Chapter 8

Why Management (Still) Matters

Introduction

With the advent of agile, many in the IT community have adopted a no managers needed here philosophy. ² While self-directed development teams have certainly shifted the role of managers, we believe very strongly that managers are an essential key to enabling and sustaining positive change in IT. Great managers provide the support needed to nurture people development, both technically and socially, as well as creating a culture of transparency. Often it is managers (and no one else) who effectively navigate upstream and downstream channels of collaboration to coordinate work inputs and outcomes into the hands of end users and customers.

Lost in Translation

In Chapter 3, we explored the importance of purpose and the significance of getting people aligned to a common goal. Sounds easy but the tricky part is getting people to see and embrace how company purpose and strategy directly apply to their daily work. High-level objectives such as Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” ³ motto may be difficult to translate into daily tactics. People are right to ask, “What does that look like?”

It is the managers in your organization who play a pivotal role in making a vivid connection between purpose and behavior—connecting strategy to execution. They are perfectly positioned to decipher your company’s intention, objectives, and strategy from high-level aspirations to specific actions.

It is useful to think of your organization as being composed of three levels: associates, managers, and leaders. The associates include everyone at the front line creating the services, products, and information customers consume. Managers are those people who are responsible for the performance of others—this includes team leads, supervisors, managers, directors, and VPs. Executive leaders are the ones who set the strategic direction of your company and are held responsible for overall performance. In a lean IT transformation, it is imperative that we are clear on what the primary focus of each role should be. See Table 8.1.

For an organization to be effective, people in all three roles need to do their jobs very well. Unfortunately, there is often a lack of clarity on what the job entails. We all know managers that seem to think their job is primarily about control—directing people as to what actions to take and what not to do. We’ve worked with companies where the associates don’t know what the CEO looks like or have never seen the general manager of their division. It’s not uncommon that associates don’t really know the other members of their workgroup, let alone the people who supply them work inputs or those who receive their work. It’s as though people are living in a bubble, seeing their job as isolated from the work of others! With such a limited view and circle of communication, it’s no wonder we possess differing ideas on roles and responsibilities.

You’re Only as Good as the People around You

Another critical role of managers, particularly in support of a lean IT transformation, is developing people. This is a skill set many managers lack when the emphasis of the company is primarily on results and people development is given lip service and effectively downgraded to a low priority. Just as concerning, it is often viewed as nothing more than occasional training in technical skills. The people development we are talking about here refers to problem solving, communication, and teamwork skills. Problem solving is as much of a mindset as it is a skill set and learning a new skill often requires a competent guide or coach. We’ll discuss coaching later in this chapter.

Managers are those who are responsible for the performance of others. If they actively work with their people and go to the gemba regularly, they begin to understand and appreciate the power of people armed with problem solving skills working in highly effective teams. Unfortunately, many work environments still live by the leader-follower model, ⁴ with a prevailing culture where managers do the thinking and associates do what they are told. When people are asked, “Can you tell me what you do here?” we are amazed at how many IT professionals respond, “Whatever my boss tells me to do!” This response is clearly an outdated twentieth century paradigm and may indicate that management is not being encouraged, measured, or supported to actively develop people.

Your Managers Are the Key

As we mentioned earlier, there are managers who do not lead and leaders who fail to manage. Stephen Covey said, “You manage things, and you lead people.” ⁵ We agree, but we also feel the word manage is so widely usedthroughout our society that we need to better define and apply it to reinforce the change we want to see in our organization. Excluding the term from our vocabulary is not going to make things better.

Most of us have had a direct experience with a manager who attempted to control our thoughts and behaviors. This is the legacy of Taylorism, ⁶ the scientific management approach from the early 1900s that powered the Industrial Revolution. Taylor believed people needed to be controlled and directed to extract value from them. The implicit assumption is that people are lazy, undisciplined, and aimless. Without direct top-down control by management, they will not do the right things or be productive. Focused on efficiency and economies of scale, this view of people as mindless workers led to robust control-based systems of centralized decision making and enforcement hierarchies. Taylor’s Industrial Age paradigm influences our workplaces to this very day.

Now roll the tape forward roughly 100 years. Today, some managers have evolved to move away from coercive command-and-control management styles to more inclusive, participative approaches. As stress levels increase, it seems that most regress to directive command management, which indicates that this pattern of management runs deep within our basic emotional predispositions. In a lean transformation, managers play a key role, especially if previous programs, initiatives, and promises that have since been abandoned have damaged the trust of your people. It is the managers that will demonstrate that lean is not another flavor-of-the month program, but rather a new way of doing business, of showing up, and of being.

Starting your transformation with the associates but without the full support, participation, and understanding of the managers won’t work because people focus on the things their boss talks about most often. The associates are busy doing the work necessary to create value for your customers. It is your managers who should be providing both the technical backing (how to develop needed job skills, not specifically how to achieve targeted outcomes) and people development support (how to improve work processes) as they nurture and develop their teams—one person at a time.

