GA 099 | How to Motivate People with Ron Pereira

You're listening to episode 99 with Ron Pereira.

Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira. Hey there.

This is Ron Pereira with Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy podcast.

As always, thank you so much for.

Taking time out of your day and your week to listen to the show.

And for watching our Lean In Six.

Sigma training videos over at GembaCademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now today is episode 99, which is obviously one away from 100. And I have to just tell you that episode 100 is not one that you're going to want to miss. You know, I like to say I think I did a pretty good job on the talk that we're going to share today, but episode 100 is like nothing, and I truly mean this, like nothing we have ever produced before. So if you listen to the show from time to time and just kind of check back in once in a while, that's totally fine. But you're going to definitely want to check back in for episode 100, which will come out next Thursday. But today what we're going to do is share the audio version of a live keynote address that I gave to one of Gemba Academy's customers. The customer is the Woodbridge Group and they're a really strong, lean thinking company, a Canadian based company, and they've been a customer of Gimba Academy for some time and they're doing some really good work over there. And they were having a session, if you will, or a meeting of all their top Lean thinkers in the company. And these folks were, it's a competition of sorts. These are all the best Kaizen events that had been done over the course of this previous year. And so this was kind of the award and they were also doing some best practice sharing and so forth. And so they asked me to, to come in and do the kind of the final keynote address to the, to the group and was happy to do it. They were meeting in El Paso, Texas, so we flew down there for a day and did the talk. Now we do have a video version of this that we will be releasing within Gemba Academy's Gemba Academy Live section of videos, but this is the audio portion. So during the talk, I really kind of get into the importance of intrinsic Motivation versus extrinsic motivation. Some of the things that we've talked about in the culture of Kaizen, our culture of Kaizen course. And we also get into the topic of culture and I think there's some really interesting stuff. I was managed to weave in some video clips and audio clips from previous podcasts that we've done and previous Gemba Academy Live episodes that we've done. So kind of a mix of me talking and also sharing some videos that made sense and kind of fit in with the story that I was telling you. So show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 99. Again that's gembapodcast.com look for episode 99. And again, be sure to check it back in next week for episode 100. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

