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Tom Ehrenfeld: Can you teach the lean ideal of respecting people without actually bullying them?
By Tom Ehrenfeld, author of The Startup Garden and A Leader's Study Guide To The Gold Mine
- Last updated: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 - Save & Share - One comment
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From a distance, lean looks like such a nice, humanistic improvement approach—one that treats people with respect and generates knowledge from the ground up. That’s all well and good, but the practice of teaching, and doing, lean invariably involves conflict, frustration, and, to be honest, what seems like a fair amount of bullying from superiors to prod their employees to “get it.” Isn’t the reality of doing lean far more frustrating and conflicted than one would think? How do you get people on board in a meaningful way? How do you teach the gospel of respecting people without bullying them in practice?
One comment to “Tom Ehrenfeld: Can you teach the lean ideal of respecting people without actually bullying them?”
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Sandrine Olivencia
Operae Partners
Comment from Sameh
Time December 23, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Hello Tom,
From my view the definition of respecting people varies based:
- culture
- organization values
- industry
- job category of the practitioner
Being in software, I believe that we respect the team member if we allow her to sign-off for tasks rather than assigning them to her. The reasons is the developer knows more than the project manager/ team leader on the how to do the task and the involvements incurred to complete it.
Adding dead-line on the developer is kind of not respect, because she knows more on complexity of the task. We should trust the developer when she says the task requires double the duration we expected.
Being sensitive to the right of people to have pride in their craftsmanship is key for them to innovate. Also, they would feel respected as individuals.
In software the pyramid is toppled. Instead of getting directions the developers initiate what is required to be done.