To be effective, managers must support the development of people (through problem solving, teamwork, and communication skills) along with technical support on how to do the work. This ideal state, where managers have both technical and social coaching skills, is rare. With the complexity of IT disciplines, managers do not always possess the knowledge to support the vast array of skills their team might have or require. In these cases, the role of a manager is to enable the means to obtain that knowledge. Let’s take a look at some of the critical skills necessary to be a lean manager.

Being an Effective Coach

A great manager places the development of people ahead of results, knowing that the inevitable outcome of engaged and skilled people is great results. For years, we’ve been told that managers need to coach, but we have often failed to provide managers with the training and coaching they need to become effective coaches. Many books have been written on the subject of effective coaching, but we’d like to highlight the key essential skills you’ll need to drive great behavior and the subsequent results.

Listening

Engaged listening shows respect toward others by demonstrating that their opinions matter. Listening is an essential skill that most of us do miserably. Instead of deeply listening, we formulate what we are going to say next, think about a different topic, don’t listen at all, or multitask with our smartphones—you get the picture. We are not present and in the moment with the other person. Most of us actively filter what is being said, ⁷ hearing and evaluating only a portion of what the other person is saying. We then base our response exclusively on the information we allowed to enter our awareness, rather than the entire explanation. Considering how important effective communication is and given our poor listening skills, it’s amazing we get anything accomplished! We’ll have more to say on this important skill later in this chapter.

Communicating

Given our poor listening skills, communication is often a one-way flow of information. To be an effective coach, you need the ability to create a dialogue, an effective conversation where information is flowing between people, not at them! Being a good communicator requires all other coaching skills that work synergistically to create a personal connection between coach and learner. As you begin to develop your listening skills, you’ll be amazed at the improvement in your overall communication. Always remember: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” ⁸

Observation

Most people are moving so fast that they miss seeing what is happening around them. We’ve all had experiences where we failed to hear what was being said and did not see what was happening in front of us. Our fast-paced world of 24/7 news, social media, smartphones, and connectivity only adds to our inability to focus and deeply observe our environment. ⁹ We’ll cover Go and See in a few pages and explore the importance of this coaching skill.

Support

As a manager, supporting your people is part of your job. But what does it mean to effectively support someone? In a lean IT transformation, it includes connecting with a person at his or her level and providing the nurturing and grooming the person needs to grow professionally as an effective team member. It also includes challenging people to strive toward a worthy goal, which may very likely appear to be out of reach. This is tough work because most people don’t get excited (at least at first) about striving for goals that appear to be impossible to achieve. Helping people see the next step is often all it takes to motivate them to take action. As a coach, you must find a balance between challenging and supporting what works best for the person you are working with. One size does not fit all and each member of your team will require a different mix depending on personality, skill level, and willingness to follow an unmarked path of experimentation and problem solving.

Patience

Patience pays; to be a great coach you must demonstrate patience in order to make the necessary space for people to grow. If your people feel pressured and stressed by your impatience, they will take shortcuts and say the things they think you want to hear. This is fake lean, imitation learning, and a waste of everyone’s time. It turns out that developing your listening skills will also improve your patience, because good listening requires quiet focus. See the simple yet effective listening exercise later in this chapter.

Empowerment

Great coaches possess an ability to share the potential capability they see in someone in such a way that people see it in themselves. People tend to live up to the expectations and perceptions of those they respect and work with. As a coach, your ability to inspire others to see the hidden greatness that lies within them is a necessary talent. Here’s a tip: If you can inspire yourself to see your potential greatness and use that to drive new behaviors, you will be able to effectively do so with others. Don’t get discouraged when you find you are good at this with some people but not with others. This is common and has to do with your natural personality and that of the person you are coaching. You will have an instant connection as a coach with some people, and what feels like a repellent with others. As you gain more experience, you will learn to modify your words and approach to effectively connect with the person you are coaching so they become more self-initiating and empowered. A final note here: Empowerment is not the same thing as “go do whatever you want!” Empowerment is placing people in a position to use their own thoughtful judgment to methodically solve problems. Before you can do this, your team will need the mindset, skill set, and tool set we have been exploring throughout this book.

Respectful Leadership

You can buy people’s time and hands with a paycheck, but to access their creative brilliance and deep caring about how to make things better, you must enable and inspire them to see themselves in a much greater role. We have mentioned respect for people several times and now is a good time to dig deeper into this important topic. Most people intuitively understand that getting people to own their problems will lead to higher levels of engagement and drive better problem solving, productivity, quality, teamwork, morale, safety, etc. Here’s the key to engaging people: When people know their opinion matters and accept ownership of their problems and solutions to those problems, they see themselves as valuable because they feel valued! When they personally align the valueadding elements of their daily work with a motivating purpose, great things begin to happen!

