A daisy rising from my brick walkway reminded me this morning, that even in the worst environment, there is a chance for growth. But this kind of individual heroism does not portend success for Lean transformation. As an organization with the slogan “Everybody Everyday,” GBMP places a high value on Total Employee Involvement as an essential piece of continuous improvement.

1. Field of Daisies
A daisy rising from my brick walkway reminded me this
morning, that even in the worst environment, there is a
chance for growth.
Bruce Hamilton

2. Everybody, Everyday
But this kind of individual heroism does not portend success for Lean transformation. As an organization with the slogan “Everybody
Everyday,” GBMP places a high value on Total Employee Involvement as an essential piece of continuous improvement.
I have a long-standing practice of asking managers “What percent of your employees come to work every day, excited about a potential
solution to a problem or an idea for improvement?”
After 20 years in Lean consulting, the answers I receive to that question have not changed much. Here are a few:
• “We had a good run for a few months when maybe a third of our workforce was engaged, but we’re probably at about 5% now.”
• “The only serious work on improvement or problem solving comes from our dedicated Kaizen team.”
• “One company owner, call him John Smith, actually told me during a sales call, “Our employees are morons, so that wouldn’t work
here,” a comment sufficiently offensive that I politely excused myself from the meeting: “If that’s how you feel, Mr. Smith, then you’re
right, Lean is not an option for you.”
Fortunately, most responses to my question are kinder than Smith’s, but the percentage estimate for employee involvement is still almost
always less than 25%. If less than one-fourth of employees are participating in problem-solving or improvement, no wonder so many
organizations report lukewarm outcomes from Lean. You can debate the exact percentages for employee involvement, but all of the
estimates and expectations are resignedly low.

3. What's missing?
So, what’s missing? Do we need better employees as Mr. Smith suggests? Or
are employees like the daisy in my walkway? Even an awful environment will
grow an occasional daisy. We call those few, the “self-starters”, the “A-team”,
persons who rise above every obstacle to achieve. And how do we reward
them? We give more challenges to them until they are overwhelmed. That’s the
predominant system.
So, how do some organizations breakthrough to generate broad employee
involvement? A manager from one Shingo Prize-winning factory related:
“When we first subscribed to the Shingo insight that systems drive behavior, we
realized if employees were not engaged, then perhaps the means by which we
encouraged involvement needed to be revised. That was a humbling eye-
opener. For example, we discovered that our idea system was literally losing
employee ideas in the evaluation process. Employees took this as rejection and
just stopped submitting ideas. They felt disrespected.”

4. Field of daisies
At a deeper level, the willingness of this factory’s managers to question the systems that they themselves
had created exemplified a couple of fundamental Shingo Principles:
• Lead with humility
• Respect every individual
According to the manager from that factory,
“the biggest lesson for me personally was how much my behavior affected all of my employees. These
principles have been guideposts for us to create an army of problem solvers.”
Call it a field of daisies.Are you relying on a few self-starters to create improvement or are you
developing an army of involved employees? Please share your thoughts.