This week I’m speaking with John Dyer, an author, speaker, teacher and consultant in team based continuous process improvement. With over 30 years experience, he is the President of John Dyer & Associates where he works with leaders in many different industries in the area of process improvement and leadership development.
In this episode we talk about the different styles of leadership and how they apply to transforming the overall culture of an organization. We also chat about John’s book, The Façade of Excellence, and how it relates to different types of leaders and sustainable process improvement.
What You’ll Learn This Episode:
- How continuous improvement has changed over the years
- Culture of continuous appearance
- John’s book, The Facade of Excellence, and why he wrote it
- The main ingredient to making any improvement initiative successful
- Why leaders need to adapt to different situations
About the Guest:
John Dyer is the President of John Dyer & Associates, where he works with leaders in a variety of Continuous Improvement and Operational Excellence initiatives. John is also the author of the book The Façade of Excellence, Defining a New Normal of Leadership.
Important Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-dyer-75a646/
www.amazon.com/Thefacadeofexcellence
Full Episode Transcript:
Patrick Adams
Our guest today is John Dyer. And John is an author, speaker, teacher consultant in team based continuous improvement in many different industries. I’m excited to have you on the show, john, with over 30 years experience. JOHN is the president of john Dyer and Associates where he works with leaders in many different industries in the area of process improvement and leadership development. So welcome to the show, john. Thank you for having me. Yeah, absolutely. So we were just talking prior to hitting the record here. And you were recently on another podcast with a friend of mine, Paul, and had some really, really great conversation with Paul and and, you know, I watched the podcast, and I was like, I need to get John on the show. He seems to have some experience and knows what he’s talking about. Right?
John Dyer
Yeah. And I thoroughly enjoy discussing lean and improvement and telling, you know, previous war stories. It’s anything to help people learn what mistakes to avoid, and, you know, ways to accelerate their improvement efforts.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. And that’s why I love the lean community so much, because, you know, I keep meeting people like you, john, and I just think about how amazing it is that, you know, so many of us are so willing to just share and and and have these great discussions with each other, you know, because also not, we don’t all agree on everything either. But the fact that we’re willing to have some conversations about tools, techniques, approaches, right and even have some hard conversations at times. You know, that’s what makes this such a great community. Right.
John Dyer
Right. Absolutely. And, you know, and everything is evolving, you know, what we used to do 30 years ago, is significantly different than what’s being done today. You know, as more and more people learn, what works, what doesn’t work, you know, the role that culture plays the role that leadership plays, it has a profound impact on not only the current success of the improvement activities, but long term sustainability.
Patrick Adams
I agree. 100%. With that, and obviously, you’ve been doing this for a long time, over 30 years. Right. So one of the questions that I had is, you know, back in the earlier days, you know, earlier 30 2030 years ago, you know, of Lean Six Sigma, continuous process improvement, what was it like back then what, what, and what made you want to get into this field, even,
John Dyer
You know, back that long ago, early in my career, there were no books about Lean, there were no books about continuous improvement, Six Sigma, any of that sort of thing. You know, this was the early days of my career when I was at General Electric, I was with GE for the first 10 years of my career. And early on, I started getting interested in what process improvement really is all about. In my book, I highlight a specific story that caused me to change my entire thinking about how processes work and how important it is to have a well designed system for people to be successful. Because, you know, I was constantly seeing people being berated for problems they were creating, that they had no real responsibility for. The system was designed for them to have defects. So that really bothered me, but this one particular situation, it was on second shift. I had just really gotten started so I was still kind of shadowing the person that was teaching you what to do. And at the end this was in major appliances for GE And this was where we made top mount refrigerators. Okay, well, the case line, the line that made the case for the refrigerator, the very last piece of equipment on that line broke, defaulted, shut down. And so that caused the entire system to backup where we made cases. Now between our area and final assembly, there was this large storage queue literally larger than a football field, with people manually pushing refrigerators down roller conveyors, and we had about four hours worth of inventory in that storage queue between the case line and the assembly line. So here, this piece of equipment goes down, everything backs up, final assembly keeps going because they’re taking stuff out of inventory. Well, when we started trying to diagnose what the problem was with this piece of equipment, it was felt that it was one of the motors that had burned out. Of course, we didn’t have a spare motor. So we had to call across town to have one driven in by taxi cab. They installed it when they installed the new motor. They wired it incorrectly because the panel had been mislabeled. Oh no, when they flip the switch, a little puff of smoke comes out. And it was fried. Oh, so of course, we had to call to get another one brought in, and hooked it up correctly this time. Once they turned it on, it turned out it wasn’t the motor. After all, it was the gearbox between the motor and the machine. And then when we opened up that gearbox, it had been out of oil for obviously a very long time, all the gears were ground down to just nubs.
Of course, we didn’t have a spare gearbox. So we had to have one of those driven in by taxi, but the new gearbox flipped the switch, and finally the machine started working properly. Total downtime was six hours. Wow. Although the final assembly shut down for two hours and okay. And in this plant, we produced a refrigerator about every 20 seconds, we can imagine that Hmm. So this was a big deal. So the meeting we had the next morning to figure out what went wrong. The plant manager said his first words were Who are we going to fire today? Hmm. Right. And then my boss’s boss jumped in and said, You know, these things happen, there’s just no way to predict when these things are going to happen. And what we have uncovered is a six hour problem. So we need to expand the storage area by another two hours, and that’ll fix this, huh. And the plant manager like, Okay, sounds reasonable, make it happen. And that was the end of the meeting. And I talked to my boss after everybody had left. And I was like, wait a minute, what just happened? You know, right. We didn’t talk about why didn’t we have the spare parts? We didn’t talk about the mislabeled panel, we didn’t talk about the gearbox. It hadn’t had any oil in it for, you know, months and months. And it completely destroyed itself. Why didn’t we discuss any of that, and it was like, you know, john, you’ll learn, just keep your head down, don’t make waves, you know, we’re going to expand the storage area. And that’s it. So that’s what that’s where the flip the switch in my brain flipped and said, You know that this isn’t right, we need to start looking at things differently. We need to start really challenging how the system is designed, and what’s causing things to fail versus first trying to figure out who to blame and second covering up with inventory.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. That’s what got me interested. What a great story. I love that. And then I bet I guarantee you, there’s people listening right now that can relate to that, right, I was thinking, you know, even the the six hours being the amount of time that it was, it’s like, for everything that you had to do bringing in the different pieces of equipment and things. I mean, six hours seems actually like a lower amount of time. In comparison, what I’ve seen some companies be down for a couple of days, and sometimes having to ship parts from other countries even you know, in in that can be obviously very alarming, especially when you are trying to run a manufacturing operation where like you said, you’re putting out a part every every 30 seconds.
