Do not be a Lean School Dropout

Dave Johnson 9-11-2018

When I first began attending college years ago, I planned to be a high school teacher.  As I worked my way through college working in an industrial environment, I began to realize how different and challenging things were.  It was another world from the small dairy farm I grew up on.  There was a more immediate need to get the work done.  On the farm we could work a little later, if necessary, sometimes from daybreak to dark.  We believed it exhibited a good work ethic.  In industry we had three eight hour shifts to meet customer demand, otherwise we had to work overtime. Sometimes an extra day, sometimes all weekend.  Nothing new for a farm kid, but in industry the extra cost of overtime can rob profitability and sometimes cause businesses to fail.  That is when the need to do things more efficiently became obvious to me.

Being a teaching major, I was taught that the teacher was responsible for student learning.  It was assumed, that if students were not learning something, it must be the teaching method.  If so, the teaching method should be altered to fit the student’s needs.  In a classroom, it was not always feasible to adjust for everyone’s learning style.  The student must take responsibility to conform and do the hard work necessary to be successful.

As years went on, I changed majors to engineering, as I gained more industrial knowledge, and started to look at things from a different, more scientific perspective, I began to realize that there was a science to work. Before I ever learned the word Kaizen, I began to understand that how you set a job up, how you instructed someone to do that job, how you monitored performance and reacted to abnormalities had a dramatic effect on the results.

I was able to teach many classes in industry over the years in leadership, always encountering the difficult students, naysayers, and sceptics of what I was teaching.  Some decided they would resist, no matter what the subject matter.  Their mindset was not to be taught.   That is when I learn the value of coaching versus teaching.  Helping people learn by experiential learning when we walk beside them, allowing them to try their own ideas and approach to problems.  The coach provides advice not learning.  The learning comes from within the individual as they experience new ways of doing things, sometimes struggle, and even fail. As long as the coach is there to encourage and provide some guidance for them to select options that allow them to recover, learning is possible.  The big difference in teaching and coaching is where the learning comes from, but there must be learning.   Even in coaching, there can be a complete breakdown if the student refuses to self-reflect, learn, and grow in the process. 

In the school setting, some students drop out.  They reject the notion that knowledge is valuable.  They believe they can get by without that knowledge.   This is an individual decision that in the long run is a detriment to the student and society. If too many students drop out, the social and societal impact is obvious.

As leaders, we see the same thing when trying to coach others in matters of operational excellence.  Many times, we are dealing with the same people that rejected learning in the school system.  They are now the folks that we are trying to “teach” and “coach” in an industrial setting to think differently about how work gets done.  The difference in this case is, we are responsible to ensure that the business operates efficiently and meets customer expectations, while at the same time remaining profitable.  We cannot afford dropouts.  This is especially true in the leadership ranks.   When someone drops out of school, they no longer attend.  They do not continue to go there every day, disrupting other students learning.  In industry, if someone decides they do not want to learn anything new, or try new ways of doing things they still, in many cases, continue to arrive every day to begrudgingly do the same job the same way every day. Ultimately, to the detriment of the business and others that work with them. 

Lean thinking requires a new way of looking at work, a new mindset.  That begins with the willingness to explore new ways of looking at how work gets done, how we measure performance, how we measure success, how we deal with setbacks or failure when we try to improve.   Lean school dropouts that continue to stay in the game in many cases may not suffer immediate consequences, but the business and coworkers do.  It has been said, in many ways, that doing the same thing every day, expecting different results, is ludicrous.  If a business has too many lean school dropouts in today’s demanding business environment, at best, success is limited, and in worst case scenarios, the potential for failure is high.

Do not be a lean school dropout.  Wherever you are in the organization, understand the impact you have on the future of that organization.  Recognize that there is more at stake than a personal decision that just affects you.  The long-term success of the business and ability of your coworkers to provide for their families is at stake. The benefits from you making the right decision may be realized by others in the long term.