It was an extremely hot Texas day and I just gotten on an airplane. We were flying to California for some meetings. I was settling into my seat and I happened to look out the window and I saw a man. He's a Baggage handler, probably 35, 36 years old. And the reason that I that he caught my attention was the way he was working. Now again, this was like August in Texas, like 105 degrees in the shade. Extremely hot. Yet this man was working like he had purpose. I just was blown away by the way he was working. And it wasn't the kind of effort like he was scared or someone he was going to be in trouble if he didn't do a good job. This man was genuinely invested in his work and it really just kind of blew me away. So I literally sat there and I watched this man work. And he had a smile on his face. He was talking to his colleagues, and he was probably the kind of person that you just like to be around, right? So I sat there and I just really was contemplating, like, what in the world was making this man so happy on 105 degrees day to do this job. So what I really wanted to do was jump off the plane and go up to him and just say, listen, I need five, 10 minutes. And I just wanted to know more about him, wanted to know about his work. I wanted to know about his life, really, and what was driving him. So as the plane took off, I remember sitting there in my seat and I kept thinking about that man. Then I was really thinking about my own life and about the times where I was highly motivated to do something. Starting Gemba Academy is a good example of that. Six years ago, I was highly motivated. Still am. Why was that? But then there was also times in my career where, you know, I haven't been. Wasn't always highly motivated. And I wondered why that was. You know, was it my boss? Was it the job? Was it the company? I didn't really have the answers on that plane ride, but on that day, I kind of committed to myself that I was going to figure it out. I was going to figure out what motivated people, and I was going to figure out how to help others, motivate people, if I could figure it out. Because I'm fascinated by excellence, and excellence can really come in any form. So this is a picture of my daughter, and she had been trying to do this. What is this? Something that helped me back walk over or something like this. And she'd been trying for weeks and weeks and weeks and couldn't do it. Her big sisters, who are very skilled cheerleaders and whatnot, were teaching her and coaching her and supporting her. She couldn't get it. Finally, she got it, and now she's unconsciously competent. She can do these things and much more with excellence. So I love seeing that in my children. I love seeing it when my colleagues. Greg, back here on the video camera, when our colleagues come up with some great, new, innovative idea. That's excellence, and I love that. But I also love excellence when I see people like that baggage handler who, no matter what their job is, they do it extremely well. And I love that. So what I want to do this evening is talk a little bit about what I've learned, because after that, I'm happy to say I did go on. When I set my mind to something, I'm pretty disciplined. And I researched and I learned and I read lots of books and I discovered many, many things. Matter of fact, we created a course called the Culture of Kaizen, where a lot of what I'm talking about tonight, we go into much more detail in that course. But before I start, I wanted to share a short video clip from a gentleman named Masaaki Imai. Mr. Amai, has anyone heard of Masaaki Imai? Yeah. Mr. Amai wrote this book called Kaizen, the Key to Japan's Competitive Success, long before the term lean was ever coined. There's a gentleman named Taiichi Ono. You may have heard he worked at Toyota. He was one of the chief architects of the Toyota production system. Mr. Imai brought Mr. Ono to America for the first time. So Mr. Imai is one of the last, literally original Lean, if you will, legends. And I've had the fortune to work with Mr. Armay for many years. We've had a great relationship with the Kaizen Institute. And on one particular day, Mr. Ramai was giving a talk to a room full of of C level executives. And the nature of the talk that day was how to build a culture of Kaizen and what he started his talk of. This is the very beginning of his talk. He said there's three criteria that must exist for authentic culture to really happen. And if you don't have these three, then you can't succeed. The first is of course, top management commitment, because top management has all the necessary resources. And if you want to inaugurate this company wide lean strategy, of course top management is the only person who can make it so that the first requirement, top management commitment. And second most important requirement is top management commitment. And the third most important requirement is, as you know, top management commitment. So the reason that I wanted to share that short clip, Mr. Amaya is great to listen to. His whole talk is included in Gemba Academy, so you can watch that if you'd like. But I just wanted to start by just saying how fortunate you all are to first of all be here. I mean, this is amazing that you bring all these people together for Kaizen, right, for continuous improvement and that your CEO is sitting here. I've been to companies around the world and I see many, many continuous improvement practitioners who really, really want to do good work. But unfortunately, they don't have this top management commitment. And it breaks my heart, it truly does, because these people want to do a good job. They're invested in it, they want to help their company, but their leadership won't get out of the way. Obviously, that's not a problem here with Mr. Daly and the rest of your team. So I just wanted to make sure that you all understood how fortunate you are, because that literally is half the battle. More than half the battle is having this top management commitment. Now, as I was preparing for this talk, Mike and I had kind of brainstormed some ideas of what to talk about. And I understand that you guys do engagement surveys. Most companies do these surveys for, you know, many reasons. Obviously, you want to