GA 171 | How to Combat Fear with Ron Pereira

You're listening to episode 171 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 in your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now today I'm going to fly solo. We've got some really good interviews in the pipeline here. We're going to bring Karen Ross back onto the show with one of her clients who she's doing some virtual coaching with and we're going to kind of explore how they're getting along. So that's going to be coming up and then we got a few other things queued up that I think you're all going to like as well. But today you're stuck with me. And I've got a few things that I want to talk about. To start with, I just want to give a quick Gemba Academy update. I know we have a lot of our regular kind of subscribers that listen to the show, so I want to give you an update and then anyone that's not a subscriber, if you're curious about what we're up to over here at Gemba Academy and how we kind of pay the bills, this is for you as well. So we are working on our job relations or JR course, which is part of our Team TWI series. We are about, I would say 70% complete with that and pretty excited with the way that things are working out. So this is going to be a combination. It's going to be like our JI course where it's a combination of live classroom footage that we captured when with Roger Bylas running that class. And then we have myself starring in some of the so called studio videos where we're going to giving you the teaching lessons, if you will. So the idea here for this JR course will be just like the JI course in that you could run your own five day class if you'd like to or you can kind of take it as an individual. So, so we're really excited about that. After that. We, we do have JM already the, the live classroom Footage already captured, but we are also captured a live stream Toyota Kata class where we partnered with Mark Rosenthal and we went to a company that's in the aviation industry and they were kind enough to host us and we went and ran a five day workshop on Toyota Kata and it was pretty awesome. Mark Rosenthal is a fantastic lean thinker and he's extremely knowledgeable on all things Toyota Kata. And so we're going to put that course together. So that's going to be again it's going to be kind of a five day style course with the idea being that if you wanted to run your own workshops you could or if you just want to watch the videos and learn all about Toyota Kata, you can as well. But there's going to be again a mixture of live on the Gemba, real life Toyota Kata. I mean this is not just. There was a little simulation we did in the, in the classroom but then we went out to the Gemba and we, we attacked real problems. So I think, I think folks are going to like that once Toyota Kata is done then jm, we'll do JM and then, gosh, we've got a lot of plans after that for some other content but we're constantly staying busy. But what I wanted to talk about from a topic perspective today is just a few things that have been on my mind as it relates to some of the things Dr. Debming taught us many, many years ago. In fact, when he wrote his book out of the Crisis, he, you know, he shared these famous 14 principles and gosh, these principles are as true today as they were back then. And so I thought it would be kind of interesting and fun to just revisit them. I'm sure most of the folks listening to this podcast are familiar with these 14 points, but if you're like me, it's always good to go back and review them. So I'm going to kind of just read them off here. I'm actually on the W. Edwards Deming Institute website and we'll link to that website. It's deming.org is the main domain there. But, but the first, first of these 14 points is create constancy of purpose. Constancy of purpose, it's hard to say. Towards improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive and stay in business and to provide jobs. Number two, point number two, adopt the new philosophy. We are in the new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities and take on leadership for change. Point number three, cease dependence on inspection to Achieve quality. There is something that we could all revisit, I'm sure within many of our manufacturing organizations that goes on to say for point three, eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place. Amen. Point number four, end the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item on a long term relationship of loyalty and trust. Point number five, Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service to improve quality and productivity and thus constantly decrease costs. Improve constantly and forever. That's a beautiful statement. Point number six, institute training on the job. I think job instruction is a great way to do this. Point number six. Point number seven, institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul as well as supervision of production workers. Well, I think here, I think most folks that are familiar with TWI would say that job relations or JR is perfectly suited here. Number eight, drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively for the company. We're going to come back to this one. Number eight, drive out fear. We're going to revisit this one here in a bit. Number nine, break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales and production must work as a team to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with a product OR service. Number 10, eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the workforce asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the workforce. This point goes on to say we should