In our experience, the most effective way to enable and inspire people is to connect with them at a very real and personal level. The currency of this connection is respect. Much has been written about respect for people; in fact, it is one of the two main pillars of the Toyota Way, the company’s system of values. Toyota describes respect as . respecting the individuality of each person within the group, respecting their contributions, their ideas, as well as their cultural or personal beliefs. It also means respecting the natural environment.” ¹⁰ When you connect with people through respect, you instill a yearning to be more and to achieve more.

Leading with Respect

In the book Lead with Respect ¹¹ , the authors provide some valuable insights on what respect looks like and how respecting people can drive engagement, accountability, hands-on problem solving, and people development. The authors do a skillful job demonstrating lead-with-respect behaviors, exploring seven core components while telling the story of a CEO struggling to create a culture of excellence.

Go and See

This has been a central maxim within lean for many years, but has seldom been practiced by managers. Go and See is all about visiting the gemba to understand by observing—silently watching people and process to stand in the shoes of the people doing the work and seeing deeply what their work experience is all about. This seems like an obvious and straightforward thing to do, but it is deceptively difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, most managers are uncomfortable going to the gemba to just watch and quickly take charge and tell people what to do. There is certainly a time and place for dialogue with your team, but initially Go and See is about silent observation and learning by looking.

So what are you looking for when you Go and See? First, do your people understand the goals they are trying to achieve? Is it clear whether they are winning (moving closer to their goal) or losing? Next, how well are people working together? What is the degree of collaboration and communication? Finally, how are problems identified, captured, and resolved? Of course, there is more to see and learn, but you need to understand these three areas in order to support your team’s success.

Questions to ask as a manager include:

• Do I Go and See on a routine basis?
• What is my purpose for visiting the gemba?
• How much looking and learning do I do (as opposed to talking and directing)?
• How do I know if my gemba visits are effective?

Challenge

It is important for managers to understand that showing respect to your people is not the same thing as being nice and well mannered. Friendliness and courtesy are not what we are talking about here. ¹² To improve performance, people need a challenge—a worthy goal to aspire toward. The more we challenge ourselves and strive to achieve a goal where we do not know the solution, the greater our confidence grows as we experience success!

Ballé breaks challenge into four steps:

1. Define success.
2. Agree on the problem(s).
3. Agree on criteria for an acceptable solution.
4. Agree on an acceptable pace of progress.

Questions to ask as a manager include:

• Am I challenging my people to achieve meaningful and specific goals?
• Do team goals align with our organizational purpose?
• Do we have clarity and agreement around the four steps?
• How do I know if my challenge to the team is effective?

Listen

We touched on this key coaching skill earlier in the chapter. Here’s a simple exercise you can do to assess your level of listening: The next time you are listening, ask yourself, “Where is my focus right now?” ¹³ Often the response is a voice in your head that says, “I am thinking about my next meeting” or “I am not entirely focused on what this person is saying.” As soon as you notice this, consciously redirect your attention to the speaker’s words. If you sense that you missed a significant portion of the conversation, say, “I’m sorry, but I wasn’t completely focused. Can you please repeat that last bit?” Of course, don’t do this too often or people will stop talking to you!

Questions to ask as a manager include:

• How important is it for me to develop good listening skills?
• What is it like to be standing in the shoes of the other person?
• What are the barriers the other person is facing?
• How would I know if I am accurately seeing things from the other person’s perspective?

Teach Problem-Solving Skills

The bonding agent that pulls together the elements of respect for people, organizational purpose, people development, and continuous improvement is problem solving. Problem solving is a universal, topic-neutral mindset, skill set, and tool set that is the centerpiece of leading with respect. If we truly respect people, our most important role as managers is to develop them to their full capabilities. When people feel they have the autonomy, support, and opportunity to improve their work environment, they feel the respect from their managers and peers.

We explore problem solving extensively in Chapter 6 and use the term problem-solving scientists to describe the atmosphere of a workplace where methodical problem solving is a way of life. To become good at problem solving, people need

• The opportunity to practice
• Good coaching support
• Time to think
• Time to try things, fail, learn, and try other things

The tragedy we see in the lean community is that many companies only employ event-based, episodic occasions (often referred to as kaizen events) to apply problem solving. While periodic problem-solving events can be effective, on their own they are not enough. If you want to effectively instill problem-solving skills in your people, they need to be practicing those skills every day. We know this sounds extreme, but we have never found a high-performing, lean organization (IT or otherwise) that gained proficiency solely using projects, workshops, and kaizen events to develop these skills.