understand, you know, what your folks are thinking, how they're feeling, you know, are they, are they engaged? Are there things that you need to work on as an organization? And I have no idea how your scores look. I haven't seen the surveys. But I do want to share a rather sobering statistic. The 2013 Gallup poll basically states that 30% of the US workforce is engaged, meaning 70% of all US workers are not engaged in their work. So if that were the case in this room, which I don't think it technically is, but if it were, you draw a line at this table, all these people aren't engaged. Now, that's a pretty scary statistic. What if it's 50%? What if it's 30%? If it's 50%, that means that when you go back to your office and you're walking through your shop or your office and you see 10 people, five of them aren't happy to be there. That's a big problem. Okay? And so we talk a lot about lean tools and concepts and whatnot, but I'm here to tell you that it doesn't really matter. The tools, honestly, they're easy. We have the videos. We'll teach you how to use the tools. But what's not easy is getting people engaged, is getting people bought in, getting people to do things differently. Because change is very hard for all of us. No one likes change. And sadly, this isn't a new problem. Dr. Deming has this awesome quote that if management stopped demotivating their employees, then they wouldn't have to worry about motivating them. Right? So what we've got to make sure as leaders of the organization is that we are not demotivating people. Okay? And so that's a lot of what we're going to talk about tonight. There's two primary ways of motivating people. These are some of the things that I discovered when I. When I research this. The first way, probably the most common way, is called extrinsic motivation. Now, extrinsic motivators are things like monetary bonuses or maybe, you know, getting some metric, and then you get a raise, okay? Some kind of reward for doing work. Some people will call this the kind of carrot and stick approach, where the carrot is the reward, and hopefully the employee will go after the reward and they get it. Then, theoretically, everybody wins. Well, the thing about extrinsic motivation is it actually is effective in one situation that I know of. So if you are in a production environment and you have hourly targets or something like that, then there are situations where some aspects of extrinsic motivation can work because what it does is it basically gamifies the work, right? And everybody likes to win, right? So we want to compete and do a good job. And that's the one time where an aspect of extrinsic motivation can be effective, but it shouldn't ever be. The only way. Because the fact of the matter is, if you don't work in a factory and produce product and extrinsic motivation is the only thing being brought to you, it can actually be counterproductive. It can be demotivating. Sometimes what will happen is, as the old saying goes, show me how you'll measure me and I'll tell you how I'm going to perform, right? And so if I know my metric is this, I may only care about that. And all the other things that I'm supposed to be responsible for are going to go, you know what? So a better way to motivate people, no matter if they're the shop floor to the executive suites, is what behavioral scientists refer to as intrinsic motivation. Research shows that when an employee, anybody, again, from any level of the organization, feels as if they have intrinsic motivation or that they can really do a good job, then they are going to be far more motivated to come to work and do an excellent job. Something that fascinates me is our brain. And our brain has. There's all kinds of brain chemicals. There's dopamine, there's serotonin, oxytocin. These are the things that make us feel good. When your child falls down and hurts their leg and they run up to you, the reason they're running up to you is because they want to hug. And what's happening when you hug them is oxytocin is flooding your child's body, and now she feels better. Literally physically, she feels better when you give her a hug. That's oxytocin. So to be sure, what I'm talking about here goes way above and beyond hitting a financial goal or goes way above any kind of monetary performance. It really, truly impacts the human person. So for intrinsic motivation to be in place, three things must exist. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose. So what I want to do is kind of walk through each one. We'll start with autonomy. Now, autonomy provides a sense of personal choice. So when you grant someone autonomy, it means to say that you're going to allow them to do their job. I grant Greg autonomy to run that video camera. I'm not saying Greg, I'm going to go over here. So pan over here, man. You know, so that would be micromanaging, right? Greg came in here and set everything up. I don't even know how to set it up. So that's a great way to have autonomy is don't even know how to do something and let your folks do it. Right? The opposite, obviously, of autonomy is micromanagement. And we've all done it. We've all been micromanaged, and we've all micromanaged. And you don't like it when someone micromanages you, and someone doesn't like it when you micromanage them. So what we need to do is we need to grant people autonomy. So last year, we were fortunate enough to go to a company called Damon Products. They're in Indiana, right by Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. And they truly get the concept of autonomy and trust. I've never seen anything like it. Now, they're a smaller company, but nonetheless, I've never seen a small company with the level of buy in that they have. This is one of their team leaders who basically tells us a little bit about how people trust and how they grant autonomy there at Damen Products. I think, for me, what I think makes it really work is the level of responsibility gets pushed down to the individual worker. Truly, every person here can impact what's going on. And having that ability really makes you take ownership in what you're doing and getting people to feel that ownership by them, feeling that they have a responsibility to do this and have the ability.