John Dyer
Yeah. So that’s why there was a lot of urgency and, you know, we were willing to pay, you know, the the cost just for the taxi was just extraordinary. But we were willing to pay that in order to get the parts we needed in as quickly as possible. Right, right. Because we knew that for every, you know, hour we were down, you know, this is a 2000 employee plant. So, if you’re down for an hour, you’re paying a lot of people to sit around doing nothing and then you it’s right and then of course you don’t have the product to sell and at that time We were selling every refrigerator we could possibly produce demand was actually higher than capacity. So we were. And as you all know, when you go to a store to buy a refrigerator, if they’re out of GE, you’re not going to wait for it, you’re just going to go to another brand insight. And we’ll just buy that. Right. So it was it was
Patrick Adams
a very big deal. But so the answer was to just boost up inventory, increase inventory to cover it up, right, so how many? How many organizations have you seen over the past 30 years with similar approaches?
John Dyer
Oh, all the time. And actually, that’s, that’s what prompted me to write my book, The facade of lean, or the facade of excellence, actually, the facade of excellence, because there were so many times that I would go into a factory. And some of these factories would be on tours at conferences, you know, lean conferences being lifted up, as you know, the alene example. Sure. And you would walk through the factory, and you would see con bond squares painted on the floor that says, you know, one pallet, and there’d be 10 pallets stacked on top of each other in that one square. And it’s like, wait a minute, it’s one thing to say that you’re doing these things, it’s a whole nother thing to actually do it, you actually follow the theory understand the reasons for doing these things, and put it into practice, so that it drives a completely different set of behaviors.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. That’s very similar to what I call having a culture of continuous appearance, right? Where you appear, you have everything, you know, the of the tape on the floors, you have the value stream maps on the walls, but do you really understand what goes behind that in order to really make it happen to really see the benefits to, you know, to to fulfill the the outcome or to receive the outcome of the efforts that you put in? If you don’t have the the right stuff behind it, then, you know, it’s it’s not going to work? Right. So let’s talk about, yeah, it’s just a facade. So let’s talk about your book. So what you mentioned just a little bit about why you wrote the book, can you just give us a little bit of an overview of your book, The facade of excellence, defining a new normal of leadership, and maybe talk a little bit more about why you wrote the book?
John Dyer
Right, you know, for the last eight years or so I’ve been writing articles for industry magazine. And one of them was titled, The facade of lean that’s been tricked me up earlier, but and a publisher actually read that article and approached me and said, you know, would you want to turn this into a book? And I was like, Sure, absolutely, I’d love to. So the book, the way it’s written, and the way a lot of my articles are written is in story format. Kind of like the goal, if you sure read the goal. So I start each chapter with a narrative that runs throughout the entire book. And I make it clear up front that every single example in the story part is based on real facts. There’s one as an example, there’s one scene where one of the machinists, is having problems with parts sticking in their machine, because they just went to a new supplier that has poor quality material. And the answer he’s given is, he’s given a stick to unjam the machine, bypassing the the guarding on the machine. Well, I’ve I’ve that’s happened with me, you know, I line was down, and we needed the parts. And I was basically given a stick, and I was told to stand on top of the machine and unjam every time it jammed, which was about every third or fourth cycle. And that’s how we ran for the entire eight hour shift me standing on top of a machine on jamming parts. So the first half of each chapter is a narrative. The second half is kind of lessons learned and how to apply what you learn in from the story portion. And in the story, the way it’s written, it follows two executives. One is his name is Jim Brown. He’s new to the company. But he wants to do all of this the right way. He wants to get the employees engaged. He wants to, you know, start doing teams and really have empowered teams, but he inherits a staff that is very reluctant to change. And so he has to win them over. First, the second main character in the book, his name’s Frank Smith, he’s been there for a while different division, but the same company, and he does it all the wrong ways and uses fear and intimidation even manipulates the data to the point of lying about certain aspects of the data, just to stay ahead of the curve. There’s some pretty big twists and turns throughout At one point in the book starts to shift from these two executives to one of the employees on the shop floor, her name is Mary, she really goes out of her way to become a champion for the change process, but then the rug is yanked out from underneath her. And there’s my favorite passage and the entire book kind of reflects on what she might think in that in, you know, at that time, you know, he or she’s been exposed to how great it can be to work on a team to actually do process improving, and actually be listened to actually see the fruits of their labor, see, the system’s improving, see that the metrics are actually all getting better, and their lives are becoming much easier, you know, actually enjoying coming to work in the morning. And then having all that yanked out from underneath you and having it all go back to the original way things were done. And at one point, and I’ve actually heard this quote from several employees that have experienced this same situation, she says, It would have been better to have not done any of this process improvement, and been exposed to how great things could be, than to live this, and then have to go back to the old ways, and realize how bad things really are. Wow. So it’s the book is meant to not only do some lessons on leadership, and I’ve got some things in there about, you know, the differences between mission, vision, strategy and values and how that fits in with leadership. But it’s really more of an example of why the culture has to change in order for any process improvement effort to be sustainable.
Patrick Adams
Wow, that’s powerful. And I love I love the stories too. And as you’re, as you’re talking through the characters, I’m actually identifying people that I’ve worked with in the past, you know, that that would fit those those same characteristics, I have to ask, are those are those characters based on real people that you’ve worked with in your past?
