Friday, March 10, 2023

The Three Pillars of Respect

 The secret of long-term success

In the 1980’s, Taiichi Ohno (head of production at Toyota, creator of what we call Lean Management) was asked the secret of Toyota’s success. He responded with one word: Respect.

Ohno-san’s use of the simple word “respect” carries with it a number of behaviors, attitudes and practices. These are grouped into three areas known as the Three Pillars of Respect:

  • Respect for people
  • Respect for your craft
  • Respect for the customer

 Respect for People

This idea is expressed by the phrase: “Build great products by building great people”. Respect for People means all the things you would expect: treat each person as an individual, care for each in their context, etc, but it does not mean a facile “empowering”. Instead it means to challenge people with high expectations and support their achieving them. It is not simply sending people to training but giving people space to learn (and even fail), support their learning and expect that they will learn. It means to focus on understanding their situation and what they are dealing with. It means to ask rather than tell, and when you ask “why”, listening for the answer. Having respect for people is the key enabler of continuous improvement.

 Respect for Your Craft

What does it mean to “respect your craft”? We assume everyone is a professional. You are a professional. You know what your work – your craft- is and what its professional standards are. You know what is quality work. You have learned the skills needed to do the work you do. You attend professional conferences where you meet with your technical peers. More importantly, you seek to uphold those professional standards to the point where you are actually annoyed when you can’t deliver at anything less that perfection. You "pull the Andon" when your process is not creating quality work of value. You notice waste and wasteful practices, and make a point of putting an item to eliminate each one on your Continuous Improvement backlog. But more than that, you work to constantly improve your skills, constantly learning and challenging yourself to get better.

Respect for the Customer

How do we have “respect for the customer”? We seek to know what the customer’s objectives are. We want to know what is important to them, and what they consider useful and helpful – what has value. We want to get that value to them as quickly as we can. Often this pillar becomes operational as “having a sense of urgency”: a deep desire to deliver something meaningful to the customer right now. This leads directly into the idea of “pull”: we are always urgently pulling work into Done.

The three pillars are mutually-reinforcing. “Respect” - the Three Pillars of Respect - are a set of high-level principles that can be applied throughout an organization at any level.

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