Leadership behaviour and Lean culture: what the research shows

Culture follows behaviour — not posters

The most widespread mistake is to believe that culture is changed with value words on the wall, a kick-off and a poster in the canteen. The single best source for the opposite is John Shook, industrial anthropologist and former Toyota manager, in his award-winning article "How to Change a Culture: Lessons from NUMMI" (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2010).

Shook was there when Toyota and General Motors took over GM's plant in Fremont, California in the 1980s — at the time one of GM's worst, known for absence, conflict and dismal quality. Within a short time the same plant, with essentially the same workforce, became one of the best in North America. No people were swapped out. The system and the management behaviour were swapped out.

Shook's conclusion is simple and counter-intuitive: you don't change culture by first changing how people think. You begin by changing what people do — defining the desired behaviour, making it easy to perform, and reinforcing it consistently. Then the culture follows. It aligns with organisational psychologist Edgar Schein's classic model, which Shook himself refers to: culture is changed through visible actions and routines, not through appeals to values.

For an owner-manager, the point is liberatingly concrete: you don't have to wait for "the culture to be ready". You have to define a few actions and hold firm on them.

Why improvements crumble — and why it's rarely the employees

When an improvement doesn't hold, it's tempting to point at a lack of engagement among the employees. The research points elsewhere.

Nelson Repenning and John Sterman of MIT described, in "Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened" (California Management Review, 2001), what they call the improvement paradox: many companies invest in improvement programmes, but few create lasting results. The cause lies not in the chosen tools, but in how the new routines interact with the organisation's existing structure and incentives.

They named the mechanism the capability trap: the more pressure rises, the more the organisation falls back on "working harder" rather than "working smarter". Firefighting becomes the norm — and here is the decisive part: the company comes to reward the firefighting. The one who, through a heroic effort, rescues a late order becomes the hero. The one who quietly built a routine so the fire never arose is not seen. Over time the "firefighters" get promoted, and the organisation learns that prevention doesn't pay.

This is not a story about lazy employees. It is a story about a system that rewards the wrong behaviour. The quality pioneer W. Edwards Deming said it already in Out of the Crisis (1986): the vast majority of problems — he estimated around 94% — stem from the system, which is management's responsibility, not from the individual employees. Employees essentially do what the system makes possible and rewards.

That is why we at Prozanta work from the premise that operational problems are usually behavioural problems — and that the system shapes the behaviour. If the improvement is to hold, you have to change what is rewarded, not scold those who respond sensibly to it.

The management patterns that carry an improvement culture

If management's behaviour is the decisive variable, what behaviour are we then talking about? The literature — from Shook through Jeffrey Liker and Gary Convis (The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership, 2011) to Mike Rother (Toyota Kata, 2009) — converges on a few, recurring patterns. Rother's concept of the coaching kata captures the core: the leader's role is not to deliver the answers, but to ask, every day, the questions that build the problem-solving capability of the employees.

In practice, the load-bearing patterns look like this:

It sounds simple. The hard part is doing it consistently — even when the day is on fire. That is precisely where most fall away, and where the difference between an improvement that holds and one that disappears is decided.

What you can do tomorrow

The research only becomes valuable when it turns into action. Four concrete steps:

An improvement culture doesn't arise from value words. It arises — or crumbles — from what management does, day after day. It is the least glamorous and most decisive part of the work. And it is the reason we stay in operations until the new behaviour is anchored, not just until the presentation has been delivered.

To read on about why improvements don't hold, you'll find our review here: Why Lean implementations often fail.