John Dyer
I’ve actually had clients call me up and say, Hey, wait a minute, was this so? And so? And I’m like, No, you know, it’s a compilation. And that’s why that’s why I write in story format, because I don’t want to put anybody on the spot. I don’t want anybody to think of, you know, Hey, he’s talking about me. But it’s a compilation of a lot of people I’ve worked with in the past. And it is interesting, you know, one of my clients, the CEO of it’s a pretty good sized company, about a dozen or so plants and distribution centers. And he read the book. And he said, the whole time he was reading it, he was thinking there’s no way anyone could be as bad as Frank Smith. And then after he finished reading the book, all he could see around him for the next two weeks were Frank Smith. And then he realized that he was behaving like Frank Smith. Wow. And that was a big, aha moment for him. And he ended up buying books for his entire staff. And every week for about four weeks, they actually discussed two or three chapters in their staff meetings. That’s great. And then there’s his staff ended up buying the book for, for their stats. So it actually led to some great conversations that they wouldn’t have been able to have otherwise, because they could talk about the characters in the book, without reflecting on any one person within their company. So it really opened the door to some really great conversation. Well,
Patrick Adams
That’s great. Well, john, I want to change, change gears a little bit here and talk about a couple other things that that, that I’ve learned, as you know, getting to know you a little bit more, you know, if you and I are both connected on social media, and recently you posed a question, and I’m curious to hear what you discovered with some of the answers to that question. You said, What is the main ingredient to making any improvement initiatives successful and sustainable? What a great question. And I’m really interested to hear what you what you learned as people responded to that,
John Dyer
Actually, yeah, as I was preparing to write the book, I put that out on social media and ended up getting over 100,000 interactions on that question. And then I put all the responses into a word cloud, and that’s actually in the book. But the two responses that were by far, the highest number of items in the word cloud were the words leadership and commitment. And I think those two go hand in hand. And I think there’s a reason why they were the two top items, you know, of course, there were a lot of other things. On culture and trust and listening, and you know, all those kinds of things. Sure. But by far, leadership and commitment came out on top.
Patrick Adams
Wow, that’s great. And and I think that that supports a lot of what I’ve seen, in my experience as well. Leadership is a huge part of what it takes to sustain a true continuous improvement culture or even to kick off a transformation or, or any kind of work around continuous improvement or becoming a learning organization. So when it comes to leadership, what would you say, you know, are those different styles? And then how do they apply to transforming the culture of an organization?
John Dyer
You know, it’s interesting, because I get asked a lot of times when I’m working with a client, from the executives, how should we behave differently in order for lean to be successful? Hmm. And then, you know, I compare that to a lot of Dr. deming’s teachings, you know, early, early on, Dr. Deming was one of the few people talking about the same things, you know, the importance of improving a system and, and so forth. And Dr. Deming, I actually had the opportunity early in my career to sit in on a couple of Dr. deming’s classes and, and I took tons of notes, I still have the notebooks. And he actually wrote me a handwritten note that’s hanging up on my wall of my office. So I’m a big Dr. Deming fan. And he’s got his 14 principles of how to run an effective organization. And many times, if you look through those 14, he talks about substituting leadership. But he never really talks about what does that mean. So that’s what I really started to dig into when I wrote my book. And I started discover, there are many different forms of effective leadership. And it all depends on the situation that that organization is going through at that time. So I, I drew out a spectrum between dictator on one side and collaboration on the other side, and I broke it into four, four different styles. The first style is what I call the crisis leader. It’s the closest to dictator and we are in a crisis mode, you want someone who’s going to take charge, and really make tough decisions to lead the organization out of that crisis, sure. But they also want to get out of the crisis as quickly as possible, because the longer you’re there, the more it wears on the entire organization. The second style is now you’re starting to go down the path of making improvement happen. Second style is the ideal generation leader, we are asking your employees for ideas on how to make improvement happen. And that’s a very important step, because it starts to get the employees to think about the future, think about how things could be different. But it’s critically important to listen to those ideas, explain why you might not be able to implement some of those ideas, but also show that you are willing to implement other ideas, right. Third is the third style is the team forming leader. And again, this is another big step towards collaboration, we are now entrusting a team of employees to come together and with, with some guidance from the leader, make some tough decisions and actually implement improvement ideas on their own. And then the fourth, its closest to collaboration is the empowerment leader, a leader that’s willing to give up their span of control, and actually allow a team to make the tough decisions, to work on problems directly next to the process. Real Time, you know, actually, when a problem occurs on a production line, actually seeing a group of employees come together and right there on the shop floor, start, you know, sketching things out on a whiteboard doing a quick process map, doing a quick root cause discussion, five whys and then solving the problem without even going up the chain of command doing it right there on the on the shop floor. And you know, Patrick early, you mentioned that you were with the Marines, I believe in the military. First of all, thank you for that. Thank you, service. But if you think about how those four styles would apply in the military, they become very obvious, right? If if there is a situation where a division is under attack, you want a leader you want a general or whoever’s in charge to step up and say, okay, troops, this is what we’re going to do to get out of this crisis, right. This is who’s going to do what I’m in charge. You know, listen to my words. I may not be right all the time, but at least everybody is listening to a single voice. To make things happen, but a good general, a good leader knows that as soon as possible, they’re going to want to start pulling in other commanders, other people who know what’s really going on out in the battlefield, and having their sit down discussions to say, Okay, what should our strategy be? How can we turn this from a crisis situation to an advantage? How do we start taking the lead on the battlefield. And so that’s where they’re an idea generation leader, then once you start setting your objectives and saying, Hey, we need to go take that hill over there. Let’s form a squad. Let’s you know that and this is the team leader, we’re going to give them their their directives, we’re going to say, this is what we want you to accomplish. But we’re going to let you decide the best way to make that happen. And then finally, you know, the the fourth styles, maybe you have a group of elite, military type folks that you say, okay, we’re going to send you on a on a special mission. And you’re going to be cut off from from the leaders, but we’re going to get you know, we’re going to train you Well, we’re going to make sure you understand what the objectives are, we’re going to make sure that you’re following the rules of engagement and the values that we have set out. But while you’re doing this mission, there may be problems that pop up that we won’t know about, because you’re going to be cut off from us that you’re going to have to handle on your own, and you’re going to have to resolve in order to get the objective completed. And that would be the empowerment leader stop for so that’s people need to understand that there isn’t just one answer to that question of what is leadership, it can be multiple situations, but you’ve got to be willing to adapt to what the organization needs at that particular time.
