NOTE: The following post was authored by Boyd Rice of S&C Electric Company and was a featured presenter at the annual TWI Summit.
The principles of Job Relations are timeless. Leaders have long known how to get good results by Letting Each Person Know How He/She is Doing, Giving Credit When Due, Telling People in Advance About Changes That Will Affect Them, and Making the Best Use of Each Person’s Ability. They have also known how to handle people problems by Getting the Facts, Weighing and Deciding, Taking Action, and Checking Results.
Because these are basic to human nature it’s not difficult to teach these principles to leaders in an organization. Getting continuing results by explicitly and consistently applying these principles on an ongoing basis is something else.
The TWI Service recognized the challenge of getting continuing results and developed a standard for doing so. That standard has five parts:
- Assign responsibility
- Get adequate coverage
- Provide for coaching
- Check results
- Give credit
In my organization we have concluded that the third part, provide for coaching, is crucial to Job Relations success. We have developed a multi-pronged approach to coaching with a primary focus on our manager-level leaders who we believe are the linchpins of any improvement effort.
We have partially addressed the “Provide for coaching” aspect of the standard by incorporating Job Relations language directly into our Leadership competency. Our definition for this competency reads in part “Utilizes the Four Foundations for good relations. Applies the four steps to resolve people-related issues.” This alone greatly increases the likelihood that every year every leader, at every level of the company, will be coached by his or her own boss on the use of Job Relations. This, of course, includes all those with a “manager” title.
We strongly encourage our manager-level leaders to coach their supervisors on an ongoing basis. One manager does this formally by conducting a weekly 30-minute stand-up meeting with his entire supervisory team. Among other activities, he requires that each week each supervisor completes a Foundations card which is nothing more than a pocket-size card on which the supervisor can record a single Foundation-related activity. At the weekly group meeting, supervisors share their practice and learning.
We also have a group of managers that practices a form of peer coaching. Two of the leaders in that cohort host a monthly “Manager JR Lunch and Learn” where they share challenges associated with practicing Job Relations and making the use of JR a reflex action on the part of their respective supervisors. In addition, they share ideas and methods for addressing those challenges. This monthly event has the added benefit of generally strengthening the relationships among members of this key group of leaders, many of whom are in internal customer-supplier relationships with each other.
We formally coach all leaders through a Job Relations Follow-up course that we require of anyone who attends the 10-hour course. This six-session course is spread out over 12 weeks and is a mix of repetition of the concepts taught in the 10-hour course such as How to Get Opinions and Feelings and a series of exercises aimed at helping participants make practical use of JR concepts. One example involves having each participant identify, by name, those Fellow Supervisors, Staff Services leaders or team members, etc. who are most important to that participant’s success. This leads to discussion around how the Four Foundations and 4-Step Method can be applied to strengthen those relationships. This is coaching at a group level.
We also use that same six-session Follow-up Course to provide our leaders with an additional opportunity to practice the skill of applying the 4-Step Method. What we do a bit differently for this practice is insist they not bring a “running into” problem. This forces the participants to share problems they have gotten into before they blew up in their faces. The coaching in this case is offered by the class instructor who works with participants to more carefully consider how they might apply “sizing up” or “tipped off” or “coming to you” thinking.
Applying the TWI Service standard for getting continuing results in Job Relations has helped us focus our attention on coaching for our manager-level leaders. Try using the standard yourself! Chances are good that you, too, will see better sustainment of your TWI-related activities and results.
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About the Author:
Boyd Rice is Vice President – Global Lean Performance System at S&C Electric Company. He has spent over 30 years in the electronic and electrical equipment industries during which time he gained extensive experience in the application of quality and lean principles to new product development, manufacturing, and service processes. He is a senior member of the American Society for Quality. Mr. Rice is currently responsible for lean activities at S&C.
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