Lean Manufacturing requires activating change processes, often requiring companies and their managers to integrate new methods, ways of thinking, and behaviors.
Change often demands acquiring new values, principles, and ideas that are in total opposition to the habitual ones.
In this situation, management and their collaborators can experience an identity crisis resulting in resistance to change.
Managers who find themselves suddenly unsuitable and unprepared for change adopt consciously or unconsciously resistance strategies that aim to protect them from the elements while waiting for the storm to pass and the change project to fail.
It is not rare to witness even unconscious behaviors that put the entire change project at risk.
As an example of unconscious sabotage, managers can:
- Not giving a project the necessary resources (using the excuse of being short of them).
- Postponing specific concrete change actions previously developed and defined by the teams.
- Not fully collaborate in teamwork activities.
Another action that can make resistance to change evident is the refusal to acquire the skills necessary for change; certain managers don't want to participate (by choice, putting forward the most varied excuses) in strategic reunions, training, seminars, or to endorse work groups.
In the ever-challenging context of implementing Lean, coaching represents an important, if not indispensable, aid to guarantee the success of a Lean cultural change process.
At the same time, if introduced correctly, this instrument represents a life preserver for managers and their collaborators to avoid drowning during the storm of change. It becomes the practice of redefining one’s role, identity, and skills in a company that is shedding its old skin.
The coach, in his role, must not be seen as a consultant; he is instead the support acting as a non-judgmental neutral mirror, before which the manager and his collaborators begin to elaborate the new identity and to test it in daily practice until its final acquisition.
At Kaizen Coach International Ltd, we understand performance as the output of the interaction of two groups of factors: to the first group belong all the beliefs, meanings, principles, and values that a person may have, and to the second group belong all the skills related to carrying out work and activities.
The performance of an individual or workgroup cannot be optimal if the values, principles, and concepts are of a level that is not adequate to the context of the performance. For example, we cannot think that a manager will perform at his best if he is afraid of working in a team. In the same way, we cannot believe that the same manager can perform at his best when he does not possess the skills to communicate with people or to write a report.
Coaching is the main instrument for helping management close the gap between knowing and doing and solidify the meanings, values, principles, and beliefs necessary to obtain optimal performance in the context in which they operate.
KCI Ltd. has developed a specific coaching program to help managers acquire the mindset and capabilities to implement lean manufacturing.
For more information on this program, click on the button