Patrick Adams
It’s such a great point, john it and and there, unfortunately, there are leaders out there that that don’t have that ability to adapt, and, you know, either their own, they’re they’re all the way on one side of the spectrum, or they’re all the way on the other side. And if they’re not able to adapt to different circumstances or situations that could that can be detrimental to an organization or to a team as well, would you agree?
John Dyer
Oh, absolutely. And you’re hitting upon the core point of all this is that one is first way to recognize there are different leadership styles, to to start developing people into being a custom to each of those styles, and knowing when it is appropriate to use each of those styles. But think how important it is for like the people who hire leaders for the future. Let’s say you have a leader that has taken an organization all the way to style three, and is ready to start going into stock for and then all of a sudden, they retire or they get hired away or for whatever reason they leave. And the people who are hiring, that replacement doesn’t understand these four different styles. And they go out and hire someone. That’s a really, really great style one crisis leader. And now all of a sudden, you’ve got an organization that is really pumped about working on teams and doing things together to make improvement happen. And now all of a sudden, they’ve got a new boss, who is basically treating everything as a crisis and is leading by command and control and saying, you know, okay, this is the way we’re going to do it. And all of a sudden, it’s like the air deflates from the balloon. Right? And, and actually, it could make things worse than they were before you started the improvement efforts. And that’s why it’s critically important that everybody in the organization is on board with these changes that need to take place.
Patrick Adams
Yes, I agree. So obviously, you know, we talked through the four leadership ship styles here. And I appreciate you giving the military reference because that that makes a lot of sense to me, obviously, in working with for and with many different leaders while I was in the military. And I’m curious to hear if you have any examples of how these leadership styles maybe were applied in an actual lean implementation for those that are listening that maybe haven’t served or that maybe that reference didn’t didn’t jive with them. What about an actual lean implementation?
John Dyer
You know, one of my favorite examples is one that after I left General Electric, I went to work for a company called Ingersoll Rand. And they have a lot of products that people would recognize. They may not recognize the company name, but at that time, it’s changed a lot since then, but at that time, we own companies like Bobcat front end loaders, and club car golf cars and Schlag locks. Well, there was this one particular plant that when we started down, this journey was denied. was in pretty tough shape, especially from a cultural standpoint. And Anna Anna performance, you know, when you ordered one of the products from this particular plant, it would arrive at the customer’s location somewhere between eight and 12 weeks later. And when they open the box, there was a 20 to 30% chance that something would be missing or wrong or require them to send it back, which then they’d have to wait another eight to 12 weeks. So that but that was just the norm in that industry. Well, we started looking at each of the different process families, and we put dedicated process improvement resources in those areas. And they were tasked with helping to implement the ideas from the employees to make improvement happen. So one particular part of the plant was a paint and plating area, or coatings area. And it was an awful shape. In fact, the nickname for this area was the armpit of the plant. Hmm. That’s how bad it was. Nobody wanted to work in the armpit, right? Because it was a dirty, smelly, dark, I mean, just awful place. So we hire a full time chemical engineer, who was a terrific person as far as relating to people very well. And but he didn’t know anything about how to paint or plate. So he started day one, talking to the employees as equals, you know, you all know this lot better than I do, I might know the chemical background of how this works. But you all know how the equipment works, how the processes work, so we need to really, you know, help each other out here. But he recognized that the first thing that needed to be addressed was the cleanliness of the area. So he went into crisis leader mode and said, Alright, for the next, you know, six months, while we’re learning all about how these systems work, I’m going to be making some tough decisions. But we we’ve got to get this part of the plant back up to speed, you know, we’ve got to address safety issues, we’ve got to address environmental issues, we got to clean the place up, we got to get better lighting, we got to paint the floors, we’re gonna paint the walls, we’re gonna do all the things to make this a showpiece. So he was in crisis mode. Then he started getting the employees engaged and asking for their inputs. What do you what would you like to see next? What would you like to see improved? What kind of ideas do you have for making improvement happen? Then he started forming some teams to look at specific projects on how to how to make things even better than they were starting to become. And then eventually, he got to the empowerment mode where one of the lines would go down. And literally, a group of employees would come together right there on the shop floor. No engineers involved, no supervisors involved. And they would diagnose what the problem was real time. Put, you know, they’d have spare parts right there on the shop floor. And they would replace those items and get the line back up and running. And then, most importantly, and I thought this was very cool. They would then meet again at lunch, and talk about why did that problem occur? And how can we make sure it never happens again, on their own, you know, now, this was a three year span of time. Yeah. But during this three years, those employees understood everything there was about how the process worked. They understood the tools of Lean and Six Sigma and continuous improvement. They understood how to work together as a team and how to solve problems together. And they were very proud of the accomplishment in that area did become a showpiece for the plant. When they started, we would shut final assembly down at least two or three times every week for lack of parts coming from the coatings area. Three years later, they had gone for over a year without shutting assembly down once for lack of hearts. Wow. So again, this stuff really does work if done the right way. And if the right things are put into place.
Patrick Adams
Right, right. No, I appreciate that. I appreciate that example to what a great example and and again, I think there’s probably many people that are listening that can resonate with, with similar examples, right. And similar leadership styles or leaders that may be are able to flex between the different styles. So I appreciate you sharing that with us. Well, john, this is this has been a really great conversation. Obviously, love talking with you and chatting through some of the different things that we talked about today. Back to your book real quick, the facade of excellence, defining a new normal of leadership. If someone wanted to, to grab the book, where would they go to to find that
John Dyer
It’s available on amazon.com Barnes and Nobles comm you know, all the.com places? Sure. So yeah,
Patrick Adams
okay. And we can throw that in the show notes too. If anybody is interested, there’ll be a link to the book in the show notes. And then also, if anybody has any other questions or anything, or they want to reach out to you is anywhere specifically that they can reach you or, or even connect with you around maybe some of the consulting or coaching that you do.
