Raise your standards

Welcome to Part 3 of Lead Like You Give a Damn, a 4-part series on becoming an effective leader at home, at work, and everywhere in between.

Here’s what we’ve covered so far:

Here’s what we’re looking at today…

Decades ago, in traditional auto manufacturing, the golden rule of the assembly line was to be obsessed with efficiency. Managers at auto firms around the globe were all focused on one thing: Never stop the line. Keep it moving, hit your daily production quotas, and if a car has a defect, let the mechanics fix it at the very end of the line.

From a management perspective, this kept the daily numbers looking great.

But one day, an engineer at a little company called Toyota named Taiichi Ohno, came along…

And he disagreed with this “efficiency” approach completely.

Ohno, who was the the creator of the Toyota Production System, decided that relentlessly focusing on efficiency was the wrong way to build a company.

He believed that prioritizing speed over quality was creating a culture of carelessness.

And when you’re building vehicles, carelessness and apathy can’t be tolerated.

So, Ohno installed a physical rope running above every single workstation at the Toyota assembly line… He called it, the “Andon Cord.”

After installing the ropes, Ohno told all of his frontline workers to reach up and pull the cord anytime they saw a defect of any kind:

• If a part doesn’t fit perfectly, pull the cord.

• If you spot oil slicks, loose wires, or broken parts, pull the cord.

• If you feel our quality standards are slipping for any reason, do not ignore it, reach up and pull the cord.

When a Toyota worker pulled the Andon Cord, the entire assembly line would stop, and managers would rush over to fix the root cause of the problem – right then and there.

From a pure efficiency standpoint, this was terrifying. Stopping a massive auto factory line can cost thousands of dollars a minute.

And when executives from other car companies visited Toyota and saw line workers stopping production over minor issues, they thought Ohno was crazy.

But Ohno didn’t care about the efficiency of a single shift.

He cared about the effectiveness of the final product.

He knew that if a worker noticed a broken part rolling by and didn’t do anything about it, the company was essentially saying, “We tolerate bad work,” without actually saying it.