As a person who is leading a lean transformation project it is very likely you will sometimes be frustrated thinking nothing is working and people are not changing. Change is a process so subtle sometimes you need skill beyond normal to detect progress. Inability of detecting it and worse being frustrated is but only harmful for the progress of the change process.
The speed of change is dependent on many things like how much people are educated about lean tools, involvement of management, and above all the crisis is the biggest catalyst for change. A good leader will not panic in crisis but will effectively use it to develop and motivate his team to accelerate the change process.
It may not be always possible to accelerate the change process. This is when you need patience and some skills to keep everyone on track. It is very important to know how the change occurs. I did try to explain my understanding in this article “Understanding change” . I don’t want get too much into the psychology of the change , it will be beyond the scope of this post and also because I am not an authority on that subject. Here is an example. We were trying to take control on our shop floor process which were in total chaos. Nobody new cycle time for any operation. There was no standard work, no production plan and many more problems. It took over a year to completely turn the ship around and it is still changing and improving. We knew what should be the end product but to get there it was not straight forward and many times people did loose faith ,but still had keep it going. At first making people just do things and keeping them aligned daily through gemba walks then slowly doing led to believing. It is a interesting process to see how people start taking responsibility after doing something which they initially did not believe in.