Lean Methodology 5 - Building a Positive Team Environment

          While working as an assistant production manager, I with all of the other employees, met for a regular company meeting. There were two shifts so we met from 4:30pm to 5:00pm during the shift change, when both shifts were at the plant. One of the managing family members whose father had founded the company years ago, made a great deal of ado about how generally incompetent we all were. Then she singled out one individual and identified how they had printed a job that wasn’t supposed to have been run. The customer had ordered manual X and the pressman had printed Y.

          I didn’t really know the guy, he was on the other shift, however something just didn’t add up. I started digging, “what had really been the problem?” The job, like most orders from this customer, was a rush order, and it had been well communicated all the way through the plant, “that it had to be run that day”.

    The stock had been pulled and delivered to the press, with its proper job number. Stripping had delivered the plates to the press with the same proper job number as well. The Job Ticket however was not around. It had been there but somehow it had been misplaced. The pressman took a few minutes looking for it, but then decided to get the job running. He had run the job countless times before, and he could look for the ticket during the run, but still it couldn’t be found. The second shift began and the importance of the job was conveyed to the bindery, the job was completed and delivered the next morning by 8:00am as promised. An hour later our customer called, their product assembly line was shut down; we had printed the wrong manual.

          The rest of the story, our customer had originally ordered manual Y, which we delivered, but due to a change in their production schedule they changed and were assembling product X. The purchasing agent had called in with the change. Our dear friend, the lady who had made all the fuss, took the call, went back, and got the job ticket from the press station without saying anything to anyone. She then returned it to her desk to make the change, and where it still sat when the customer called the next day with the problem.

Needless to say that company meeting was probably one of the worst I have ever seen or been a part of. It did so much damage to employee morale overall, which took nearly a year to overcome. The pressman was a quiet kind of guy, very conscientious about his work, but became very removed, and was gone within a few months.

          Teamwork begins with a cooperative commitment from all parties, especially top management. There cannot be this attitude that every problem needs the face of a human to go with it. Teamwork is the creating of an environment where people are encouraged to unite with one another under a common goal, a work environment where people feel free to discuss and resolve problems openly rather than behind closed doors. Teamwork is also where there are no mental score cards of issues and problems being stored as potential ammunition in an attack of another, in some feeble attempt to prove one’s own individual worth, by overstating the imperfections of another. Belittling is just not cool.

          In a true environment of teamwork there is a feeling of “we’re all in this together.” People are enthusiastic about coming to work every day, sharing with others, and learning from each other. The company is energized, productive, and synergizing. Real meetings are organized and conducted in meetings and not in the secluded hallways afterwards. Information is shared openly and freely, even problems, because of the genuine understanding that hidden problems and distorting information do not lead to improvement.[1]

The problems we face are not people problems as much as they are process problems. Dr. W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician who has contributed much to the quality improvement movement, spent much of his life trying to convince people that most of the quality problems were “in the process, not the person”. For most of his life he promoted what he called the “85/15 rule”, based on his experience and research, 85% of the problems in a company come from the process of getting those things done. The 15% was from the people that are involved with the process of the production. By the end of his life he said it was really more like 96/4.[2]

          Understanding this difference is paramount in developing your team. You have people who work in the company’s process, or you can have a team working together to prefect the company’s process. Hajime Ohba, the former president of the Toyota Supplier Support Center, captured this idea well when he said, “We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes. We observe that our competitors often get average (or worse) results from brilliant people managing broken processes.”[3]

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[1] pg 29 - George, M., Rowlands, D., & Kastle, B. (2004). What is Lean Six Sigma?. McGraw-Hill, New York, New York

[2] pg 19 - George, M., Rowlands, D., & Kastle, B. (2004). What is Lean Six Sigma?. McGraw-Hill, New York, New York

[3] PrintCEO February 2009 “The Process of Manufacturing Customers” by David Dodd