To make changes and make things better.

I think that's the key thing to it. And management allowing them to have that responsibility. Yeah, so management allowing them to have that responsibility. So we. I don't know how many people we interviewed that day, but just about everybody that we talked to said something similar to that. And this company is on fire for Lean. They're extremely profitable. They do. They're. They're beating companies who have much lower labor rates than they do. And so they're a very, very, very good company. Highly encourage you to check out the Damon Products Gemba Academy live episode in our subscription. So for autonomy to exist, there's. Dan Pink wrote a book. This is one of the books that I read. Highly encourage you read this book if you haven't. It's called Drive. The Surprising Truth of what Motivates People. And what Dan Pink talks about when he's speaking about autonomy is that there's four T's, task, time, technique, and team. So let's go ahead and kind of walk through each one. So for autonomy to be in place, you need to allow your associates to choose their job or how they do their job. Okay. The tasks that they do. Now, of course, certain people have certain things they have to do, so you can dictate that, but it would be like me saying, okay, Greg, now today, what I want you to do is I want you to go edit that footage. And don't worry about the other thing that you are working on. I want you to stop that. I want you to do this. So that would be the opposite of granting autonomy to Greg Time. Employees should have control over when they do things and how they do things. A perfect example of this that I've seen, you know, many companies do morning meetings, stand up meetings with, you know, the various value streams come together. One time there was a group of people and they came together and they said, you know what? I think this would be much more productive if we met right before lunch instead of in the morning. And the management was like, well, we've never done it before lunch, but go for it, try it. Next thing you know, everybody in the whole company changes when they meet to lunchtime because for their particular business, it made more sense. So that's a perfect example of granting somebody the autonomy to choose when they do something. Technique is to say that, you know, if you tell someone how to do it. The perfect example is Kaizen Events. What you guys are all here for, right? If you're running a Kaizen event and the team leader comes in and says, okay, here's what we're gonna do and here's exactly how you're gonna do it. Or the engineer comes in, right? The engineer that knows a lot, right? And the engineer tells everybody on the team, this is exactly what we're gonna do and how we're gonna do it. Now it goes break and go do it. That's not autonomy. You're not leveraging the people's brains that are on the team. Why are they on the team? Right? So we need to allow people to have the autonomy to understand how they're going to do something. And the fourth T is team. You should be able to choose who you want on that Kaiset event. It shouldn't be dictated to you, because if it's dictated to you on who you have to work with, well, it may not be the right team. Okay? So these are things that you need to start thinking about, if you don't already, for when you want to grant autonomy to folks in your organization. Now, to be sure, autonomy is not easy. It's a very hard concept. It's easy to talk about, extremely hard to do. It's hard to grant someone autonomy. But it's equally hard in many cases, believe it or not, for people to accept except autonomy. This is a picture of Greg and our colleague, Elaine Cresciotti. Elaine is our customer service manager. She's been with us for almost five years. And Elaine is fantastic. I've known her for a long, long time. And when we first started Gamba Academy, it was me, Elaine, and a couple other people, and we did everything. And Elaine would call me up and she would say, ron, I'm not sure what's on going to do. What did I do? And I knew in my heart that I shouldn't just answer. I wanted to, but I shouldn't. And so I'd say, I don't know. What do you think? And she didn't like it. Right, so here's a little audio clip. This is from a podcast that we.

Did well in previous jobs. I had always had very well defined job descriptions. This is what I was permitted to do in my job, and this is what. What I was not permitted to do. And if you wanted to deviate from the script, you had to get approval. So when I came to work for you all and I would have a customer come to me with a different situation that maybe required a different solution, I would come to you often and say, what should I do? What should I do? The customer wants to do this. And you would always say, well, what do you think? Do you have some ideas?

And how did that make you feel?

I didn't like it at first because I wasn't used to having that type of autonomy in my job. And when you're not used to that, there's a lot of fear because you think, well, what if the solution that I come up with, my boss disagrees with and then he gets mad at me and say, why did you do that? You shouldn't have done that. That was a bad idea. But you never did that, you know.

