by Gwendolyn Galsworth, Ph.D., President of Visual Thinking Inc., Shingo Faculty Fellow, two-time Shingo Publication Award recipient, and former Shingo and Baldrige Examiner
Respect Every Individual is one of the ten Shingo Guiding Principles that the Shingo Institute provides organizations to help guide their journey to enterprise excellence. It is a foundational, universal principle and a cultural enabler of immense importance.
In today’s global discourse, respect has become a controversial issue that grows even hotter when, in some circles, it is referred to not as a principle but as a right.
To my knowledge, heated discussion on respect is not that common in business and industry. On the contrary, the notion of building a more respectful workplace is not even on the agenda of some organizations. Others show interest only when complaints accumulate because respect is so blatantly absent. But there are plenty of forward-thinking companies engaged in cultivating the respect principle, and with good success. In general, they segment the topic into two parts: 1) owed respect, and 2) earned respect.
In the workplace, owed respect is typically a behavioral condition, required by corporate policy, and documented in the personnel handbook code of conduct and rules governing corrective and disciplinary action.
In the workplace, earned respect is encouraged by and reflected in a company’s formal and informal reward and recognition programs, and in its investments in training and coaching activities that help team members create, improve, and contribute.
If only building a respect-based organization were as plain as that. It rarely is.
The Personal Will: Hidden Barrier to Respect
The definition of “work culture” that I use in my work, including what it means for a work culture to align, is this: A company’s work culture is a function of who I think I am and who I think the other is. That work culture becomes aligned when I know that I am you.
And that is the truth of it.
The Shingo Institute’s Respect Every Individual principle is a deeply embedded truth. A company that cultivates this truth embarks upon a journey that can best be described as profound in purpose and transformational in outcome.
As I see it, implementing the principle of respect is a two-front pursuit—two arenas of endeavor.
The drive for respect lessens considerably as the power of position lessens. In some companies, it all but vanishes at the ironically named level of “value-add” associates.
Said another way, a hidden barrier to respect can be the reluctance of people with lesser positional power to want respect or to give it. Here is the mighty, concealed kingdom of the human will, a private space where we can create the world we want—and the place we want to occupy in it. The personal will is a powerful determinant of personal identity (“Who I think I am”). In this domain, the owner holds sway. Like it or not, this is the individuated seat of your company work culture.
The Hero Within
Charles Dickens opens his classic, David Copperfield, with David pondering his young life. In the quiet of his mind, David asks, “Will I be the hero of my own life?” Over the next 624 pages, David proceeds to discover the answer in the trials and adventures of becoming a man in nineteenth century England.
David’s question is our question. Though often forgotten as we grow older, when each of us was young, this was the question in our hearts: “Will I be the hero of my own life?” It may have been worded differently. It may have sounded more like: “What will I be when I grow up?” Deep in the mystery of our childhood and then of our adolescent heart was a profound belief that whatever “it” turned out to be, “I will be excellent at it. I will shine. I will make something of my life. I will be its hero!”
At our core is a deep and abiding need to contribute—a longing to share, to create something of value. Not just in our everyday lives but also at work—in fact, especially at work. There is a hero within who wants to master, excel, and contribute. That hero is us.
This question is anchored to our sense of self at work and our perceived value in the enterprise. But its answer is rarely of our own making.
Listen closely and you will hear that same question, whispering inside the heart of each person who goes to work for the very first time, holding fast to the belief that people will respect them for their willingness and for the potential they know they possess. They might not get respect at home where so many problems wear them down. But they believe and hope they will find it at their new job where everything is fresh and possible—this first chance to do and to contribute.
Too often, however, that hope-filled question gets squelched by the very work that newcomers are assigned, dimming over the years until it is barely heard. But it never disappears completely.
Operators often experience their lot at work as “the bottom of the food chain.” (Their words, not mine.) Value-add associates will often describe themselves as the least powerful people in a company. They do what they are told. That’s their job. That’s how they keep it. That’s how they pay their mortgage. Operators caught in this kind of compressed, untenable condition can’t stay there for long without damage. They can and often do get very grumpy for a very long time.
I have encountered such operators in nearly every company that has asked for my help. To be sure, those same companies almost always include operators who are shining exceptions to this. But that is a discussion for another day.
The grumps are hard nuts to crack. To a very large extent, they gave up a long time ago. They do not seek respect; and they often have a hard time showing it. You have met them as well. And when you treat grumpy people with the respect they are owed as part of the human family, they sometimes take note, thaw, and respond in kind. Sometimes. When they see that you are not holding them to their past selves, they sometimes take the opportunity to shift their persona into a less unpleasant societal identity.
