Showing posts with label more. Show all posts
Showing posts with label more. Show all posts

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Lean Mean Fighting Machine


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. 

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