Spark The Fire

That ‘lean’ initiatives are of little interest to executives should come as no surprise. Embark on a structured path to win the buy-in.

- David Mann 

Since Creating a Lean Culture was first published in 2005, I have been asked many times by corporate executives or internal lean leaders to provide lean training for senior executives ‘to get them on board’, either at the start or along the way in their lean initiatives. (I counsel against this approach, though the requests continue.)

Around 2008, internal lean leaders began appsroaching me, at conferences or other events, expressing anxiety about losing senior executives’ support for continuing their lean initiatives, even when initiative goals were being met. Typically, the lean leader would have conducted gemba walks with senior executives, but failed to spark their engagement with lean.

Could these two kinds of conversations be related?

Think about it. Executives’ time is pressured and precious. A training session or simulation exercise takes time they will never get back. If we are honest, executives attend lean training sessions under duress because an authority has required it.

I have never met a senior executive interested in gemba walking to become a lean implementer. Yet, that is how lean practitioners learned lean, so that is how they have attempted to teach—and engage—their executives. Big mistake: learning the arcana of lean’s industrial engineering tools is not going to help executives have a better or more effective day at work, one that moves them closer to their goals. Becoming a lean practitioner simply is not meaningful to corporate executives. They do not see how this expertise will help them succeed.