Billy Taylor on Lean Leadership, Culture, and Ownership (Part 1)

My guest for Episode #293 of the podcast is a dynamic speaker and manufacturing leader, Billy R. Taylor. I saw him speak a few years ago at a Shingo Prize Conference and I've wanted to get him on the podcast ever since.

He's currently the Director of Commercial, Off Highway, and Support Manufacturing North America for The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Over the past 20 years, he has risen from “the lowest level of the organization,” up through the manufacturing leadership ranks at Goodyear, including time as a Plant Director at facilities in Oklahoma and North Carolina.

He's been “engaged in Lean” for over 15 years and he is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt. Billy has a BS in in Electrical Engineering from Prairie View A&M University and an MBA from Baker University.

Billy was very giving of his time and we talked for over 75 minutes, so I'm breaking this up into two parts, with Part 2 available now.

This first part of the conversation explores how Billy moved beyond a tool- and event-based view of Lean toward a true cultural focus. He discusses the importance of governance in sustaining improvements, how strategy deployment helps create ownership, and why leaders must embrace the mindset of “I work for you, not you for me.” Billy emphasizes recognition, trust, and creating environments where people feel safe to speak up, experiment, and change. He also shares powerful stories about building pride, uncovering hidden potential in teams, and helping employees connect to the broader strategy.

The discussion highlights why Lean success depends on leadership behaviors, not just technical methods. Billy's experiences offer practical examples of how to shift mindsets, develop accountability processes that empower rather than punish, and foster engagement at every level of an organization.

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Streaming Player

For a link to use for this episode, refer people to www.leanblog.org/293

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Links, Topics, Questions, and Quotes:

• How did you get started with Lean?
• How did you move beyond a “tool-based” and an “event-based” approach to Lean?
• “The culture piece is what really intrigued me”
• Learning from AME and Shingo
• How did thinking about Lean more as a culture help?
• “Instead of DMAIC, we had DI — we went from Define right to Improve.”
• How better “governance” leads to better sustainment
• “Once you change the guard, how do you guard the change?”
• How do you use strategy deployment to create a sense of ownership?
• Why managers should embrace the idea that “I work for you” rather than “you work for me.”
• “Some managers look for facts that justify their opinions” and that will “demoralize their team.”
• “Not everything that counts can be counted, however what should be counted must be.”
• “Where are the gaps in the process vs. where are the gaps in the numbers?”
• “I'm recognizing the process, but embracing the individual.”
• How do you create and reinforce a Lean culture in an organization? How has your role changed and evolved?
  • “The core process has not changed for me” — define winning, align to win (helping people understand what they own), execution (how do we know if we're winning or not?)
  • Do we celebrate the “red?” — use the red as a way to improve instead of “a hammer”
• “In the absence of ownership and clarity comes blame.”
• How do you work to create trust?
• How do you help employees know what the strategy is?
  • Moving from getting “the shrug” to 90% of employees understanding the boards
• How do you find the “gold mine” in “the hidden factory?”
• The cartoon of mine that Billy found and talked about
• How do you create an environment where it's safe to change?
• Billy's story about being exposed to a different type of culture visiting a hospital…
• How do you help people through the discomfort of change?

• “You can't teach what you don't know and you can't lead where you won't go.”
• Their “formula for success: Strategy + Execution = Results”
• Why do so many companies fail to execute? Because people don't know what they have ownership of.
• Goodyear's CEO: “You can't manage a secret.”

Video of Billy Taylor:

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Transcript

Introduction

Announcer:

Welcome to the Lean Blog Podcast. Visit our website at www.leanblog.org. Now, here's your host, Mark Graban.

Mark Graban:

Hi, this is Mark Graban and welcome to episode 293 of the podcast. It's November 29th, 2017. My guest today is a really dynamic speaker and manufacturing leader, Billy R. Taylor. I saw Billy speak a few years ago at a Shingo Prize conference.1 I've wanted to get him on the podcast ever since, and I'm really glad we were able to make that happen.

He is currently the Director of Commercial, Off-Highway, and Support Manufacturing for North America for The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.² Over the past 20 years, he has risen from what he calls the lowest level of the organization at the front lines of the company up through manufacturing leadership ranks, including time as a Plant Director at facilities in Oklahoma and North Carolina.³ He's been engaged in Lean for over 15 years. He is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt. Billy has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Prairie View A&M University and an MBA from Baker University.⁴

Today we'll have about 30 minutes of the conversation. I'll bring the rest of it to you in the next episode. We're going to talk about how Billy got started with Lean, how he helped shift the focus from a tools- and event-based approach to more of a culture focus, how to build a sense of ownership, servant leadership, strategy deployment, employee recognition, and more. If you'd like to share a link to this episode, you can go to leanblog.org/293. Thanks for listening.

