Michelle: We wanted to talk to you a little bit more about people-centric leadership. And it seems like such a great topic and way to lead and also just kind of live your life in general. But could you tell us a little bit more what exactly it means and your work with it?

Lisa: So it actually grew out of my work, my volunteer work with the Association of Manufacturing Excellence, the AME, and probably around 2010, 2011, the AME, the Association of Manufacturing Excellence, their whole focus was on helping organizations, particularly manufacturers, adopt lean best practices, enterprise excellence, CI. A group of us got together and we're like, there's something missing here. We should be a lot further along and companies are really struggling. What's going on? And we kind of came to the conclusion that we have spent so much time and so much emphasis on continuous improvement and tools and techniques.

And when you think about, particularly the Toyota production system and Lean, there's always these two pillars. There's this pillar for continuous improvement, and then there's this other pillar for respect for people. And we spent all our time and energy on the continuous improvement and the tools. And when it came to respect for people, it's like, oh, you respect people, I got it, that's it. That's what it means. And so it was kind of neglected. And we said, well, we really need to help organizations really embrace and learn how to demonstrate respect for people so that these two can come together, the continuous improvement and the respect for people so that we really can achieve enterprise excellence. And so that was kind of the back history of where it all started. And so a group of us got together, we defined it as people-centric leadership, we coined the term.

And we said, well, so what does it look like? What's included in people-centric leadership? And so with any lean curriculum or journey, we always have a house. And so we came up with this framework of what is people-centric leadership look like. And so our framework consisted of a foundation, right? We had a house. So the foundation of the house is the basic mindset and thinking, which is value, respect and care for people. And then our two pillars were, one of the pillars was continuous improvement. And then the other pillar was capability development.

And then we, with inside our house, we had our leadership behaviors, behaviors that are necessary to create a culture of people-centric leadership and then management systems as well. And then the roof of our house was, if we do this, then everybody will flourish. So that's kind of the basics of, and a little bit of the backstory of people-centric leadership and where it came from.

Michelle: It does sound easy for people to just say like, of course, respect, who's gonna disagree with respect?

Lisa: We all love that, you know, but to actually, yeah. Well, so what is, when you think about, I said that the foundation is the basic thinking and mindset. And so a lot of people are like, well, what does that mean? And I think one of the core beliefs behind a, I tend to call it, we call it people-centric leadership, but referring more to the culture in general. And one of the core beliefs around people-centric leadership as with Lean, is you're trying to shift from a command and control to giving control. That's kind of one of the core beliefs there. And so that's one of the things that we, we really focus on. And what are those behaviors, you know, what are those leadership, key leadership behaviors that allows that shift to occur?

Even it seems like, with children, of course you don't want to only direct them to what to do. You want them to decide like, oh, this might be a good idea to do this. Yeah, I love it. I'm like every level. Absolutely. Can you give us an example of a situation where someone might use this and kind of how it would work. So I think it's actually in your everyday practice that you use people-centric leadership is how you approach, how you approach individuals and people in your workplace. So one of the easy, I mean, a simple example is when it comes to people coming to you with questions, they have, they need something, they want you to give them an answer.

And if you respond in a people-centric way, you don't respond with the answer unless it's a simple, where are the keys? Well, the keys are over there. But a lot of times people ask us questions where there is not a simple answer. And so instead of giving our opinion, giving our advice, telling people what to do, we respond in a way which gets people to think more deeply and to reflect more deeply on the problem, the issue. So we're actually giving control. We are reflecting it back. We're giving people control. So that's a pretty like kind of a basic interaction of what people-centric leadership might look like. Very subtle though, very subtle.