Lean Leadership and Culture
What the exam tests
Leadership and culture questions ask how leaders behave to sustain Lean: going to the gemba, developing people, aligning work through hoshin, and building daily management. The exam distinguishes genuine respect for people from permissive management.
Core rules and concepts
- Respect for people means challenging people to improve and supporting them, not avoiding difficult conversations.
- Leaders go to the gemba to observe work and ask questions: What is the standard? What is the gap? What have you tried? What do you need?
- Leader standard work makes daily routines visible: tiered huddles, gemba walks, review of visual boards, and coaching cycles. It is a management system, not a checklist to audit others.
- Hoshin Kanri aligns improvement priorities from top-level objectives to team actions through catchball, so trade-offs are explicit.
- Daily management uses visual boards and short-interval controls to surface abnormalities early. Psychological safety lets people report them without blame.
Worked example
A team's 5S audit score falls from 90% to 65%. A command-and-control response is to set a deadline and add an audit. A Lean response is to go to the area, observe, and ask the team what changed. The reasoning: the score is a symptom; the team may lack time, tools, or a clear standard after a layout change. The leader coaches the team to update standard work, removes a barrier, and checks the daily routine. Accountability remains: the team owns the standard and the leader owns the support.
Traps that cost marks
Equating respect with avoiding accountability; turning gemba walks into inspections; copying another company's leader standard work without adapting it; using hoshin as a top-down target list with no dialogue; and blaming culture when the management system is the real constraint.