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Supportive leadership

Employee motivation is core in Lean thinking. The prospects for success increase with employee commitment and motivation.

The leadership must create a culture with values such as:

• openness
• mutual trust and confidence
• teamwork
• customer focus
• education/training 

This reflects management's position that"the employees are the company".

Focus on the way work is performed

Focus on results means to focus on something that already has happened. To focus on the way the work is performed, means focusing on the future and on achieving better future results.
If results are not as expected, investigate why. Is it the way in which the work is performed, or was it the way in which improvements were introduced that caused results not to meet expectations?

Go to where the action is

Decisions made in today's traditional meetings are frequently not based on the real situation. Often the root cause to a problem is missed.
A leader must be around, he must be visible. Through the participation in the daily work, by asking questions, listening and acting on the information received, trust is created. Hereby one gets greater understanding for what is happening in the organisation and today's reality.
It is important that employees are rewarded and made visible by their leaders. This gives an enormous positive effect through out the organization.

No blame

People want to do a good job. To make a good job means to work in a good working climate where you can learn from mistakes and see them as opportunities to learn more.
"No problems is a problem, all problems mean opportunities."
Here exists the right environment for the leader to ask questions such as "How are we doing?" "How come it is going well/not so well?" "What is required by me in order for us to be successful?" If results are not in accordance with expectations it is important for the leaders to show restraint. We want to learn from the mistakes, not find somebody to blame". This also sets some restrictions on the employee. If implementation does not work out well, he can not start with blaming others and excuses.

Learning

Consider all work as learning, and all learning as work. Learning (and work) require time for reflections, preferably as a team. Without reflections, we are bound to repeat our mistakes over and over again

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