ABSTRACT
We were facilitating a Lean breakthrough or a Kaizen Blitz in a process at a back office of a financial services company. The shop was run by a woman who was supposed to be very successful in the organization. She had a command-and-control leadership style and believed in a “noquestions-asked” style of management. The team members were expected to execute like robots. The processes were threaded with metrics, and the employee performance was measured by health of processes as indicated by the metrics. Their increments and bonuses were dependent on meeting the metrics as set up by the operations head. She took a lot of pride in having created a “disciplined” workplace where employees carried out all instructions to a T.
