Calling Someone a "Process Coach" Doesn't Make Them One

A title change is not a culture change. In this episode, Mark Graban draws on his early experience at GM in the mid-1990s — where "foreman" became "team coordinator" overnight without anything else changing — to explore why renaming supervisors with Lean-sounding titles so often fails to deliver Lean results.

Read the blog post

The discussion centers on Ford's Process Coach role: what it's supposed to be, what it often is in practice, and why the gap between those two things is a leadership system problem, not a training problem. Mark also looks at why Toyota's Group Leader model works where Ford's equivalent often doesn't — and why a senior UAW worker has rational, concrete reasons to turn down a promotion to Process Coach even if they're the most qualified person on the floor.

If your organization has rebranded its supervisors without redesigning the conditions those supervisors work in, this episode is worth your time.