And there were times where she did have a bad idea, you know, and obviously we would never do anything to hurt a customer. But, you know, there's certain times when, you know, you got to let people go and experiment, and sometimes they have to fail, because in failure, we learn, right? But we have a very safe environment. Again, the Academy. No one's ever in trouble for failing. One of my daughters is a great little soccer player, and I used to coach her. I don't coach anymore. She's got real coaches now. But I used to tell her, daddy does not care if you make a mistake, but just make it going fast, baby. You know, that was my only rule. Daddy doesn't care if you make a mistake, so make it going fast. So give effort, right? Give effort. But that's what. That's why autonomy is so hard. It's hard to do. It's hard to give, but it's also hard to receive. But you have to have autonomy if you want to get intrinsic motivation. So that's autonomy. Now let's go ahead and transition into the second one, which is mastery. Now, mastery is super cool. It's that feeling that when you are working on a project and you fall into that zone. You know what I mean? Like, you get into it, and next thing you know, you look up. It's like, time to go home. And you're like, oh, what happened to the time? That's flow. That's when you. That's when you are achieving mastery because you're getting good at something. But here's the secret to mastery. There's three secrets, actually. The three principles. The first one is that you have to believe the work can be improved. So if someone gives you a task that you believe, there's just no way. It's impossible. Like, Ron, fly with your arms. Well, I can't fly with just my arms. Maybe I can strap something to them, but just my arm. I can't do it. I don't believe it. Okay, so you have to believe that you can do it. The second thing is, it has to be challenging. Okay? So if you give someone. You know, I think this is where it's okay on the. On the task aspect. I think it's okay for Mr. Daly to give you a hard task or a hard goal to achieve a stretch goal. I think those are good so long as they're not so crazy that you don't believe you can do it. But if. Yeah, I think I can do it, but it's going to be a challenge. So people kind of get into that, right? They feel that excitement. They feel that competitive spirit come out. So that's good. That's a good aspect of mastery. And the thing about mastery is it cannot be fully attained. That's what's kind of crazy about it, and that's why it's so perfectly suited with continuous improvement. You're never done, right? You're never done. It's continuous. So it doesn't matter how good you think you are, you can be better. That's really the secret to mastery, is making sure that you believe it can be done. It's challenging, but you know you'll never fully attain it. The third one is purpose. And this is. I hate to say one's more important than the other, but this one, in my opinion, is the key to this whole intrinsic motivation equation. So if you take one thing away from what I talk about tonight, it would be to simply ensure that you understand what this company's purpose is. What's your cause? What's your goal? Why do you exist? Why does the company exist? This is sometimes easy, sometimes hard. And when you understand why the company exists, then you can take it another level down and say, why does our business unit exist? Okay, and this is the power of why. And last year, I had the good fortune of interviewing Simon Sinek. Has anyone heard of Simon Sinek? He's a great, great speaker. Matter of fact, he has the third most watched TED talk of all time, with more than 25 million views. This is the famous why video that he has. Didn't intend for it to go viral like this, but it did, where he talks about the golden Circle. If you haven't watched this video, go to ted.com and watch it. But I interviewed Simon for our podcast, and one of the questions that I had prepared for him, I knew he wasn't going to like, but I asked it anyhow. I asked him if there was a particular why that was better than another. In other words, is there a better purpose than can you have a better purpose than someone else? And I knew I was going to fire him up, and I knew he was probably going to yell at me, and he did. But I'm glad that I asked it, because he gave a great answer. So let's hear no.

