by Lee Fried, on 23 Sep 2007 12:05 pm
The Journey
Quote of the Week
Last week I spent a morning with a couple bright members of our human resources team dicussing career development and career paths in a Lean organization and how they are different then in a traditional organization. It was exciting to see how receptive and open these team members were to new ideas and their willingness to be creative as we try and work through some challenges. These challenges include career development paths that are constructed around organizational functions, rewarding of specialized skills, and a culture that place prestige on those that have larger and not smaller functional budgets.
In the areas in the organization like the Model Line that are now deeply engaged in Lean transformation it has been necessary to begin to reshape the career development pathways in order to promote different types of behaviors. This has created a tension with our human resource systems, which is right now most visible with our compensation methods. These methods rely on benchmarking in the traditional market place, which means that jobs are priced against organizations that are most batch and queue. Thus the more specialized the skill set the higher the value. In a Lean organization as standard work for management is put in place it becomes possible for leaders to rotate across functions and leaders are promoted for their ability to transcend functions.
I chose the following quote from Lean Thinking to illustrate this difference:
The conventional idea of a career progressing up a ladder toward general management, with more and more direct reports, now needs replacement because the value stream doesn’t benefit. However, a new concept of a career in which more and more skills are gained and applied to more and more difficult problems is both good fore the employee and good for value flow. What’s more, gaining the agreement of employees that this is the path to the future is the key to self-perpetuating lean enterprises.