Billy, hi. Thank you so much for joining us and being a guest here on the podcast today. How are you?

Billy Taylor:

I'm doing very well. Thank you for having me. I'm excited about actually engaging in the podcast with you.

Mark Graban:

I was wondering if you could start off by introducing yourself. Tell the listeners a little bit about your professional background and some of the things you've done in your career.

Billy Taylor:

I've actually been with Goodyear for over 20 years in the operations field.5 I started out on the shop floor at the lowest level of the organization, and now I'm currently director of manufacturing for North America, covering our commercial off-highway division, race car, and also our aviation business.6 And I've been engaged in Lean for the better part of 15 years now with practical experience.7

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From Tools to Culture

Mark Graban:

And how did you first get introduced to Lean?

Billy Taylor:

Actually, it was really tool-based. When we as a company started hearing a lot about Lean and the Toyota transformation and the Toyota process, it was a really tool-based focus. We had a lot of speakers come in and talk to us about bus routes and 5S. And at that time, I was in a struggling department, so I was willing to try anything. As I continued to get engaged in the Lean process, the culture piece is what really intrigued me.

We had some success in one of the plants I was in. I was running a department, and I recall a senior executive issued a challenge to me. I think it was 8,000 tires a day, and at that point, we were making around 7,000. It quickly came to our attention that we were not going to get there if we didn't address the cultural piece around the tools. We started to ask questions of organizations like AME and Shingo, and we started to get advice on our journey. At that point, Lean became something that really interested me.

Mark Graban:

Can you think back to if tools were the starting point? How did thinking about Lean more as a culture help in terms of what you were trying to achieve?

Billy Taylor:

When we were tool-based, the focus was basically event-focused. “We're going to do a quick change event,” “we're going to do a Kaizen event,” or “we're going to do a DMAIC event.” And what we realized is if you didn't address the cultural piece where you put processes in place around the tools so you could fully embrace and get the full impact of the tool, it had to be about the culture. So you had to build evangelists around the tools and evangelists around the process.

We started the transformation, we looked at DMAIC, and we kind of used to joke about it. It wasn't DMAIC; it was D-I-E. So instead of Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control, we actually defined and went right to improve. And then what happened? The execution part, you end up dying two weeks later because the system will go away. There was no sustainment because governance, we found, was the greatest tool for sustainment. Once you change the guard, how do you guard the change?

Mark Graban:

And how do you define governance in terms of a project or some sort of change initiative? Can you talk about that a little bit more?

Billy Taylor:

Right. Governance is the closed-loop system. It's a closed loop that, when you say “Control” even in DMAIC, it means you have a process to go back. You have to have an action register of who owns what. And so consistently we go back; it's a closed-loop system. And it's not a system where people were chastised or hazed. It's around, “Here's what we agreed to. How do we know it is still in place?”

For example, we have what's called a monthly operating review meeting with a big board that has an action register. You have to take a sticky note and go up to the board and put the sticky note on the day you're going to complete the task to get us back in control if something's out of control. But everybody in the room is there to help you. And so governance is a little different than compliance. Compliance is, “Here's what the spec said to do. Are you doing what the spec said to do?” Governance is, “While it's out of spec, we found that you're not doing that. So how do we get you back in control and make sure you stay in control?” In most journeys I've seen that fail, there was a lack of governance. But before you can have governance, you have to have ownership.

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Building Ownership and Servant Leadership

Mark Graban:

How do you help build that sense of ownership within a team or an organization?

Billy Taylor:

We use strategy deployment as a means to manage the intersections. We deploy the strategy, then we use a process called Hoshin Kanri, where you can actually see who owns what in the strategy. And when you see who owns what, the game changes. Then we have a visual process where ownership is visible. And in that essence, our saying is, “If you make people visible, they'll make you valuable.”

So it's not a confrontation. But as we deploy strategy, how do we know if you're executing it? Once you know what you own inside the strategy, what's the process that shows how you're doing to the team? We were recently discussing the Hawthorne Effect. When they raised the lights, production went up. And they lowered the lights, production went up. They concluded that whatever you're watching or paying attention to, you're going to get a better performance. But when you transfer ownership, it's different. When people are engaged and you're paying attention to them, you have a sense of urgency at all times. And it's around ownership; it's a value proposition within the individual.

Mark Graban:

Yeah, it sounds like what I hear you saying is this idea of governance is a process of managers trying to help rather than just chewing people out and making them feel bad for not performing at the right level.