Because it's objective, right? All whys are positive. People say, look, I have a negative. You know that guy's a negative. Why? Nope. All whys are positive. The other thing is, all whys have nothing to do with product or service that you sell or offer. And you only have one. People are like, we have four whys. I'm like, no, you don't. You have one why. It is the sum total of who you are, how you were raised, the lessons you learned as a young person. And the rest of your life simply serves as an opportunity to either live in or out of balance with your why. The same with an organization. A why is why. Was the organization founded? What problem was it attempting to solve? The founders? What vision did they have? It's an origin story. And there's no such thing as a North Star why. Objectively, this is why. A why is important because your why may resonate with some people, but not others. And that's the point of stating and knowing your why, which is you want to attract the people who believe what you believe, and you want to be attracted to the people who believe what you believe. That's why, when we listen to political Races. We want our leaders or our would be leaders to tell us what they believe, not just what they would do. Because when we hear what they believe, we want to align ourselves with those who share our beliefs and that we trust that they will do the things to uphold those beliefs. And the same is true in a company. We want to know what the company stands for, why they do what they do, so that we can devote ourselves and our energies to helping them advance that cause. Otherwise, it's just a job, just a series of transactions. I do work, you pay me money. It's a transactional relationship.

So what I want to do now is just kind of turn the tables a little bit. And I want everyone just at their table to talk for just a few minutes to discuss what's your purpose, why do you exist as a company? And then maybe if you open to it, if a table or two wants to maybe share their answer, that would be awesome too. So just let's take a couple minutes, kind of discuss that. Okay. So obviously I need to give you more time to do a thorough job of this, but I'm curious, is there anybody open or comfortable maybe just sharing? Just a few. You don't have to come up with just one, but maybe a few ideas of why you think you exist as an organization. So I've been around this company for 32 years through the ups and downs and the goods and the bads. And I was around when the original founder of the company was here and his montage at the time was he created Woodbridge to create rewarding and sustainable jobs for the employees. And I think today that still holds. I wouldn't have been here for 32 years if I didn't believe it. So. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I think that's probably a big reason why you're so successful. Thank you. Thank you. So from a lean tool perspective, once you kind of get understanding your why and maybe you break it into some more tactical goals, there is a lean tool called Hoshin Kanri, or Policy deployment is another way of stating it. That is a fantastic tool to align the organization's targets from the very top all the way to the bottom of the organization. And so I think I know Mike is familiar with this concept and we obviously have content if you want to learn more about that. But fantastic tool, Hoshin Kanri, Policy deployment. So to summarize this first part of my talk, autonomy is important for intrinsic motivation. People want to be self directed. They want to have control over what they do. Mastery is when we feel like you're really achieving something, you fall into that state of flow and then purpose. We understand our why, our cause, what we're fighting for, why we get out of bed each and every day. The second part of my talk, what I want to talk about is culture. Because obviously a company's culture is the glue. I mean, without a strong culture, again, it doesn't matter how good you are at lean tools or even how good you are at producing a product. If you have a bad culture, a culture of corruption, for example, the company is not going to succeed. Okay, my favorite definition of culture, it comes from Herb Kelly here from Southwest Airlines. He says culture is what people do when no one is looking. I love that, right? It's like, what is my son really doing in that we're not looking? So that's what culture is. What do people do when the boss isn't looking? Did they do perfect one piece flow? And then as soon as they leave, let's go back. This is nonsense. They're not looking anymore. So this is why culture is so important. Now, another company that we visited, this guy, Paul Akers, who may have some people in the lean circle, probably heard of him. He wrote a book called Two Second Lean and he's one of my favorite people in all of the world. Paul is a fantastic leader of people. He's a fantastic lean thinker. He's a little bit crazy, I'm warning you. But he admits he's a little bit crazy. But his company, FastCap in Seattle is another smaller company. But they have multi billion dollar companies come and tour to learn what they do and how they do it. And when I say they have a lean culture, I truly mean it. It is embedded in everything they do, including how they take care of their bathrooms.