eliminate work standards or quotas on the factory floor and instead we should substitute leadership. And then the second bullet under this point number 10 is to eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals and substitute leadership. Again, we're kind of kind of revisit this one as we dive into the fear topic here in a bit. Point number 11, remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his or her right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality. Point 12, remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective. Point number 13, institute a vigorous program of education and self improvement. Gemba Academy is here for anyone that wants to do that just a little plug. And then point number 14, put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job. So what's always been interesting to me about these 14 points is how they interact with one another so much. You could say, point number five, improve constantly and forever the system. Well, gosh, all these other things seem to do that as well. When you're creating constant purpose and adopting a new philosophy, all these things are really focused on improvement. So they're very complementary. I would say these 14 points are. But with this said, the one that I want to kind of dive a little bit deeper into is point number eight, which again, was to drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively for the company. So I wrote a blog article, actually one up today, and maybe we'll link to it where I kind of touched on this, on this topic a little bit. And the point of the article was that, you know, we've all probably heard these words that, you know, fear within the workplace is no good. And everyone kind of shakes their head. Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it, got it, got it. And we listened to, to Dr. Debbings, 14 points. And we all nod our heads up and down. Yeah, got it. Nope, fear is bad. But here's the thing, we all nod our heads, but I think it's safe to say that it's extremely difficult to rid the organization of fear of all fear. And, you know, of course, if you have a kind of a toxic company with bad management that just fires folks for the sake of firing them, even when they don't need to, just because they want to make a little bit more money, that's a different type of fear. And sure, if you're working for an awful company like that, you know, there's probably not much you can do short of leaving if the leadership is that, that warped. But I'm guessing most of the people listening to this podcast work for companies that, you know, perhaps are on the lean journey or are practicing some forms of communication. And maybe you're not, you know, scared that you're gonna get fired tomorrow, but even if you're in those situations and you're working for a company that's that thinks lean and does their very best to practice lean, they're not immune. Strong lean companies are not immune to fear. And the story I went on to tell in that blog article was how I recently interacted with a couple folks who were extremely high performing individuals at their jobs, and they work for a company that was also really into the lean journey and Doing really good things and definitely cares for the people and so wasn't a toxic environment or anything like that. But after I was talking with these folks, I quickly realized that, man, there's some serious fear going on here. And as we kind of dug deeper and I kind of kept probing, came to realize that there was a, a metric that, that these folks were, were tracking and come to find out that they were able to kind of game the metric a little bit. Nothing malicious or nothing bad. And it didn't injure anyone or hurt the company or impact customers or anything like that. All it did was it kind of made them look maybe a little bit better and set them up for success versus for failure. And again, it wasn't anything malicious, but what we discovered was the fact that this metric was there. And I kind of kept digging like, why are you doing that? And came to find out that these folks who again were very high performing and really, really cared about their jobs and cared about the company were worried that they were going to let their colleagues down. They were worried that they were going to let their leadership down and they didn't want to let anybody down. So they were using this sandbagging or whatever you want to call it as a way to kind of deal with this fear. So long story short, we did get that kind of leadership involved and we kind of had a really good talk. These folks that, that shared this were really, I was really proud of them, honestly, for being so transparent and vulnerable and, and to share, you know, really what they were, that what they were feeling. And when the leadership kind of heard this, they put it all together and, and they, they changed that metric, number one. Because come to find out, the metric in and of itself wasn't really doing much anyhow. And the fact that they were able to game it kind of proved the point that, you know, this, this metric wasn't good. So they, they modified that. And then there were some other things that were put in place and all said and done, that situation ended much better than it started. But the thing I walked away with was, man, here's this company that's pretty good at this stuff, right? It's pretty good at lean. And here's these employees who are really, really good employees and even they were not immune to fear. And so I've been thinking about, like, how do you combat fear, right? And how do we, what, what are some things that we can do to, I don't know, maybe not completely eliminate, but