Podcast: Lean leadership lessons for manufacturers — Creating a culture of improvement

Marty Hallman is director of bearing operations Americas for The Timken Company. During his 34-year career, he has served in various senior manufacturing roles, most recently as plant manager prior to being promoted to director of operations. Sam McPherson is president of The Lean Leadership Academy, which trains leaders to lead successful lean transformations. As an internationally recognized expert on leadership, leader development, and organizational excellence, Sam leads Toyota gemba walking tours and workshops on leading the Toyota Management System.

Marty and Sam recently spoke at IndustryWeek’s Operations Leadership Summit in June. During the panel, “Building Blocks of Lean Leadership,” the two discussed what it takes to develop a lean leadership team culture and how to build a workforce who wants to go where you lead. In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Jill Jusko, executive editor at IndustryWeek, shares the audience questions and expert answers from the session.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

JJ: Can you share some insights on how you guys applied the Toyota Manufacturing Operation System (TMOS) across all your sites?

MH: Very similar foundation. The boards look different. I call it wallpaper. If you go into the operation center, the wallpaper is different. Some plants are high-volume plants, but it's measurable. So, first we ask, “What is the unit of measure? What are we trying to track?” I've got a facility in Mascot, Tennessee, that makes rail products, very low volume, but we measure. What is the expectation? What is our standard for every two hours? So, very same process. I’ve got a plant that grinds parts made in South Carolina, and it takes hours to grind the parts. So, what we had to figure out was how do we measure that in the smallest increment, which would be every two hours. What we do is we have a process, the value, earned hours. What you don't want to do is get four hours into an issue and realize that you're three hours late. So, what we would do is divide it up on races on that part or whatever. And we measure every hour. Did we hit that target? If you didn't, what is your recovery plan? What is your problem solving versus waiting till the end of four hours? We've had to modify the wallpaper in the rooms, but it’s the basic, same process.

JJ: And are all your plants at different places along the TMOS journey?

MH: They are. And I'd say most of them, the wallpaper is probably the same. And when I say the operation center, but the leadership development is different. I've got a plant in Honea Path, South Carolina, where I was the plant manager. They are probably my most developed, meaning that I was their plant manager, I left, and a new plant manager comes in that reports to me. But the plant, all the way down to the lowest level of the organization, they've got it. The culture is there. They went through a major burning platform. They all got on board with it. A lot of talent growth inside the building. But I've got other plants that are not that evolved yet. I mean, some of the problem solving out there, we hadn't had enough TMOS waves there. But the cultures are still driving it, but each plant is at a different stage in this journey.

JJ: So, can you help me understand your waves a little bit better? Are those kaizens, like another name for a kaizen, or what exactly occurs during these waves?

MH: So the wave comes in and, first of all, we do the business case, and then we look at all the leadership in that area. And then the first week is really about leadership development. We're not talking about 5S, we’re not talking about lean at that point. You're doing leadership development. Are you a leader? Do you want to be a leader? And we have people that don't make it. We have people, week one, that tap out. I'm not going to do this, and we're OK with that. I mean, we don't encourage that, but I don't want people to be in the wrong position in the organization. So, week one is leadership development. Week two is transitional. We start going into the problem solving with that. And we continue that, and some of that is going to be collaborating, articulating, some TWIs, some different things going into week three.

Then week four, for most cases, is a go-live week. What that is, in bloom taxonomy, it really goes back to the same philosophy that we're going on this knowledge and memorization journey. Week four is applying it, because what we want to do coming out of week four is application. What is called a go-live week. We're going to take you, as a team leader, and you're going to go out. And you're going to demonstrate, back to me, as a leader of the class, you're going to demonstrate that you fully understand what you picked up the past three weeks. Are you able to apply it effectively? And we're still coaching at that point. The training wheels are still on in week four. They're still out there. So, we're out there coaching. And I usually assign them to a mentor, and they're getting coached and mentored. So, week four is the go-live week. The first three weeks are really education development. But week one is always leadership development.

SM: Think of a wave as a cohort. So, it's very structured, and Marty touched on it a little bit. One of the things you have to have with leadership development is context. The leaders need to have a reason to lead. So, the structure that Marty hit on a little bit in his presentation is whoever the senior site leader is that we're going to be working with, they're in charge. It's their plant, it's their operation, all the way up to sometimes CEO or president. It just depends where we're working. And they've got to lead the transformation. We're going to change the management system. We're going to change leader behavior. We're going to develop leaders. And so, to Marty's point, sometimes that's about 18 to 19 people, because we're trying to get a critical mass because there's some things down the road we want to have a tipping point for. So that cohort, which, somewhere along the line at Timken, became a wave. Think about it as echelons. And so the class leader, who we call a group leader, is the senior site leader, and they have key leaders of the team that business case says we need to improve with quality or we need to improve with productivity.

So, we'll normally take and put the leaders that need to be developed most into a team leader role. And we have an assistant team leader on the team. Usually, a team is about six people. You have a team leader, assistant team leader, and then everybody's put together in buddy teams. And so the big thing in the context there, and Marty mentioned it with the exams and some of the other things, is that leaders are responsible for getting results through people. Using the cohort system, and having three teams led by an organizational leader, we're working on leadership and context as we go through the transformation. In the early days, a lot of that is problem solving, abnormality control, and stuff like that. As we get down the road, then you're now starting to look at more advanced elements of TPS. So those waves will change out, but then you’ve got to connect wave one to wave two so everything that wave one built doesn't need to be rebuilt. So, what's the mission of wave two? Wave one builds the management system for the organization or the plant, and then wave two is going to focus more on floor management development. So now they're building on each other, so sometimes the number of waves depends on the number of folks in the organization. But the core concept, it's a cohort. Leaders have to lead in context, and they're accountable for everyone else's performance in the cohort. Just being responsible for your own performance will get you nowhere in that cohort system or that wave system.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.