Billy Taylor:

Right, absolutely. It's when managers start to embrace the idea that “I work for you, you don't work for me.” It's my job to enable, empower, engage, and provide you with the resources you need. However, the expectations are the expectations, and I'm still the leader. But the mindset around my team is as though I work for them, they don't work for me.

Mark Graban:

Yeah, you hear a lot about that style of leadership from Toyota. Some would label it servant leadership. You know, Toyota leaders talking about the obligation of leaders to help create a system in which people can be successful. I think back to my days at GM 20 years ago, managers didn't feel that sense of obligation. It was this bad cycle of creating a bad system and then making the workers feel bad for not performing well in it. It was really dysfunctional.

Billy Taylor:

Yes. Some managers I've seen, they look for facts to justify their opinion. And when that happens, I think you demoralize your team. I was speaking to a young person recently, and we were talking about the numbers, and the person was very KPI-focused. My comment to the person was, “Not everything that counts can be counted. However, what should be counted must be.” And he said, “What do you mean?”

So let's talk about the culture piece, the engagement piece. Talk about that team presenting the process to you and understanding where the gaps are in the process versus the gaps in the numbers. When we had the discussion, we talked about how he would cut people off and he never had a review process or a recognition process. He asked me, “So should I go buy T-shirts? Should I give them trophy gift certificates?” I said, “Again, you've missed the point.” When I have those meetings, I'm recognizing the process, not the individual. I'm embracing the individual. So if Billy Taylor leaves, the process sustains the game.

I stand up, we shake their hands. On my plant visits, we take plaques and we take medals that we adopted from the military, where the superior officer shakes hands and gives the coin away. We've adopted those types of processes in our recognition system. However, the people get excited when we recognize the process, but we embrace the individual. And we just have to get out of the way. Actually, we get backlogged on the recognition events. People are just engaged. They want to bring more to the table. The ideas just flow.

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Giving Employees a Voice

Mark Graban:

So how do you help create and reinforce that culture? As you've moved up from leading a department to being a plant manager to a senior leadership role, how has your role changed?

Billy Taylor:

The core process for myself has not changed. It's consistent.

1. Define winning. That's around the clarity piece.
2. Once I've defined winning and the team has embraced it, I move to aligning to win. That process is where I spend the majority of my focus, assuring that people know what they own in the process of winning. In the absence of ownership and clarity comes blame.
3. And then at that point, I focus on the third component, which is the execution process. How do we know if we're winning or not? Do we celebrate the red? Do we celebrate the opportunities? And do we have a process to recognize the systems and embrace the people?

If I can check those three boxes, I think I'm confident I get the core ingredient, which is inspiring trust, because now people have a voice.

Mark Graban:

Have you been in some situations where you've had to help develop an environment where people are able to use their employee voice? Creating trust is a big part of that, as you mentioned. Can you talk more about that?

Billy Taylor:

Absolutely. I was promoted to go to a plant in Tyler, Texas. When I got to the plant, within three days of going in as the assistant plant manager, I was the interim plant manager. Some unfortunate events had taken place. What was interesting, I would get the leadership team in the room, and I asked them to take a blank piece of paper and write down the three most important objectives in the plant. I said, “What's the volume expectation, what's the bottom line EBIT expectation, and what's the safety expectation?” They were clear around safety, but no one knew what the other two were.

Two weeks later, we met with teams, we had a very good strategy, but the needle never moved. In some aspects, we were getting worse. I walked the shop floor on the night shift. I would come in at midnight, I would stay over to 7:00 or 8:00 p.m., come back and meet with the area managers. They had no idea what the strategy was, and no one had even spoken to them.

So how do we handle it? We started what we call “board meetings.” The area managers developed a board, and it was a 10-second rule. Within 10 seconds of walking up, you could see if we were winning or not. And then we attached an action register to it. Every two hours, we would have these board meetings. Area managers were the chairman of the boards. Leadership could not speak; only frontline managers. Leaders were required to attend. It was unbelievable what we found. You're talking about a hidden factory. We found a gold mine. We went 90 consecutive days without missing one day of our customer expectations. We had a significant safety improvement where we were recognized by a third party. When the area managers who live in that environment were able to express themselves, the whole enterprise changed. The pride around the organization changed, and it was worth millions to the bottom line.

They requested these T-shirts and they were called “Tyler Pride.” And the only way you could get a T-shirt was to participate in a continuous improvement activity or event. You couldn't buy the shirt. If you did one project, you received a bronze hat pin. You did two, you had a silver; three, gold; and if you did 12, you got your platinum and a Goodyear racing jacket. We initially started with one recognition meeting on Fridays. We ended up moving to four, and we were still backlogged. Now, the price of those pins was 30 cents apiece. The value of those pins? Priceless. Because you could wear that proudly and you knew you were part of the transformation.

