Level Two Leadership in Lean

Level Two Leadership – Permission – You Can’t Lead People Until You Like People John Maxwell, in his book “The 5 Levels of Leadership” writes that this leadership level is about the human relationships that the leader has built up around him. Making the shift from Level 1 leadership -Position to Level 2 leadership- Permission is a person’s first real step into leadership.Leadership is influence, and when a leader learns to function on the Permission level, everything changes. This is where people do more than merely comply with orders. They start to follow. And they do so because they want to, not because they have to. Why? Because the leader influences people with relationships, not just position.Building relationships develop a foundation for effectively leading others. It also breaks down organizational silos as people connect across the lines between their job descriptions or departments. The more barriers come down and relationships deepen, the broader the foundation for leading others becomes.As a Level 2 leader, team management and team-building skills are skills that must be mastered. The most fundamental team management skill managers must master is the motivation of their team and their team members. You cannot accomplish your goals as a manager or team leader unless your team is motivated to perform, produce, and to deliver the results needed.Motivating each of the individuals on your team requires recognition by the manager or team leader that each team member’s motivation needs are different and that the primary source of their motivation comes from within the individual. And motivating the team requires a different approach from motivating the team members.Within lean management, teamwork is a further aspect of engaging individuals by getting them to build strong relationships across process steps, staff functions, and with suppliers. As Dr. Ishikawa once famously noted: the coworkers in the next step of the process are not our enemies, they are our customers.Motivation is relevant to lean because it's motivation through engagement. The article, How Do I Keep My Lean Team Motivated For The Long Term, by Michael Bale’, lists three key dimensions of motivation in a lean management system: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.Autonomy recognizes the need for individuals to have some control over what they do when they do it, who they do it with, and how they do it. The Andon system, for example, gives a very large amount of control to the individual worker over the entire chain. This is an essential part of lean management which requires careful nurturing and constant leadership to develop as it should.Mastery is about the drive to become better at what we do. Most of our organizations emphasize compliance over competence, an approach that kills engagement and kaizen every time. Mastery is about seeing your abilities not as finite but as infinitely improvable. This is the core of the kaizen spirit and this what people find so rewarding in kaizen when it is encouraged.Purpose is a strong need in most of us: we want to take part in something bigger, more enduring than our day-to-day. A key aspect of respect is to work hard at sharing the objectives of the company with every employee so they understand the larger picture.When people feel liked, cared for, included, valued, and trusted, they begin to work together with their leader and each other. And that can change the entire working environment. The old saying is true: people go along with leaders they get along with. You can like people without leading them, but you cannot lead people well without liking them. That’s what Level 2 is all about.Leadership...