maybe, I don't know, counter as best as, as we can this whole thing of fear. And so I've come up with three points. Now, this is definitely not an all inclusive list or anything like that, but just three things that I've been thinking about. And the first one of how to combat fear is to be careful what you measure and know why you're measuring it. In other words, what problem are you trying to solve and how does this particular metric help? You know, it was interesting. You know, one of Deming's points was, you know, eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals, substitute leadership. Right now, I think there's certain things you do have to track. I mean, we live in a world where, you know, if you're a for profit company, you've got to track certain things to know how you're doing, right? You got to keep score, right? Visual management. But you've got to be really careful with the way that those metrics are being collected, the way they're being reported and how people perceive they're being judged against those metrics. Because that's what was happening in and my situation that I was talking about, these folks had this metric hanging out there and they knew that if it went the wrong way, they felt that people would be kind of, whoa, what's going on with these folks? And they, they didn't want that. So that's number one, be careful what you measure and know why you're measuring it. Number two is something that, that's been on my heart here as a result of all this JR topic that we've been into and that's talk with people on a regular basis and get the facts. And most importantly, we need to get all of our employees opinions and feelings out there. Now, as they say in Junior, you know, people's opinions and feelings, right or wrong, are indeed a fact to that person. Okay? Now you may not agree with opinions, you may not agree with the feelings, but it doesn't matter. It's still a fact to that particular person and we need to acknowledge it. Now this whole thing about talking with people, you know, it's interesting. It's not. And I don't just mean like, hey, how's it going guys? Or you know, how was your weekend? That's nice, that's small talk. But we really need to talk about business and we need to talk about how are things going? And then when the supervisor asks, how are things going? They just need to kind of zip it and let the person talk. Now sometimes the people won't be comfortable opening right up. And so if you kind of have a sense that there's something brewing there. You know, as a leader of people, you need to kind of probe a little bit. That's what I was doing in my earlier story. There is. I sensed something was going on, and so I, I kept trying to probe and trying to understand at a deeper level what was really at the root of this problem. So that's the second one. Talk with people on a regular basis and get the facts. And then the third, third thing that I think we should be doing as organizations in order to combat fear is to be consistent and constantly communicate. Let me take be consistent first. If your leadership style is to be all over the place, you know, one day we're doing this, another day we're doing that. That is not effective. But it can also lead to uncertainty. And what does uncertainty lead to? I think it leads to fear. Now, here again, by Academy, we're not. We're far from perfect. And we joke sometimes that we're really good at, you know, talking about an idea and we're brainstorming, and then all of a sudden a squirrel runs past with squirrel, you know, and we get distracted and really easy because we have a lot of, lot of ideas. But when we are constantly kind of chasing squirrels, that's not being consistent. And then people don't know what to expect. So another quick story on. Again, the academy as it relates to consistency is. Well, I just share some, some, some of the back, back office stuff that we do here. We actually have a, an employee wellness program. And we're using an app called Rally that that comes with the insurance company that we, that we work with. And, and it's basically just a. An app that runs on your phone that you go onto and, and you log all the things that you've done that day that were associated with your wellness. So if you ate, you know, exercise a certain amount, you log it. If you eat well, you log it. If you smile more, it's all kinds of wellness. You log it. And the idea is that we're doing it as an entire company, and we do have some extrinsic motivators out there that if we hit certain milestones, then there'll be certain rewards. And we understand that extrinsic motivation isn't perfect, but we believe that our hope is that by doing this, it will evolve into intrinsic motivation and folks will develop those habits to want to take care of themselves. So anyhow, we're, we're into the. We're about, you know, obviously more than halfway through the year. And gosh, we've Hit a little bit of a road, some bumps in the road, let's say. And, and we've not all done as well as we had been doing. And I was talking with, with my business partners, you know, the founders of the company. We were kind of trying to decide, man, should we stick with this or should we kill it and try something else? And we came to realize that, you know what? No, we're going to stick with it. We're going to be consistent and we're going to fight through it. Sure, we're, we're not doing great right now, but that's no reason to quit. It'd be easy to quit and just try something different, but we don't want to take the easy way out. So we kind of reinvigorated things and we're hoping to get things kind of rolling in the correct direction. So maybe that's just an