CEO Monthly December 2017

CEO MONTHLY / DECEMBER 2017 17 Why “Respect for people” Is the Secret Ingredient of Successful Teams g team. Why? Because John is not a marketing guy and he is far away from the area. However, sometimes colleagues from other departments may suggest a much better solution for your problem because they are not stuck in your daily routine and they don’t have the same boundaries that you have. As human beings, we like to put labels and we miss many opportunities by doing so. Toyota’s “Respect for people” culture teaches us the exact opposite. In order to evolve continuously, we need to challenge ourselves constantly, listen, learn and do not underestimate others. A real-life example from Cassandra Lin comes to notice that you should be open to new ideas. No matter where they come from. The 12-year-old created a recycling program that uses food grease from local restaurants to heat the homes of underprivileged community members. If a 12-year-old girl can give such an idea, imagine what is the potential of your colleagues and what you can miss by ignoring them. Respect for People’s Limits Even the most efficient modern machinery has limits. Then what about us people. We all have our physical, mental and emotional limits, and if we cross them, we eventually turn into a burden not only to ourselves but also to the company we work for. Keep this in mind, every time you give your employees extra work. If you overload your team, sooner or later occupational burnouts will appear. Consequently, productivity levels will decrease dramatically before you even realize it. You have probably heard about Kanban, a Lean-based method famous for its positive impact on productivity and efficiency. It is not accidental that one of the major Kanban practices is focused on limiting work in progress. This practice prevents the whole workflow from overloading and it focuses on single tasking. Through the years, it proved to be much more efficient than multitasking. And it is not just a statement. It is a scientific fact. Executing more than one task splits the brain and errors multiply. As a manager, you will probably want everything to happen as fast as possible. But be careful, because, in the end, you may receive badly executed work, internal conflicts and lоss of valuable employees. Bottom line “Respect for people” is a philosophy that is difficult to be described in a sentence or a paragraph. Respecting the people enables them to learn and improve on a regular basis. In other words, it is a mandatory prerequisite for achieving continuous improvement. Actually, the two major pillars of the Toyota way are interrelated in a very interesting way. As Mark Graban from leanblog. org describes it: “We practice continuous improvement because we have respect for people… we practice respect for people by engaging people in continuous improvement and challenging them to perform better… for the sake of our customers.”