John Dyer
Yeah, the best way is through LinkedIn, I use LinkedIn quite a bit. So if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, and
Patrick Adams
you know, that’s the best way to communicate. I’m also on Twitter at john Dyer pi for process improvement. So feel free to join me on Twitter. We’ll drop both of those links into the show notes as well then. So if you’re listening in and you want to reach out to John, check out the show notes. You’ll have a link to his LinkedIn as well as his Twitter. JOHN, thanks again for joining us today and and giving us kind of an overview of your continuous process improvement journey as well as an insight look into your book and the four leadership styles. Appreciate your time today.
John Dyer
Thank you, Patrick. I appreciate being invited.
Patrick Adams
All right, take care. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe. This way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined. Please give us a review. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Our guest today is John Dyer. And John is an author, speaker, teacher consultant in team based continuous improvement in many different industries. I’m excited to have you on the show, john, with over 30 years experience. JOHN is the president of john Dyer and Associates where he works with leaders in many different industries in the area of process improvement and leadership development. So welcome to the show, john. Thank you for having me. Yeah, absolutely. So we were just talking prior to hitting the record here. And you were recently on another podcast with a friend of mine, Paul, and had some really, really great conversation with Paul and and, you know, I watched the podcast, and I was like, I need to get John on the show. He seems to have some experience and knows what he’s talking about. Right?
John Dyer
Yeah. And I thoroughly enjoy discussing lean and improvement and telling, you know, previous war stories. It’s anything to help people learn what mistakes to avoid, and, you know, ways to accelerate their improvement efforts.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. And that’s why I love the lean community so much, because, you know, I keep meeting people like you, john, and I just think about how amazing it is that, you know, so many of us are so willing to just share and and and have these great discussions with each other, you know, because also not, we don’t all agree on everything either. But the fact that we’re willing to have some conversations about tools, techniques, approaches, right and even have some hard conversations at times. You know, that’s what makes this such a great community. Right.
John Dyer
Right. Absolutely. And, you know, and everything is evolving, you know, what we used to do 30 years ago, is significantly different than what’s being done today. You know, as more and more people learn, what works, what doesn’t work, you know, the role that culture plays the role that leadership plays, it has a profound impact on not only the current success of the improvement activities, but long term sustainability.
Patrick Adams
I agree. 100%. With that, and obviously, you’ve been doing this for a long time, over 30 years. Right. So one of the questions that I had is, you know, back in the earlier days, you know, earlier 30 2030 years ago, you know, of Lean Six Sigma, continuous process improvement, what was it like back then what, what, and what made you want to get into this field, even,
John Dyer
You know, back that long ago, early in my career, there were no books about Lean, there were no books about continuous improvement, Six Sigma, any of that sort of thing. You know, this was the early days of my career when I was at General Electric, I was with GE for the first 10 years of my career. And early on, I started getting interested in what process improvement really is all about. In my book, I highlight a specific story that caused me to change my entire thinking about how processes work and how important it is to have a well designed system for people to be successful. Because, you know, I was constantly seeing people being berated for problems they were creating, that they had no real responsibility for. The system was designed for them to have defects. So that really bothered me, but this one particular situation, it was on second shift. I had just really gotten started so I was still kind of shadowing the person that was teaching you what to do. And at the end this was in major appliances for GE And this was where we made top mount refrigerators. Okay, well, the case line, the line that made the case for the refrigerator, the very last piece of equipment on that line broke, defaulted, shut down. And so that caused the entire system to backup where we made cases. Now between our area and final assembly, there was this large storage queue literally larger than a football field, with people manually pushing refrigerators down roller conveyors, and we had about four hours worth of inventory in that storage queue between the case line and the assembly line. So here, this piece of equipment goes down, everything backs up, final assembly keeps going because they’re taking stuff out of inventory. Well, when we started trying to diagnose what the problem was with this piece of equipment, it was felt that it was one of the motors that had burned out. Of course, we didn’t have a spare motor. So we had to call across town to have one driven in by taxi cab. They installed it when they installed the new motor. They wired it incorrectly because the panel had been mislabeled. Oh no, when they flip the switch, a little puff of smoke comes out. And it was fried. Oh, so of course, we had to call to get another one brought in, and hooked it up correctly this time. Once they turned it on, it turned out it wasn’t the motor. After all, it was the gearbox between the motor and the machine. And then when we opened up that gearbox, it had been out of oil for obviously a very long time, all the gears were ground down to just nubs.
Of course, we didn’t have a spare gearbox. So we had to have one of those driven in by taxi, but the new gearbox flipped the switch, and finally the machine started working properly. Total downtime was six hours. Wow. Although the final assembly shut down for two hours and okay. And in this plant, we produced a refrigerator about every 20 seconds, we can imagine that Hmm. So this was a big deal. So the meeting we had the next morning to figure out what went wrong. The plant manager said his first words were Who are we going to fire today? Hmm. Right. And then my boss’s boss jumped in and said, You know, these things happen, there’s just no way to predict when these things are going to happen. And what we have uncovered is a six hour problem. So we need to expand the storage area by another two hours, and that’ll fix this, huh. And the plant manager like, Okay, sounds reasonable, make it happen. And that was the end of the meeting. And I talked to my boss after everybody had left. And I was like, wait a minute, what just happened? You know, right. We didn’t talk about why didn’t we have the spare parts? We didn’t talk about the mislabeled panel, we didn’t talk about the gearbox. It hadn’t had any oil in it for, you know, months and months. And it completely destroyed itself. Why didn’t we discuss any of that, and it was like, you know, john, you’ll learn, just keep your head down, don’t make waves, you know, we’re going to expand the storage area. And that’s it. So that’s what that’s where the flip the switch in my brain flipped and said, You know that this isn’t right, we need to start looking at things differently. We need to start really challenging how the system is designed, and what’s causing things to fail versus first trying to figure out who to blame and second covering up with inventory.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. That’s what got me interested. What a great story. I love that. And then I bet I guarantee you, there’s people listening right now that can relate to that, right, I was thinking, you know, even the the six hours being the amount of time that it was, it’s like, for everything that you had to do bringing in the different pieces of equipment and things. I mean, six hours seems actually like a lower amount of time. In comparison, what I’ve seen some companies be down for a couple of days, and sometimes having to ship parts from other countries even you know, in in that can be obviously very alarming, especially when you are trying to run a manufacturing operation where like you said, you’re putting out a part every every 30 seconds.