example of being consistent. Now, the second part of this point is to constantly communicate. And now we talked about talking with people on a regular basis. That's one form of communication. But, but I think what I mean here by constantly communicating, I mean at the organizational level, I mean making sure everyone understands where the company's headed, how we're doing. You know, something, we do a morning call. We've about half of our team here at Gambit Academy works here in Texas, so we all kind of office together. But then about the other half of the folks work in California. Steve's in Michigan. We've got. So we got some folks that they kind of work virtually. So in order to kind of stay as connected as we can, we do every morning, we don't miss a. We use Google Hangouts and we turn our web cameras on and we see each other and we kind of have a little standard work that we follow that we go through each and every day. And so that's an example of how we are constantly trying to communicate with one another on what's going well, what doesn't go well. And that's another meeting where we've always wondered is, you know, we kind of say the same things every day. Should we spend, you know, the 15 minutes to do this? And, and we, we feel adamantly, as a leadership team that we will, we will never stop this morning meeting so long as folks are, are not all in the same office. If we're all in the same office, I think we would still do those the same meeting. We just wouldn't do it on webcam, but we would come together and just kind of share what we're all up to. And I think it's been, it's been really good because here's the thing about communication, it's directly related to change, right? And one thing's for sure, we all know people hate change, but people hate change they don't see coming even more. And so that's the power of communication done correctly, is that we can say, and again, this is part of, this is part of job relations, is to kind of let people know what's coming, let them know how it's going to impact them and try to, you know, it doesn't mean that they're going to be happy or they're going to like it, but it's going to be better to roll that out in a very transparent, open way than it is just drop on people. Hey, today we're starting this new thing and if you like it or not, tough. That's how it's going to go. So. So be consistent and constantly communicate. So again, the three points for that I wanted to share again for combating fear is to, number one, be careful what you measure and know why you're measuring it. Talk with people on a regular basis and get the facts. And be consistent and constantly communicate. Now, obviously, we could probably go on and on and add another 10 points to this. In fact, I would. There's not a. People don't normally go to our website to listen to these podcasts, but if you did, you could leave a comment. And so if you are listening to this and you have some things that you'd like to share, you know, we'll post this up on LinkedIn, we'll post it on, on our blog. I would really appreciate your feedback. And how do you guys go about combating fear within your organization and what would you add to this list? And also if you disagree with anything that I thought I said, I'd love to hear your opinion. So, yeah, so that's what I wanted to talk about today, is fear. I'm also going to link. We did an episode of oh gosh, it's been a. I don't even know how long month, two months, three months. All the months run together with this podcast where I shared a really powerful talk from Jocko Willink. He's a former Navy SEAL and he's super intense guy and he's talking about kind of fear of failure. And so it's a slightly different angle to this fear topic, but I think it's super relevant. So we'll link to that in the show notes as well. To get to the show Notes what we'll link to everything. Just go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 171. Again, GembaPodcast.com and Look for episode 171. Gosh, 171. We are approaching 200 episodes, which is pretty crazy. That's a lot of episodes. So if you've been a longtime listener and I know there, there are many, many of you out there, thank you for, for listening to the show. By the way, gave a little plug for this a few episodes ago if you have the minute some time to spare, which very few people do. But we would really appreciate if you went over to itunes and we'll put the link in the show notes as well. And he gave us a review and if you like the show five stars, it'd be awesome. If you don't like the show, maybe don't leave a review. Just kidding. Just send me an email, whatever, how we can make it better. But apparently that really does help the show kind of spread. And we always want to reach people who know about Lean for sure, which is most of you listening. But we also want to reach people who maybe have never heard of Lean or they don't know what continuous improvement is all about. But as we all know, everyone needs this stuff. So they just don't know the terms and the labels that we put on things. So by things like leaving comments and reviews and itunes, it helps to show grow. So that's what I have for this particular episode. Next week we're going to get back on track with some interviews. I think we're going to have Karen and her colleagues or actually her customers on to talk about how they do virtual coaching. So that should be super fun. And well, I don't know how else to end it because I'm by myself and I don't have anybody to say goodbye to. So I'll just say goodbye to you and let you know that I really do appreciate you for listening. Bye.

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