Questions to ask as a manager include:

• Do I believe that problem solving is a key skill I need to develop in my people?
• Does my team have the opportunity to develop their problem skills every day?
• Am I qualified to coach my team in problem solving?
• If not, what can I do to become a good problem solver myself, and then develop my coaching skills?

Support

As managers, we intuitively know we need to support our teams to achieve the results we are accountable for. In terms of leading with respect, the support we’re talking about has everything to do with daily problem solving. As people begin to actively engage in problem solving, they will encounter obstacles to making the changes they want to test, they will experience failures and setbacks, and they will be frustrated and stymied. This is all part of the normal growth process when learning a new skill. Consider the time, effort, and frustration you might have experienced learning to play a new sport (say, golf) or musical instrument. Without some form of nurturing support, you might have given up.

If you think about it, the daily problem solving we’re describing is probably radically different from the behavior that you are currently getting from your people. In order for people to want to try new things, they must feel safe and see a potential benefit to making the change. Engaging people with respect to try new things is perhaps the most supportive thing you can do as a manager. Why? Because you want them to do the thinking, the learning, the discovering, and the growing! You cannot do this for them; they must do it themselves. Mike likes to say, “Lean is not about trial and error; it’s about trial and discovery.”

Support your people by encouraging them to proactively take responsibility for solving problems that impact them, trying new ideas, and failing forward ¹⁴ by learning from mistakes and tenaciously persevering. Don’t allow failures and setbacks to cause you or them to abandon the goal.

Questions to ask as a manager include:

• Do I support my people to become autonomous problem solvers?
• Do I actively encourage them to try new ideas even if they may not work?
• Do I instill a failing-forward mentality in my team?
• What behaviors do I demonstrate when failures and setbacks are encountered?

Enable Teamwork

As a manager who wants to nurture lean thinking and behavior, you very likely know how important effective coordination is within your team and among the various departments and suppliers that provide inputs and receive outputs. Leading with respect includes developing skills to work effectively with others. Communication, including listening, is at the top of our list. If you consider each of the chapters in this book, you may notice that they all contribute to effective collaboration and teamwork: purpose, process, visuality, problem solving, and strategy alignment complement one another to enable effective teamwork.

Comparable to problem solving, effective teamwork requires daily practice to develop the skill set required to be an effective team when things aren’t going well and difficulties are encountered. It’s easy to be a team when everything is running smoothly, but what happens when a major bug is discovered in a new release? Do we begin pointing figures and deflecting blame, or do we rally as a team to address the issues at hand?

It is response to adversity and challenge that defines the degree to which effective teamwork is embedded in the social fabric of a group and of an organization.

Questions to ask as a manager include:

• How important is effective teamwork? Why?
• How do I actively encourage (or discourage) effective teamwork with my people?
• How do I know if my people are effectively working as a team among themselves and with other groups?
• What happens with my team when difficulties and challenges arise? Do we come together or do we come apart?

Learn

If you want to be a good manager, you need to be curious and always learning from the experiences of gemba. Going to gemba to really see, creating a challenge, deeply listening, teaching problem solving, supporting your people, and enabling effective teamwork will require deep learning on your part. And it never ends! You will be learning, discovering, experimenting, failing, and succeeding for the rest of your career. Learning is the skill that will help you to grow as a person and as a manager.

As you learn to apply these skills, you will also discover a deeper understanding of people’s potential capabilities as well as your own. Your paradigm of what is achievable will expand, as will your faith in people to accomplish the seemingly impossible. Your understanding of what motivates and inspires people will grow with experience. And perhaps most importantly, your ability to lead with humility will emerge as a part of your character.

Humility, as we are using it here, means that you will be comfortable not having all the answers and value the fact that the answers need to come from the people working for you. The people at the front lines know the problems they face at a level that no manager could ever fully understand. Someone once said, “No idea is held so precious as our own.” ¹⁵ The people who conceive improvement ideas hold them close, identify with them at a personal level, and commit to making them work.

Lean is about lifelong learning, and leading with respect is perhaps the greatest teacher you can learn from as a manager. It is useful to review these practices on a regular basis (we do it monthly) to reflect on strengths, opportunities, and your next area of personal growth.

The Coach in You—A Reflective Journey

In this chapter we’ve covered the pivotal role of managers actively engaged as coaches enabling transformation by effectively developing people. Effective coaching drives and accelerates an effective lean IT transformation. The manager’s journey is a reflection of the organization’s journey. The importance of developing yourself into a great coach can’t be overstated, so start now! If you can find a good coach to mentor you, your development will be faster but probably just as painful because of how uncomfortable it feels to step into a new role for which you lack proficiency. As a manager, you may be very comfortable and accustomed to knowing what to do and how to get results. As a coach enabling a lean IT transformation, you may feel woefully inadequate. Relax; this is natural and fundamental to Leading with Respect!

Notes