levels, but the role of team leader does present specific challenges to defining the ‘desired’ and ‘undesired’ behaviours that are displayed. It is clear that the responsibility of leadership is to ensure an environment exists that promotes, recognises and reinforces the defined desired behaviours.
In this case, we can observe a team leader who loves the warm glow of the spotlight of leadership debriefing. However, on the other hand creates a facade of healthy visual performance management, and seditious atmosphere on the shopfloor.
What are the forces that drive this disparity? Before we attribute guilt, or fault, let’s examine the environmental drivers that may exist in your organisation.
- Is it part of the culture of senior leadership to showboat and over commit at meetings? Most junior leaders will mimic behaviours that succeed in an organisation.
- At shopfloor level, is there a tolerance of non engagement from employees and a pressure to have a visual management board as wall paper and a tick box rather than a critical focal point for performance management and escalation for teams? Success by green ticks on board, team leaders will find a way to make anything go green!
Behaviours at all levels will adapt to ensure survival in the organisations, particular environment and culture. It is a survival necessity in today’s high performance, high pressure workplace.
If you see undesired behaviours in your organisation then the first place senior leadership should look is in the mirror. It is the shadow you cast.
To finish, just two observations on the CI Dilema provided;
- During the leadership debriefing led by the team leader described, has the team leader ever been asked to bring his team into the meeting to present an actual improvement that has been implemented?
- When you visit the shopfloor and suspect the team leader is covering for disengagement and dissent amongst his team, have you ever conducted a process confirmation check? And, if the check proved to uncover a lack of real engagement what consequences would you apply to both the team leader and the team?