John Dyer
Yeah. So that’s why there was a lot of urgency and, you know, we were willing to pay, you know, the the cost just for the taxi was just extraordinary. But we were willing to pay that in order to get the parts we needed in as quickly as possible. Right, right. Because we knew that for every, you know, hour we were down, you know, this is a 2000 employee plant. So, if you’re down for an hour, you’re paying a lot of people to sit around doing nothing and then you it’s right and then of course you don’t have the product to sell and at that time We were selling every refrigerator we could possibly produce demand was actually higher than capacity. So we were. And as you all know, when you go to a store to buy a refrigerator, if they’re out of GE, you’re not going to wait for it, you’re just going to go to another brand insight. And we’ll just buy that. Right. So it was it was
Patrick Adams
a very big deal. But so the answer was to just boost up inventory, increase inventory to cover it up, right, so how many? How many organizations have you seen over the past 30 years with similar approaches?
John Dyer
Oh, all the time. And actually, that’s, that’s what prompted me to write my book, The facade of lean, or the facade of excellence, actually, the facade of excellence, because there were so many times that I would go into a factory. And some of these factories would be on tours at conferences, you know, lean conferences being lifted up, as you know, the alene example. Sure. And you would walk through the factory, and you would see con bond squares painted on the floor that says, you know, one pallet, and there’d be 10 pallets stacked on top of each other in that one square. And it’s like, wait a minute, it’s one thing to say that you’re doing these things, it’s a whole nother thing to actually do it, you actually follow the theory understand the reasons for doing these things, and put it into practice, so that it drives a completely different set of behaviors.
Patrick Adams
That’s right. That’s very similar to what I call having a culture of continuous appearance, right? Where you appear, you have everything, you know, the of the tape on the floors, you have the value stream maps on the walls, but do you really understand what goes behind that in order to really make it happen to really see the benefits to, you know, to to fulfill the the outcome or to receive the outcome of the efforts that you put in? If you don’t have the the right stuff behind it, then, you know, it’s it’s not going to work? Right. So let’s talk about, yeah, it’s just a facade. So let’s talk about your book. So what you mentioned just a little bit about why you wrote the book, can you just give us a little bit of an overview of your book, The facade of excellence, defining a new normal of leadership, and maybe talk a little bit more about why you wrote the book?
John Dyer
Right, you know, for the last eight years or so I’ve been writing articles for industry magazine. And one of them was titled, The facade of lean that’s been tricked me up earlier, but and a publisher actually read that article and approached me and said, you know, would you want to turn this into a book? And I was like, Sure, absolutely, I’d love to. So the book, the way it’s written, and the way a lot of my articles are written is in story format. Kind of like the goal, if you sure read the goal. So I start each chapter with a narrative that runs throughout the entire book. And I make it clear up front that every single example in the story part is based on real facts. There’s one as an example, there’s one scene where one of the machinists, is having problems with parts sticking in their machine, because they just went to a new supplier that has poor quality material. And the answer he’s given is, he’s given a stick to unjam the machine, bypassing the the guarding on the machine. Well, I’ve I’ve that’s happened with me, you know, I line was down, and we needed the parts. And I was basically given a stick, and I was told to stand on top of the machine and unjam every time it jammed, which was about every third or fourth cycle. And that’s how we ran for the entire eight hour shift me standing on top of a machine on jamming parts. So the first half of each chapter is a narrative. The second half is kind of lessons learned and how to apply what you learn in from the story portion. And in the story, the way it’s written, it follows two executives. One is his name is Jim Brown. He’s new to the company. But he wants to do all of this the right way. He wants to get the employees engaged. He wants to, you know, start doing teams and really have empowered teams, but he inherits a staff that is very reluctant to change. And so he has to win them over. First, the second main character in the book, his name’s Frank Smith, he’s been there for a while different division, but the same company, and he does it all the wrong ways and uses fear and intimidation even manipulates the data to the point of lying about certain aspects of the data, just to stay ahead of the curve. There’s some pretty big twists and turns throughout At one point in the book starts to shift from these two executives to one of the employees on the shop floor, her name is Mary, she really goes out of her way to become a champion for the change process, but then the rug is yanked out from underneath her. And there’s my favorite passage and the entire book kind of reflects on what she might think in that in, you know, at that time, you know, he or she’s been exposed to how great it can be to work on a team to actually do process improving, and actually be listened to actually see the fruits of their labor, see, the system’s improving, see that the metrics are actually all getting better, and their lives are becoming much easier, you know, actually enjoying coming to work in the morning. And then having all that yanked out from underneath you and having it all go back to the original way things were done. And at one point, and I’ve actually heard this quote from several employees that have experienced this same situation, she says, It would have been better to have not done any of this process improvement, and been exposed to how great things could be, than to live this, and then have to go back to the old ways, and realize how bad things really are. Wow. So it’s the book is meant to not only do some lessons on leadership, and I’ve got some things in there about, you know, the differences between mission, vision, strategy and values and how that fits in with leadership. But it’s really more of an example of why the culture has to change in order for any process improvement effort to be sustainable.
Patrick Adams
Wow, that’s powerful. And I love I love the stories too. And as you’re, as you’re talking through the characters, I’m actually identifying people that I’ve worked with in the past, you know, that that would fit those those same characteristics, I have to ask, are those are those characters based on real people that you’ve worked with in your past?
