by Lee Fried, on 22 Sep 2006 06:53 am
The Journey
Let the Work Begin
This week’s quote of the week was “sometimes you have to start where people are and not where you would like them to be.” That is exactly what we did yesterday in our first Hoshin planning retreat with the Model Line Leadership team. What surprised me was how far along they have come over the last couple of months. As I drove into the conference center yesterday morning I kept reminding myself that I would need to be patient with the team and not push them to far. What I experienced was the opposite. They were very ready to give up the past and at first were frustrated with me for continually bringing them back to the current state that is our reality. The day progressed with ups and down, frustration and excitement. All of the leaders let go of something…
We had prepared for weeks for yesterday and I think the prep really paid off. Basically, the team drew a line in the sand and said from this time forward we manage as a business first and a function second. All of them agreed to give up on “pet projects” that they had in queue for their functions and instead offered up the resources to support our transformation to a Value Stream structure. It is hard to express how hard this was for some of them. The average tenure on the team is probably fifteen years. Most of the leaders have grown up in these processes and with their heroic acts they have forged the current state. To simply state, “it is what it is” and we are going to now completely change course must have been incredibly hard for them, but they did it.
We now enter the messy stage of transformation where we need to transition for the batch and queue world of improvement by project to a world of improvement by process. In the short-term we will focus on the basics so in the long-term we can accomplish the breakthroughs.