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Creating a Safe Environment for Change

Mark Graban:

Right. And I will share a link; I'll put the cartoon in the blog post for this episode. I see this happen in organizations, including hospitals, where there's some sort of target and there's just this simplistic comparison of red or green. It's easy to, if you will, “bark at the red.” It's harder to understand why performance is what it is. And I like the way you put it: you have to embrace the people and work together with them to try to turn red into green.

Billy Taylor:

Yes. And that was interesting, as I was invited to speak at MidMichigan Health, and the CEO invited me to come speak to her team. She asked me, “Billy, could you wear pink? Could you wear a pink tie, a pink shirt, pink socks? Because the theme's pink.” And so I arrived, and she has on a princess outfit with a crown, a princess dress, and a wand. And I'm thinking, “This is the CEO.”

The first thing I noticed was the environment. It was one that was very comfortable, and you could not decipher rank. It started with her creating an environment where she was comfortable being uncomfortable. And she wanted me to step into that arena with all the pink to be comfortable being uncomfortable. What was interesting, at the end, she said, “Billy, could you come up, and we're going to dance to close the meeting?” And I get up, and I'm like, “Okay, this is interesting.”

And then at that point, the music that came on was “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae).” I think, “You're playing a rap song at your annual operating meeting?” And you're wearing a princess costume, and you're doing the dance. What do you think I do? Ten seconds later, I start doing the dance. What do you think the audience does? Ten seconds after I start, they start doing the dance. Pretty soon, the only thing missing is cocktails. Everybody's in engagement mode. But she created an environment where it was safe to change, it was safe to get out of your comfort zone. And her statement was, “Great leaders, when they're on their Lean journey, they have to create an environment where it's safe to change, it's safe to fail.”

Mark Graban:

Yeah, your story kind of points out… I was doing a workout the other day, and I was listening to an audio workout coach, and she said something like, “Without discomfort, there's no change.” When you think about trying to improve a factory or change a culture, it's inevitable there's going to be discomfort for people, right?

Billy Taylor:

There is going to be discomfort because change, again, is uncomfortable. But at some point, if you're going to achieve your goal, you have to go through that. That's why great leaders create an environment where you can be comfortable being uncomfortable. It's different. Sometimes it's not painful, it's just different, and we call it pain. Emotionally, we recreate the pain.

Mark Graban:

What do you mean by that, “recreate the pain”?

Billy Taylor:

Emotionally. Here's what I learned where I didn't have some success: when people feel you're doing it to them versus with them, right? It's painful. And so emotionally, I create this baggage, this resistance to the training.

I told my team, “Do not ever treat me like you do some ladies in the grocery store with the baby carriage.” What happens? You walk up to the baby carriage, and in some cases, you lie. You look down, you say, “Oh, it's so cute, it's so precious,” and you walk away and you say, “Dang, that's an ugly baby.” And I tell them, “Now listen, tell me when I have an ugly baby.”

Let me put it into context. Once, I did my daughter's hair. My wife was at a conference, and I did her hair. When my wife came back, she just really got on to me about how I made her baby ugly. After taking this for so long, I just politely stated, “You've never shown me how to do hair. You've never given me a process to do hair, but you have critiqued me. Show me how to do hair. Give me a process.”

At the end of some of my presentations, I put the picture up of my daughter. I actually have the picture of that hairdo. And then I have the picture of my daughter now. And the theme of that slide is, “There are no ugly babies; there's a lack of process and a lack of ownership,” because I didn't own it as well. And I said, “Look at my daughter now. She's gorgeous.” And I now have a process: I pay for her to go to the beauty salon.

Mark Graban:

You outsource that.

Billy Taylor:

There you go. And so it's interesting when you're talking about change and the pain of change. Right? If Billy Taylor wants to lose weight, I can't keep doing the same thing that I'm doing. I have to change. And it's about inputs more so than outputs. The process. That's right.

In our strategy deployment system, the execution part… often we call it the formula for success is Strategy + Execution = Results. So why do so many companies fail to execute? Because people don't know who owns what in the strategy. Alan Mulally and even our CEO, Rich Kramer, I've heard Rich say numerous times, “You cannot manage a secret in your Lean journey.” If you do not deploy the strategy, it is a secret. If you do not deploy the ownership, you're going to destroy the strategy.

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Let’s build a culture of continuous improvement and psychological safety—together. If you're a leader aiming for lasting change (not just more projects), I help organizations:

• Engage people at all levels in sustainable improvement
• Shift from fear of mistakes to learning from them
• Apply Lean thinking in practical, people-centered ways

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