John Dyer
I’ve actually had clients call me up and say, Hey, wait a minute, was this so? And so? And I’m like, No, you know, it’s a compilation. And that’s why that’s why I write in story format, because I don’t want to put anybody on the spot. I don’t want anybody to think of, you know, Hey, he’s talking about me. But it’s a compilation of a lot of people I’ve worked with in the past. And it is interesting, you know, one of my clients, the CEO of it’s a pretty good sized company, about a dozen or so plants and distribution centers. And he read the book. And he said, the whole time he was reading it, he was thinking there’s no way anyone could be as bad as Frank Smith. And then after he finished reading the book, all he could see around him for the next two weeks were Frank Smith. And then he realized that he was behaving like Frank Smith. Wow. And that was a big, aha moment for him. And he ended up buying books for his entire staff. And every week for about four weeks, they actually discussed two or three chapters in their staff meetings. That’s great. And then there’s his staff ended up buying the book for, for their stats. So it actually led to some great conversations that they wouldn’t have been able to have otherwise, because they could talk about the characters in the book, without reflecting on any one person within their company. So it really opened the door to some really great conversation. Well,
Patrick Adams
That’s great. Well, john, I want to change, change gears a little bit here and talk about a couple other things that that, that I’ve learned, as you know, getting to know you a little bit more, you know, if you and I are both connected on social media, and recently you posed a question, and I’m curious to hear what you discovered with some of the answers to that question. You said, What is the main ingredient to making any improvement initiatives successful and sustainable? What a great question. And I’m really interested to hear what you what you learned as people responded to that,
John Dyer
Actually, yeah, as I was preparing to write the book, I put that out on social media and ended up getting over 100,000 interactions on that question. And then I put all the responses into a word cloud, and that’s actually in the book. But the two responses that were by far, the highest number of items in the word cloud were the words leadership and commitment. And I think those two go hand in hand. And I think there’s a reason why they were the two top items, you know, of course, there were a lot of other things. On culture and trust and listening, and you know, all those kinds of things. Sure. But by far, leadership and commitment came out on top.
Patrick Adams
Wow, that’s great. And and I think that that supports a lot of what I’ve seen, in my experience as well. Leadership is a huge part of what it takes to sustain a true continuous improvement culture or even to kick off a transformation or, or any kind of work around continuous improvement or becoming a learning organization. So when it comes to leadership, what would you say, you know, are those different styles? And then how do they apply to transforming the culture of an organization?
John Dyer
You know, it’s interesting, because I get asked a lot of times when I’m working with a client, from the executives, how should we behave differently in order for lean to be successful? Hmm. And then, you know, I compare that to a lot of Dr. deming’s teachings, you know, early, early on, Dr. Deming was one of the few people talking about the same things, you know, the importance of improving a system and, and so forth. And Dr. Deming, I actually had the opportunity early in my career to sit in on a couple of Dr. deming’s classes and, and I took tons of notes, I still have the notebooks. And he actually wrote me a handwritten note that’s hanging up on my wall of my office. So I’m a big Dr. Deming fan. And he’s got his 14 principles of how to run an effective organization. And many times, if you look through those 14, he talks about substituting leadership. But he never really talks about what does that mean. So that’s what I really started to dig into when I wrote my book. And I started discover, there are many different forms of effective leadership. And it all depends on the situation that that organization is going through at that time. So I, I drew out a spectrum between dictator on one side and collaboration on the other side, and I broke it into four, four different styles. The first style is what I call the crisis leader. It’s the closest to dictator and we are in a crisis mode, you want someone who’s going to take charge, and really make tough decisions to lead the organization out of that crisis, sure. But they also want to get out of the crisis as quickly as possible, because the longer you’re there, the more it wears on the entire organization. The second style is now you’re starting to go down the path of making improvement happen. Second style is the ideal generation leader, we are asking your employees for ideas on how to make improvement happen. And that’s a very important step, because it starts to get the employees to think about the future, think about how things could be different. But it’s critically important to listen to those ideas, explain why you might not be able to implement some of those ideas, but also show that you are willing to implement other ideas, right. Third is the third style is the team forming leader. And again, this is another big step towards collaboration, we are now entrusting a team of employees to come together and with, with some guidance from the leader, make some tough decisions and actually implement improvement ideas on their own. And then the fourth, its closest to collaboration is the empowerment leader, a leader that’s willing to give up their span of control, and actually allow a team to make the tough decisions, to work on problems directly next to the process. Real Time, you know, actually, when a problem occurs on a production line, actually seeing a group of employees come together and right there on the shop floor, start, you know, sketching things out on a whiteboard doing a quick process map, doing a quick root cause discussion, five whys and then solving the problem without even going up the chain of command doing it right there on the on the shop floor. And you know, Patrick early, you mentioned that you were with the Marines, I believe in the military. First of all, thank you for that. Thank you, service. But if you think about how those four styles would apply in the military, they become very obvious, right? If if there is a situation where a division is under attack, you want a leader you want a general or whoever’s in charge to step up and say, okay, troops, this is what we’re going to do to get out of this crisis, right. This is who’s going to do what I’m in charge. You know, listen to my words. I may not be right all the time, but at least everybody is listening to a single voice. To make things happen, but a good general, a good leader knows that as soon as possible, they’re going to want to start pulling in other commanders, other people who know what’s really going on out in the battlefield, and having their sit down discussions to say, Okay, what should our strategy be? How can we turn this from a crisis situation to an advantage? How do we start taking the lead on the battlefield. And so that’s where they’re an idea generation leader, then once you start setting your objectives and saying, Hey, we need to go take that hill over there. Let’s form a squad. Let’s you know that and this is the team leader, we’re going to give them their their directives, we’re going to say, this is what we want you to accomplish. But we’re going to let you decide the best way to make that happen. And then finally, you know, the the fourth styles, maybe you have a group of elite, military type folks that you say, okay, we’re going to send you on a on a special mission. And you’re going to be cut off from from the leaders, but we’re going to get you know, we’re going to train you Well, we’re going to make sure you understand what the objectives are, we’re going to make sure that you’re following the rules of engagement and the values that we have set out. But while you’re doing this mission, there may be problems that pop up that we won’t know about, because you’re going to be cut off from us that you’re going to have to handle on your own, and you’re going to have to resolve in order to get the objective completed. And that would be the empowerment leader stop for so that’s people need to understand that there isn’t just one answer to that question of what is leadership, it can be multiple situations, but you’ve got to be willing to adapt to what the organization needs at that particular time.
Patrick Adams
It’s such a great point, john it and and there, unfortunately, there are leaders out there that that don’t have that ability to adapt, and, you know, either their own, they’re they’re all the way on one side of the spectrum, or they’re all the way on the other side. And if they’re not able to adapt to different circumstances or situations that could that can be detrimental to an organization or to a team as well, would you agree?