So we have three people that are responsible for cleaning the bathrooms every morning. And they stay just immaculate. Okay, so you can see again, everything's simple. The paneling simple, the woodwork simple, but yet it's a very clean and pleasant place. We even put natural light in the bathroom, which is not normal, deliberately, by design, because we know natural light is very powerful. So what I want to do is I want to show you how we clean a bathroom. But I do want you to notice how clean the bathrooms are. There's a couple things here before we get into the cleaning, I want to point out. So we thought lean about everything. So an extra roll of toilet paper, strategically placed, right? The toilet paper holder is lean. Look how easily it replaces. So simple. No struggle there, right? Bidet toilet seats from Japan. These are awesome. Toilet seats. And people say, why would you do that? Those are $500 toilet seats. Because we respect our people. Because we're trying to teach them to think differently about things. Now, this is the men's bathroom. The toilet seats down. There's no piss on the toilet. Everything's totally clean, right? Because we trained our people to think this way. We've had people come in here and say, this is advanced training for husbands. When you come here, think about it. When you come here as a young kid, you're learning to keep things at a very high level. What wife wouldn't appreciate a husband that.

Picked up that, hey, I gotta tell you, when every time I've used the bathroom at FastCap, I have never been more careful in my life, man.

And the truck drivers are too. The truck drivers come here and they know because our people actually train the truck driver. They're walking across the floor and say, you're gonna go into a bathroom that's world class. You need to respect it. You need to put the toilet.

So what happens if a truck driver leaves a little bit of a mess?

I swear, they chase him down. They literally, when they walk out the door, our people will walk in here, inspect the area that they've been in, and if they don't leave it perfect, they'll go. Go back and clean it. And every truck driver knows this story, right? So they come here, Whether it be UPS, FedEx, it doesn't matter who it is. Expediters. They know you're gonna go to the best bathroom. We say that people wait to go to the bathroom here because it's such a great experience. I mean, it's crazy, but people. We're influencing people to say, hey, respect other people. Lean it great. So we have Wind.

