you draw a picture of these connections, for example, mapping the frequency of
communication, it starts to look like a big spiderweb—a network. If you look more
carefully, you’ll see that certain parts of the network are denser than other parts.
At the center of these dense parts are particular individuals sometimes called
“sociometric stars.” That is the academic term for people who are popular or even
natural leaders. Some people’s opinions count more than others. If you can win
over these opinion leaders, you can change the culture by working through them.
These leaders are not difficult to find. Since they’re so well-connected, you
can find them in many different ways. Those in the organization generally
know who they are, as do their bosses in middle management. These are the
people Toyota tends to find and make team leaders.
There are many ways to involve them. The lean coach can seek them out and
informally talk to them. But a better way is to formally involve them in the
change process. The kaizen workshop is one great format for involving these
natural leaders. If you break the larger group in this kaizen event into smaller
subgroups, you might even make these individuals the head of a team. That, of
course, means management must pay them to be part of the event, but it’s a
trivial investment in the long term, with a large payoff. Some companies will
find a few of these people and make them full-time members of the kaizen pro-
motion office. It is one thing for middle managers to come to the floor to enlist
the support of the workers, and it’s another for a respected peer to make a case
for support. So, find these people and find ways to involve them.
Becoming a Lean Coach
The lean coach is a staff position. It is some person or group inside the company
that has been assigned to be the internal expert or experts. In the transition to
lean, this role is critical. Unfortunately, everyone is busy, and lean is just one more
thing to do. For a full-time lean coach, this is their job, and it usually becomes a
passion more than a job.
Lean needs to be driven by the line organization, not a staff organization.
The line organization has responsibility and accountability for delivering
results. The people doing the value-added work are in the line organization.
They need to use all the lean systems, so they should own the lean systems.
Take, for example, standardized work. Going back to Frederick Taylor, the
father of time and motion studies, the idea of standardizing how work gets
done was thought to be a staff job. Taylor envisioned large staffs of industrial
engineers who were expert in “scientific management.” With their scientific
management, which people on the floor did not understand, they could deter-
mine the one best way to do the job, and the foreman was required to enforce
this one best way. The unanticipated result was the conflict this created between
labor and management and the antagonism toward the “efficiency experts.”