John Dyer
Oh, absolutely. And you’re hitting upon the core point of all this is that one is first way to recognize there are different leadership styles, to to start developing people into being a custom to each of those styles, and knowing when it is appropriate to use each of those styles. But think how important it is for like the people who hire leaders for the future. Let’s say you have a leader that has taken an organization all the way to style three, and is ready to start going into stock for and then all of a sudden, they retire or they get hired away or for whatever reason they leave. And the people who are hiring, that replacement doesn’t understand these four different styles. And they go out and hire someone. That’s a really, really great style one crisis leader. And now all of a sudden, you’ve got an organization that is really pumped about working on teams and doing things together to make improvement happen. And now all of a sudden, they’ve got a new boss, who is basically treating everything as a crisis and is leading by command and control and saying, you know, okay, this is the way we’re going to do it. And all of a sudden, it’s like the air deflates from the balloon. Right? And, and actually, it could make things worse than they were before you started the improvement efforts. And that’s why it’s critically important that everybody in the organization is on board with these changes that need to take place.
Patrick Adams
Yes, I agree. So obviously, you know, we talked through the four leadership ship styles here. And I appreciate you giving the military reference because that that makes a lot of sense to me, obviously, in working with for and with many different leaders while I was in the military. And I’m curious to hear if you have any examples of how these leadership styles maybe were applied in an actual lean implementation for those that are listening that maybe haven’t served or that maybe that reference didn’t didn’t jive with them. What about an actual lean implementation?
John Dyer
You know, one of my favorite examples is one that after I left General Electric, I went to work for a company called Ingersoll Rand. And they have a lot of products that people would recognize. They may not recognize the company name, but at that time, it’s changed a lot since then, but at that time, we own companies like Bobcat front end loaders, and club car golf cars and Schlag locks. Well, there was this one particular plant that when we started down, this journey was denied. was in pretty tough shape, especially from a cultural standpoint. And Anna Anna performance, you know, when you ordered one of the products from this particular plant, it would arrive at the customer’s location somewhere between eight and 12 weeks later. And when they open the box, there was a 20 to 30% chance that something would be missing or wrong or require them to send it back, which then they’d have to wait another eight to 12 weeks. So that but that was just the norm in that industry. Well, we started looking at each of the different process families, and we put dedicated process improvement resources in those areas. And they were tasked with helping to implement the ideas from the employees to make improvement happen. So one particular part of the plant was a paint and plating area, or coatings area. And it was an awful shape. In fact, the nickname for this area was the armpit of the plant. Hmm. That’s how bad it was. Nobody wanted to work in the armpit, right? Because it was a dirty, smelly, dark, I mean, just awful place. So we hire a full time chemical engineer, who was a terrific person as far as relating to people very well. And but he didn’t know anything about how to paint or plate. So he started day one, talking to the employees as equals, you know, you all know this lot better than I do, I might know the chemical background of how this works. But you all know how the equipment works, how the processes work, so we need to really, you know, help each other out here. But he recognized that the first thing that needed to be addressed was the cleanliness of the area. So he went into crisis leader mode and said, Alright, for the next, you know, six months, while we’re learning all about how these systems work, I’m going to be making some tough decisions. But we we’ve got to get this part of the plant back up to speed, you know, we’ve got to address safety issues, we’ve got to address environmental issues, we got to clean the place up, we got to get better lighting, we got to paint the floors, we’re gonna paint the walls, we’re gonna do all the things to make this a showpiece. So he was in crisis mode. Then he started getting the employees engaged and asking for their inputs. What do you what would you like to see next? What would you like to see improved? What kind of ideas do you have for making improvement happen? Then he started forming some teams to look at specific projects on how to how to make things even better than they were starting to become. And then eventually, he got to the empowerment mode where one of the lines would go down. And literally, a group of employees would come together right there on the shop floor. No engineers involved, no supervisors involved. And they would diagnose what the problem was real time. Put, you know, they’d have spare parts right there on the shop floor. And they would replace those items and get the line back up and running. And then, most importantly, and I thought this was very cool. They would then meet again at lunch, and talk about why did that problem occur? And how can we make sure it never happens again, on their own, you know, now, this was a three year span of time. Yeah. But during this three years, those employees understood everything there was about how the process worked. They understood the tools of Lean and Six Sigma and continuous improvement. They understood how to work together as a team and how to solve problems together. And they were very proud of the accomplishment in that area did become a showpiece for the plant. When they started, we would shut final assembly down at least two or three times every week for lack of parts coming from the coatings area. Three years later, they had gone for over a year without shutting assembly down once for lack of hearts. Wow. So again, this stuff really does work if done the right way. And if the right things are put into place.
Patrick Adams
Right, right. No, I appreciate that. I appreciate that example to what a great example and and again, I think there’s probably many people that are listening that can resonate with, with similar examples, right. And similar leadership styles or leaders that may be are able to flex between the different styles. So I appreciate you sharing that with us. Well, john, this is this has been a really great conversation. Obviously, love talking with you and chatting through some of the different things that we talked about today. Back to your book real quick, the facade of excellence, defining a new normal of leadership. If someone wanted to, to grab the book, where would they go to to find that
John Dyer
It’s available on amazon.com Barnes and Nobles comm you know, all the.com places? Sure. So yeah,
Patrick Adams
okay. And we can throw that in the show notes too. If anybody is interested, there’ll be a link to the book in the show notes. And then also, if anybody has any other questions or anything, or they want to reach out to you is anywhere specifically that they can reach you or, or even connect with you around maybe some of the consulting or coaching that you do.
John Dyer
Yeah, the best way is through LinkedIn, I use LinkedIn quite a bit. So if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, and
Patrick Adams
you know, that’s the best way to communicate. I’m also on Twitter at john Dyer pi for process improvement. So feel free to join me on Twitter. We’ll drop both of those links into the show notes as well then. So if you’re listening in and you want to reach out to John, check out the show notes. You’ll have a link to his LinkedIn as well as his Twitter. JOHN, thanks again for joining us today and and giving us kind of an overview of your continuous process improvement journey as well as an insight look into your book and the four leadership styles. Appreciate your time today.
John Dyer
Thank you, Patrick. I appreciate being invited.
Patrick Adams
All right, take care. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe. This way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined. Please give us a review. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
0 Comments