This is not an impossible conversion. But it is also not guaranteed. It does not always work.
A person’s commitment to their own grumpiness is a direct expression of that person’s self-sovereignty, an internal treasure that no one but its owner can touch. More often than not, however, when grumpy people see the respect agenda trundling towards them, they reflexively refuse it either by pushing it away with force (“No!”) or by disappearing into the haze of indifference (“I don’t care.”). Resistance or inertia is the sovereign choice they exercise.
Let’s move on to how visuality can help.
Cultivating the Hero Within Through Operator-Led Visuality
When a company invites me to help it deploy visual workplace methodologies, I have at the ready a wide array of tactics and protocols, specifically aimed at reviving and rebuilding respect. In a moment, I’ll share five of these, tied to Work That Makes Sense (WTMS), my core process for implementing operator-led visuality.
First, here are some general points about workplace visuality, in case you are new to my approach.
Point 1: Visuality is about information that is missing from the workplace—and about installing that missing information in the form of visual devices and visual mini-systems so that the workplace speaks.
You already know places like this in the community: roads and highways, airports (terminal and tarmac), supermarkets, stadiums, and so on. They function smoothly because so much information is visually shared.
Point 2: We are sight dominant. Fifty percent of the human brain seeks and interprets visual data. This is an automatic function, involuntary like breathing. Our brain searches for any and all available visual data and turns it into information; then the brain converts that information into meaning. That meaning doesn’t just trigger human behavior, it governs it.
Point 3: In a pre-visual workplace, value-add associates struggle with information deficits. This not only causes failures in safety, quality, and productivity, it is demoralizing. A non-visual workplace makes even good employees look bad. As a result, respect erodes—for one’s self, the boss, and the company. Operators often mistakenly conclude that they are failing the company when, in fact, the company is failing them.
No operator is in a position to mandate a workplace that speaks. Only company decision-makers can do that. When they do, they invest in re-building operator respect, on all levels. WTMS is a good example of that.
Work That Makes Sense. WTMS is a transformative process that begins in the training room, where we use many tools (How-To’s) to re-ignite the hero within. Here are five of them, which you may find useful in many settings:
How-To #1: Stretch Content
The vast majority of operators I have worked with are at least as intelligent as I. Many are much more so. I quickly learned that I needed to create training content that was thought-provoking and eye-catching if I were to stimulate the natural appetite of operators: to see and to solve. As with all of us, operators are natural visual beings.
The 12 modules in the Work That Makes Sense suite contain dozens upon dozens of visual devices, invented by value-add associates from around the world.
Across the methodology, these devices in the community and at work become the learning ground. Operators dissect them like puzzles, discovering how they work and why.
For example, consider the blind person with a white stick walking on a sidewalk section that is covered with small, raised circles. What are the circles for? Why aren’t they square? Figure it out.
The muscle under development here is critical thinking. The process works by fueling discovery, stretching boundaries, and stirring lively exchange. One of our goals in WTMS is to use the content itself to build internal respect and the power within. The success is dazzling as identities shift.
By the same token, we tend to shy away from brainstorming with its heavy reliance on imagination. In our experience, this may produce quick answers but not true growth.
Rich, provocative content is key: The 14 Principles of Smart Placement, eighteen types of borders, and four power levels of visual solutions. We often hear associates refer to WTMS as an “Engineering Course.” The mind is teased, tantalized, challenged, and delighted—first in the classroom and then on the production floor. The process of visual thinking begins.
How-To #2: Teach with No Answers
Hand-in-hand with stretch content, a WTMS Trainer makes a point of not providing answers. Instead, the trainer provokes thinking, perhaps moving through a question string like this: “What do you think this is? How does it work? Tell me more.” And later: “How is this different? What’s weird about this device? How would you use it? Tell me more.”
This is mind candy to every operator I have ever met. All responses are good responses.
If you want the well of respect-for-self and respect-for-others to fill, let operators figure things out on their own. The flood gates will open—maybe not during the first training session but certainly by the third session. The thinking muscle is found and exercised. The take-a-chance/experiment muscle is engaged.
You know what I know: Many operators don’t arrive ready to think, speak or interact. Instead, they often arrive stuck, stalled, indifferent or just plain irritated. Grumpy.
WTMS is not about obedience, compliance or replication. It is about creating, thinking, inventing, and solving. It is about the power within. Teach with no answers because the right answer is not the goal. Growing is.
