Continuous Improvement or Respect for people - what is more important?

This is a question that comes up a lot in discussions when we're implementing some lean with clients, "If we want to have a lean culture what is more important, respect for people or continuous improvement? Surely, they are both equally important? "

No! It's kind of chicken in the egg, so if you think about it, if you want to have continuous improvement happing in your organisation, people have to feel like they're empowered to do that. They have to feel like they have a reason for them to improve. Now you can only do that, if you engage with people, you can only do that, if you respect people enough to let them do things to try things out. So, the first thing you have to build is that respect for people.

Respect for people is about making people feel worthwhile, it's about somebody being able to leave work at the end of the day and think I've done a good job today. Now that good job might be I hit my numbers, it might be I learned something new, it might be I helped coach a colleague, but they left that day for feeling fulfilled, feeling like they mattered and that's one of the things that a lot of companies I guess struggle with is if somebody should leave a company feeling like they matter.

Now it's not about pats in the back and high fives and all that sort of stuff, yeah it's nice everyone wants a pack in the back. One of the things about respect for people that people find challenging is that it is also about challenging people. It's about saying look here's the target and I know you're getting 10 of these done every hour but actually we need 12 that's the target I'm going to stretch you for that. It's not about setting impossible targets but it's about setting realistic targets that you say right you have to meet that how do we get there and asking them to come up with a way to do it not inflicting anything on them not forcing anything on them but saying what do you need to be able to do this

It's also about taking some decide and saying you're just not performing it's disrespectful to that person not to tell them that they aren't meeting expectations, it's disrespectful to their workers not to let them know that somebody isn't performing, and you know and that you're not willing to help.

It's about making sure you have the tools, the instructions, the processes. It's about making sure you're not overloading people you know it's not really that respectful of a person to treat them like a workhorse and at the end of the day they leave exhausted and feeling like well I did my bit but nobody else did. Respect for people is about helping each person, at the end of the day, be a little bit better than where yesterday and giving them space to be able to do that

If you think about it. if you have a situation where you don't let people make changes you don't let them try things out or that the culture is one where people know if they have a mistake or if they have a failure there's going to be trouble. You're not going to get very much in the way of continuous improvement. People are not going to want to try things just in case it goes wrong! So, building up and spending time developing the respect for people element in the short term is going to lead long term to far more contentious improvement and far better continuous improvement because people will be able to take a bigger leap if they feel safer in the environment, they're in.

If you don't have that respect for people at the start, you're never going to get true continuous improvement. You're not never going to have an environment where people feel safe to open up and try things, because if they think that the boss is going to come down to them for getting something wrong or the improvement that they're suggesting not working out, they're not going to stick the neck out, they're not going to do it.

So, like any other chicken and egg what comes first, you can't have a chicken without an egg, your respect for people is the egg, that's the seed that everything grows from, start there everything else is going to follow.

We put the call out to our Newsletter readers, on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for questions. Questions that people are struggling with around ISO, Lean or leadership that they wanted help with and we got some fantastic responses that we have loved reading through and thinking about how we can help. We can't answer everything but we'll do our best to get through as many as we can. 

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