Lean Leadership: Empowering Instead of Instructing

Much can be learned from Lean Management: Understanding the value for the customer, then identifying the value stream and optimizing the flow to avoid unnecessary effort and last but not least ensuring continuous improvement. However, the focus should not only be on the application of other and better methods, but also on a different leadership culture. The second pillar of the Toyota Way therefore is respect for people. At the core of Lean Management are the people as its essential success factor. The motto of Lean Leadership is therefore “empowering not instructing “. This principle deserves to be disseminated at least as vigorously as the well-known concepts and methods of Lean Management.

The rise of Toyota after the Second World War is inextricably linked with the name Taiichi Ōno He has significantly influenced and further developed the Toyota Production System. What is today known as Lean Manufacturing and more generally as Lean Management originates largely from him. As a result, Toyota succeeded in significantly increasing productivity and not only catching up with the American competition from Detroit, but outperforming it. The concepts and methods spread not only in the manufacturing industry but in many other industries — including IT, where the Agile Manifesto can be interpreted as an application of lean principles to the process of software…