Christine
Koht, a Norwegian media personality and program leader, is also a columnist for
A-magazine, Aftenposten’s weekend magazine. Her column this past Friday was
about the Lean management philosophy, how it has invaded Norwegian workplaces,
and the effect it has had on many employees, whom as she described, are just so
tired of being told how to be better. She lectures and entertains at many different
workplaces around the country, and described how many of the employees she
meets in her travels are feeling these days about their workplaces (translated
from Norwegian):
‘I
travel quite a lot around this country, entertaining at different workplaces,
and everywhere I go I encounter the same ideal—continuous improvement.
Counting and measurements and endless documenting are
presumably what it takes to find out how everything can always be better. But everyone is
so tired of it. Doctors and plumbers, engineers and
teachers--all of them are finding that their workdays and their job enthusiasm
are being drained dry by the perpetual need to document everything they do’.
I have to
admit that this was the first time I had ever heard about this
management philosophy. First it was New Public Management (NPM), now it's Lean.
So I decided that it’s time to read up on these business philosophies that have
taken over the workplace. I’ve already written a post on New Public
Management. Actually, we're knee-deep in NPM in the public sector and
rather stuck there, so how did Lean get a foothold? I am interested in
these philosophies because I see what they are doing to workplaces. The first
thing that came to mind when I saw the word Lean was the old expression ‘lean
mean fighting machine’. And it seems that this management philosophy is all
about reducing waste and continuous improvement, so that your company ends up
‘fit for fight’—a lean mean fighting machine in a competitive global economy.
It seems to have started as a management philosophy for manufacturing—how to
improve efficiency of production by focusing on waste reduction. For the life
of me, I cannot imagine how this philosophy can be applied to public sector
organizations. For one thing, it is the exact opposite of NPM as far as I can
see. Correct me if I’m wrong, but NPM has only led to massive increases in
layers of administration and administrative positions—too many chiefs and not
enough Indians, in other words. So if Lean is now the management philosophy of
choice—what possibilities exist to eliminate waste? Should the Lean business
consultants, strategists and gurus start by ‘removing’ the very layers of
administration that NPM set in place? Because anyone with an ounce of common
sense can see that it is the exponential growth of administration that is
clogging the system, reducing efficiency and causing waste. The administrators
need to administrate and to control the employees who are doing the actual
work. The numbers of actual workers are decreasing relative to the number of
administrators set in place to administrate them.
I also see
what these different trends in management philosophies have done to workplace
leaders, how desperate some of them are to effect change, any change,
in a panicked attempt to leave a legacy behind them when they go. They also
have to be able to say to a new employer—‘I managed to implement this or that
change in my former workplace, and it’s working very well. I can do miracles
with your workplace if you only give me a chance’. Or I can at least imagine
that this is what they are desperate to achieve, otherwise why do so many of
them—men and women alike--look so harried and haggard? When you meet with them,
they come up with yet another idea for how you can be better, how you can
improve your workday, how you can best serve your workplace and those ideas are
completely different than the ones they were so adamant about your accepting
just a year ago. And when you remind them of what they insisted upon a year
ago, they get irritated and don’t want to hear about the past. The past for
them is the past—gone, non-existent (as though it never existed), passé, and a
taboo topic of conversation. It’s all about relativeness (changing with
circumstances) these days. When you remind them that you personally might want
to learn from past mistakes, they don’t want to hear that either. They also
don’t want to hear that you want to take your time now in making a decision
that will affect how you perform your work duties for the next few years. They
just want you to accept what they want you to accept—NOW. It doesn’t matter if
they change their minds again in six months.
When will workplace leaders
realize that efficiency is the last thing that results from incessant poking and prodding and change?
Employees work best and most efficiently in an environment that lets them do
the job they are paid to do, in other words, in a stable and supportive
environment. They work best in an environment where the infrastructure in place
supports them in their quest to do a good job, rather than hindering them, as
is often the case in overly-bureaucratic and overly-administrated environments.
There is no stability in an atmosphere of constant change, in an environment
that incessantly pokes and prods its employees at every turn in an effort to
get them to produce more and to be more efficient. There are many employees who
have done a terrific job, who have produced for their companies, and who are
tired. Just plain tired—of being told they haven’t done enough, that they
aren’t good enough, that they need to change, that they are resistant to
change, that they are too set in their ways, or that they need to just ‘adapt’
to yet another way of looking at their job. What if the new management
philosophy could be one with a laissez-faire
focus, one that led to appreciation of employees and to company management which
understood that employee competence and expertise are the reasons that
employees were hired in the first place, which understood that ‘more and better’
all the time doesn’t lead to efficiency and that if employees are appreciated
that they will produce in ways that a company could only dream of? What if
companies understood that enough is enough and that better is often the enemy of good, and that more means never enough? Management should back off and let employees
be. But that would mean treating employees like adults and not children. Are
company managements up to that? Only time will tell.
I’m not
arguing against all forms of self-improvement; I’m actually a proponent of self-improvement
in the personal arena. By that I mean—striving to be the best person you can be
in the situations in which you find yourself. We can always learn new ways of
looking at things, always have new and different responses if we’ve learned
from our mistakes. My problem is when self-improvement/job improvement is
forced upon you by people who have little to no idea of what they’re doing and
who have no idea of who you really are or of what you need in a workplace
setting. So let’s see if I can get this right. If I need advice on how to be a
better scientist, I will consult a highly-successful scientist, not an
administrator. Likewise, if I need advice on how to be a better friend or
spouse, I’ll consult people who have good track records in both departments or
who work in the psychology and social work fields, but not an administrator. By
documenting all that we do, administrators conclude that they know us and that
they are competent enough to tell us how to do the jobs we were hired to do.
But they are not. However, if I need help with balancing a budget sheet or with
filling out a complicated form, I’ll consult an administrator. But that is very
seldom. So perhaps these management philosophies are more about finding valid
work for the administrators to do. The employees they are administrating know
for the most part what they are doing and why, and how to reach their professional
goals without administrative interference. The more time we spend on
administrative tasks, the less time we have to work at our real jobs, and then
productivity and efficiency fly out the window.
