Hopefully compensating for poor leadership with the toolbox meetings will not delay corrective action to change the behaviors of leaders, managers and supervisors.
Warning: rant ahead!
In an ideal world, no, it wouldn't. But, respectfully, in an ideal world, we wouldn't have the poor leadership in the first place, would we? In the real world where many of us toil every day, for many of us reality is not ideal, by a long shot.
Whether you look at anecdotal reports from friends, relatives, acquaintances, or posters here at the Cove, or more formal analysis from various authors or organizations like Gallup, we find lots of examples of poor leadership and/or room for improvement. Lots of cases where "leaders" have NOT "changed their leadership style to engage employees daily in improvement and in preventing and solving problems."
A 2017 Gallup report says the following:
The American workforce has more than 100 million full-time employees.
One-third of those employees are what Gallup calls engaged at work. They
love their jobs and make their organization and America better every day.
At the other end, 16% of employees are actively disengaged — they are
miserable in the workplace and destroy what the most engaged employees
build. The remaining 51% of employees are not engaged — they’re just there.
Employees have little belief in their company’s leadership. We have found that just:
•• 22% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization
has a clear direction for the organization.
•• 15% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization
makes them enthusiastic about the future.
•• 13% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization
communicates effectively with the rest of the organization.
I believe many, if not most, quality practitioners have little actual leverage or success in making these leaders “change the behaviors” that need changing. Sure, they try their best, but showing the leader the water and getting them to drink it are two different things. Try issuing a CAR to senior leadership telling them they have developed a company with a poor culture that needs fixed, or that they need to “engage employees daily in improvement and in preventing and solving problems” and see where it gets ya.
My point is, sometimes in the real world all we can do is the best we can do, and sometimes that means we take what authority we have, or a little more if we’re feeling frisky, and try to lead by example and influence the people that we can in the best way we can.
Maybe that means that only within our direct sphere of influence (team, shift, department, etc.) we engage employees daily in improvement and in preventing and solving problems, and do some “toolbox talks” to dive deeper, and maybe if we do it at lunchtime (lest we get yelled at for taking the others away from their “real work”) we can get some folks from other departments or areas to join our toolbox talks and hope the cure spreads virally. Maybe eventually we’ll get lucky and some of the leaders may even “catch the cure”.
I've been in this boat. I've pushed as hard as I dared without being insubordinate or losing my job. I’ve done what I could, when I could, and eventually at least some of the leadership that resisted my efforts, including one who referred to my efforts as “the college-boy wasting time” or something along those lines, eventually saw some good in it and at least stopped actively opposing me. And one glorious day the President even came in to one of my sessions, sat down, and said “keep going, I just wanted to watch” and later encouraged me to continue. (The employees loved it, BTW.)
Did I make the amount of change I wanted to? Did we as a company reach our potential? No, but I did leave that place much better than I found it before I moved on. Sometimes that is all we can do.