Is Respect for People a Pre-condition for Lean?

In the Executive Forum that closed out this year's LPPDE, One idea hit me like a thunderbolt: you can't do lean - any lean, but especially lean product development - without respect for people.

When I thought back over five years' of clients - the ones who'd been able to make the most of lean vs. the ones who struggled, and the ones who drank in knowledge vs. the ones who spent more time arguing than trying - the leadership's respect for people was the differentiating factor.

Respect for people doesn't mean molly-coddling them. Respect for people means believing that they are capable, competent people with the capacity for growth and the desire to do good work, and then accepting nothing less than the best from them. It means valuing the knowledge and experience they have gained through working in the trenches, close to the value stream.

I can teach the skills that maximize value and eliminate waste in product development, and I can help the leadership support, model, coach and reinforce the practices of lean product development.

But if an organization views people as simply expense, then nothing I can do will help them become leaner.

Lean product development requires a certain level of trust between product development leadership and the engineers, technicians and testers who actually get products out the door. Lean leadership also requires healthy respect for the knowledge created in the lowest levels of the company - the experienced line worker who knows how to keep a machine running, the customer service agent who knows how to calm an angry customer and the technician who can spot manufacturing problems within ten seconds of looking at the CAD models.

If that trust is broken, if that respect for knowledge is missing or if the leadership believes that experienced resources can be as readily replaced as light bulbs, then people will not share what they know, and they will not try to change things for the better. It's hard work, and they have no reason to do it if they believe that their efforts are not valued.

One time, I heard second-hand that a company's CEO had stated that there was no reason why an engineer should make more than $80,000 per year. . .for a company that made complex, high-precision devices for a dynamic market.

If company leadership is incapable of recognizing that their product developers are the ones to whom they have entrusted their company's future and then treating the developers accordingly, then they have problems I can't help them with.

But if a company's leadership has an appreciation for the value of the knowledge that their experienced workforce has built and a determination to help the workers use that knowledge to grow themselves while they grow the company, then lean can achieve dramatic, lasting results.