How-To #3: Talk Amongst Yourselves
When I ask a challenge question or present a puzzle device, I never ask operators to talk to me first. I ask them to talk to each other, one-on-one, in pairs. “Find a partner. Pair up. How about the person sitting next to you? That’s it. Now share ideas back and forth. Talk amongst yourselves.”
If you are a WTMS Trainer at the start of the process, you know to expect a wall of silence. People sitting side-by-side may not even look at each other. Just about everyone looks uncomfortable, because they are. Yes, you are prepared for this; indeed, it is part of the learning design. You know that, for many associates, speaking in a public setting (even to a nearby person) is not all that common. Outside of breaks or lunch, some operators have never heard their own voice at work.
Talk-amongst-yourselves happens at least once every training session and, in the process, people come out. They move forward, out into the world. And with them come their curiosity, self-reflection, and internal worth. They grow. Slowly perhaps, but, I promise you, surely as well. The hero walks in.
How-to #4: Leave the Grumblers Alone
WTMS is not a proving ground for good manners. The instructional design has purpose, process, and very specific outcomes. None of this includes trying to change people and make them more polite and socially acceptable. Instead, we accept people as they are, by design. Operators know that they have to show up for the training session. They also know that they do not have to like it. And they don’t have to like me. Every WTMS Trainer knows the shorthand for this by heart: “Attendance is mandatory. Participation is voluntary.”
If people are grumpy, we let them be grumpy. It is a non-issue. We let adults be adults. We have faith in them. Faith is one of the deepest forms of respect.
We have faith in the teaching and in the WTMS methodology. We don’t persuade. We present. We share a lot of examples—and they are vivid. We know we have a mighty ally in human brain function. Naturally and elegantly, the brain’s appetite for visual data and visual meaning will draw associates into the process of thinking visually. It is literally irresistible.
The result? Visual thinking gains traction and visual solutions multiply.
How-To #5: Supervisors Don’t Supervise
When a company asks us to assist in a visual conversion, we begin (with rare exception) with WTMS. That process starts in the training room. Supervisors attend but they do not sit at the table with their teams. They sit in the back, their cell phones and laptops off, and with the WTMS Operator Booklet in front of them. They follow the learning.
We meet with supervisors before the first session to prepare them for this, and many times across sessions. They learn a lot. They, too, undergo a shift in identity, which is often considerable, even dramatic. And it is beautiful.
Why don’t supervisors sit at the table with their teams? WTMS is designed to help operators rediscover their own power. The positional authority that supervisors wield is deeply engrained and commanding. Even in leading-edge organizations, many operators find it difficult to think and speak freely in the shadow of their boss, especially in settings where innovation and invention are prized. So, we simply avoid the confusion by seating supervisors elsewhere.
After a training session, the operator/supervisor relationship springs back to normal, yet often with new-found or refreshed respect on both sides—and excitement.
At a certain point in the training cycle, the WTMS instructor invites supervisors to sit tables with operators. By then, supervisors understand that they must adopt the same “no answers” protocol the trainer has been modeling: “What do you think? How’s that? How does that work? Tell me more.” Later still, supervisors learn to support visual blitzes, without supervising them. They know that blitzes are also operator-led.
Supervisors learn a new way too, making their own sterling contributions to the WTMS deployment along the way. They are growing, too. It all starts in the training room.
Conclusion
In the WTMS training room, we focus on creating a safe learning environment where no one needs to prove themselves. No one needs to be right or needs to excel to earn a place in the room. Value-add associates have our respect as a matter of principle, whatever level of contribution they want to make. They know they will have a chance to sort out their thinking, quietly with a nearby person. They are safe whether they are chatty extroverts or cagey grumps.
In WTMS, we blend respect-building people protocols with rich knowledge and powerful know-how. Combined in the hearts and minds of operators, these work together to liberate information as value-add associates take the lead and rediscover and reinvent their work areas and themselves. I call this: “I-driven visuality.” As with WTMS, all visual workplace methodologies are I-driven. That is why they are self-sustaining.
WTMS is specifically designed to systematically reignite and cultivate operator self-respect. Associates think, decide, invent, and contribute as they learn and apply the principles and practices of workplace visuality and convert their areas into work that makes sense—into self-sustaining visual workplaces.
We have witnessed this time and again in every type of company—discrete manufacturing, process manufacturing, offices, hospitals, and open-pit mines.
When you teach people how to liberate information, you liberate the human will. Now that’s respect.
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