Written by Jason Haines

“But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.” -Luke 22:26 NIV

While growing, I was surrounded by many characters on the sports teams I played on. We had the comedians, pranksters, rah rah leaders, and then there was the true leaders much like Benny the Jet from the movie The Sandlot. Within this movie, each teammate fulfilled a purpose and kept the team on the right path by doing the job they were on the team for. Not only their job given to them by the position they played, but also the job they inherited. Later in life, and when I entered the working world, I realized that really the working world was no different. You had all these people filling different roles and becoming a bigger part of the environment. All serving a purpose and keeping the organization moving forward, but all of them were being helped by the one person who usually was the most unassuming leader of the whole group. This person was serving all, excepting the flawed yet willing, and learning as much as they could from everyone all while balancing what they needed to get done.

Throughout the years I came to realize that playing on teams are much like life and work. Almost everyone wants to be part of something special and included in the ins and outs of what the team is all about. I really got a great insight into this and servant leadership when I worked at the foundry in Ohio. I had always been in a leadership role, but never a leadership role where I had full responsibility over people, the team, and the area in which we were all part of. So, you can say I had an extremely large hill to climb because I had to learn all the jobs - the people, the machinery, my responsibilities, and the inner workings of the facility. Not only that but overcome a fear that I wasn’t good enough to be the leader. Then one day I was speaking to one of the employees and he told me, “Don’t worry about what they think, just do what you think is right.” That stuck with me in that job and all my future jobs as well. Now mind you, I was a hell raiser in those days, so what was right at the beginning was not exactly what was right at the end. But my leadership journey wasn’t complete there and I wasn’t done learning a whole new way of thinking.

While I was at the foundry I dabbled in Lean Thinking, though I didn’t know that at the time we did a lot of things to improve the process and make things easier for my employees. How did I do this you may ask, and not call it Lean? Well, first I became an extremely helpful, onerous, and knowledgeable leader as well as building great relationships with my employees. This all may have gotten me started on my Lean journey and why I may argue with anyone that it doesn’t always take upper leadership buy in to get something started as many others try to say. I learned to treat my employees well and they in turn helped me out when I needed help. My crew worked well together and got along so we knew when someone was struggling and what needed to be done to help. We would try and drop anything and be there when they needed help in any way possible. But a lot of this came from them watching me make the sacrifices for them to be the best leader they needed.

I tell my wife all the time that that job may have been one of my favorite jobs of all time and it wasn’t just about the job, it was about my people. I know that I could never have continued in the job due to the physicalness of the position, but I know I would have helped create a better, more worker friendly environment. Little did I know I was really working in an environment that myself and my team created that was Lean. We just didn’t call it Lean Thinking because many of us didn’t know what Lean was. I also didn’t know that I was becoming a servant leader and a better and better leader daily, but just like Lean, I didn’t know what a servant leader was. It just seemed to come naturally.

I wasn’t always the person to seek out being a leader because I never thought that I was good enough to lead. What I did was just try to do my best and include everyone that I could in all that I could. There may be many reasons I wanted to bring all people along and I probably can’t pinpoint one reason, but I can pinpoint a couple of people. One of those would be my grandfather and the other would be my father-in-law. Both passed away a few years ago, but both were very good, unassuming leaders in their own right. I knew one all my life and the other for a short amount of time but learned many things from the two of them. A couple those things was to treat everyone the same and to help everyone regardless of what you may receive in return from those people. These are big things I take from my work, respect for all people.

Now Respect for People does not mean that you always must be always nice to people and that there are not times when you must have the tough conversations with the people that you care about. I think that Jesus may have said it best when sending the disciples out amongst the people, “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore, be as shrewd as snakes and as harmless as doves.” - Matthew 10:16 NIV. He, as do many leaders, realized that we would all have a tough time getting our ideas across but if we made friends of our enemies and those that are the hardest to get to buy in, we will be able to apply our ideas much easier and bring more people to the table. All leaders, not just servant leaders, must be striving to bring people aboard, but many are not. Many have the attitude that we can just find another person to fill the position, but Covid put a magnifying glass on this problem.

It was easy to just churn and burn through employees in the past, but the rise of the pandemic has put a microscope on this type of thinking along with many other things such as the lack of skilled workers, etc. But there is something that can help with all places and their current crisis of finding and hiring good employees, and that would be with the implementation of Lean and servant leadership. When I first started in Lean, in fact one of my friends told me this last week, I thought it was all about cutting jobs and eliminating people. Not wastes (frustrations), but people, in the early implementations and due to some bad thinking, this was what Lean was used for. So naturally all front-line workers were going to dig in and do anything they could to create chaos and failure within the organization. But after I started studying and using Lean, I found out quick it wasn’t about job elimination but about making jobs easier, building teams, creating leaders, stability, reducing chaos, and making better people and products. Respect for People and serving others by teaching them, growing them, and helping them succeed.

Many will ask how can Lean help with being a servant leader and what does servant leadership have to do with Lean? Lean is a set of tools to help in the process of making the work that is done easier and eliminating the wastes within work. This waste (frustration) elimination helps free up time, not only for the frontline workers, but also the leaders and managers through a process of standardization and visual workplace management. Visual management allows for the standards to manage the workplace while the leaders and frontline employees are thinking about and making the necessary changes to all the processes to allow for easier work. This in turn creates more leaders and those people, along with those already in place, become servant leaders who are trying to help each other out making the workplace better, safer, and more efficient. Which in the long run makes for a more stable workplace.

Helping build future leaders and ambassadors while also getting people home to their families. Allowing employees to enjoy their life and their jobs. This is what Lean is about. Respect for people (Stakeholders) in all areas and in all ways. If you don’t know where to start give Industrial Solutions a call to start the conversation.

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