So he's going to go on and tell you about how they got Windex back there. He tells a story that he's Greek and they use Windex to clean everything. They have Windex all over fastcap. But this is just Paul, right? And this is his company. He starts all of his tours in the bathroom. He really does. And it doesn't matter who it is. He brings them in to the bathroom, and that's where the tours start. And then they go off and show you all their incredible production aspects and all the Lean stuff that they're doing. But this is where it starts for them. Lean starts in the bathroom, as Paul says. So with that said, when you want to start thinking about culture, there's really. I chose nine here. There's more than Nine characteristics of strong culture. But these are some of the key that I want to focus on. First, if you want to have a strong culture, it must be secure, safe and blame free. Okay? This kind of gets back to autonomy, getting back to people feeling that it's safe to try and it's safe to fail, so long as the customer isn't hurt, of course. But if people are working in fear, then they're not going to feel good. You're not going to have a good culture. You'll also need to cultivate humility and curiosity. Environments of humility and curiosity. This means to say that people should be curious of what happens if we experiment. I know we've never done this, but what would happen if we did it? Just having that mindset of sometimes you have to think out of the box, right? I'm sure there's been many innovative ideas throughout the Kaizen events that you guys did this past year that all came from curiosity. And humility is also very, very key for when you do a good job that, you know, you take it in stride. You know, like my daughter scored a goal. I used to tell her, act like you've done it before and that you're going to do it again. Don't act like, you know, you don't need to be crazy. Right? Have a little humility. Okay? So that's really important. We've talked about finding your why, but it definitely needs to be mentioned again. A strong culture understands why they exist. Also, a strong culture nurtures human potential. If you study Toyota deeply and you go and look on their website, as far as what does respect for people mean? They actually. One of my business partners is John Miller. He was born American guy, but born and raised in Japan, speaks Japanese fluently. He learned lean by translating for some of these old Toyota guys who couldn't speak English. That's how he learned lean from these Japanese guys. And he told me that when we speak about respect for people in Lean, that it's actually poorly translated. And I won't go into the Japanese, but the Japanese is actually respect for humanity instead of respect for people. Humanity, the humanness of a person. That's what we truly talk about when we're respecting people. We respect all aspects of them. And it's not just our people. We respect our suppliers, we obviously respect our customers. But you respect everybody that you interact with. That's what a strong culture does. Also, I don't need to say this to this group, but strong cultures understand processes scientifically. So all of the Kaizen that You did. I'm sure you leveraged many aspects of plan, do, check, act, pdca, problem solving, strong cultures do that. So do not stop doing that. Because that's how good, good companies become great is when they start to understand and they go to Gemba. You know, Gemba means the place the work is done. Good leaders, good culture means when you have a problem, get up out of your seat, go to where the problem is and look at it with your own eyes. That's called genshi genbutsu. It means go and see the problem with our own eyes. Don't sit in a boardroom, don't sit in a conference room and try to plan everything or solve everything on flip charts. Doesn't work. You have to go next. Acting with urgency is very important. Paul Akers, the guy from FastCap, wrote a book called Two Second Lean. And the premise behind it is that at FastCap, every employee every day, including Paul, makes a two second improvement. Then the next day during their stand up meeting and they meet for like 30 to 45 minutes, they go through in their meeting. It's just amazing. I could talk all day on their meeting. They studied the U.S. constitution. It's crazy what they do at that company. But they truly value their people. But with 2 second lean, Paul will just stand there and he'll say, hey Mike, what was your 2 second improvement yesterday? And without blinking, Mike will say what it was. Because everyone does it and they're not huge improvements. You know, one is, I didn't know where something was, so I organized it and I made a label. It's a two second improvement. But every one of his employees do these every single day. Do you think they have a problem with Kaizen or continuous improvement or making things better or backsliding? No, no problems. There's no backsliding there because they're constantly making it better. So they don't ever have to worry about it going backwards because they are always going forward. My favorite one here is courage. You've got to have courage. Aristotle called courage the first virtue. Because really everything starts with courage. If you don't have courage, then you can't do anything. You'll be stuck in analysis, paralysis. We'll study it, we'll plan. Let's plan some more. Let's study some more. But you have to have courage to go out and try and experiment and see what you learn. So you've got to have courage and then long term purpose. This company, how long has this company been around? 30 some years, 38 years. So I think this company has long term purpose. Right. I think this company gets that, so that's fantastic. But you have to look at things from a long term perspective. If you're constantly worried about like this is more problematic for publicly traded companies who constantly have to worry about what Wall Street's going to say if they don't beat the number or whatever it is. This is a really bad problem with publicly traded companies is they're constantly trying to improve short term things and they don't look at the long term view. And that's very, very problematic. You cannot develop a strong culture of kaizen when you have short term purpose or short term objectives. So you must think long term. And then lastly, strong cultures persevere. Now, I don't know if there's been, you know, I studied a little bit about your history, but I don't know. I'm sure it's not always been roses, especially to the guys that have been here a long time. I'm sure there's been some hard times that you had to persevere through. But this gentleman's been here for 30 some years. So obviously it's in this company's DNA to persevere. But each and every one of you also has to do that because you're going to come up against problems, especially as it relates to continuous improve improvement. Okay? Especially as it relates to continuous improvement. You're going to go out and you're going to try to get some other people bought into this stuff and they're not going to want to. I'm just telling you, they're not going to want to. They're going to fight you, they're going to see you come around the corner and they're going to run, you know, follow them. Okay? But be kind to them, don't be pushy, okay? But you have to persevere. Also this group right now, hopefully you all band together. This is a huge company. You're just a few people of a huge company. So you need to all support each other, okay? And so when Mike's having a bad day or he's had a, you know, someone needs to pick up the phone and call Mike and you know, you need to, hopefully you have a way to communicate with one another. But this is very important, especially as you're early in your journey with continuous improvement, to stick together. Because it's not easy. Again, the tools are not difficult. You can get the tools easily. Watch our videos, we've got you covered. But what is hard is the people, the people side of it. But if you don't give up and you persevere. The sky's the limit. My favorite quote for perseverance comes from Martin Luther King. He says, if you can't fly, then run. If you can't run, walk, can't walk, crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now it's time to take a free, no strings attached, fully functional test drive of Gemba Academy's School of Lean and Six Sigma. 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