Modern leadership is no longer a one way-street, but rather a dialogue-led interaction. At TT Gaskets, growth is sought through cooperation and a clear and up-to-date picture of the current situation. Among other things, the tools provided by the LEAN model are helpful.
Leadership plays a significant role in whether and how an employee can influence his or her own work. This is a big challenge for the employer, which we at TT Gaskets strive to tackle in many ways. We think we need to give every employee a good and meaningful workday. With good leadership, we have succeeded in building interesting career paths, for example.
In our family company, the change and continuous development of leadership has gone through three generations. In the early decades of TT Gaskets, the roles of the leader and the subordinate were clear: the boss said what to do and the worker did it. During the second generation, the leadership style was strongly instructive, management by walking around. I represent the third generation and I want to guide our community to build the future through participatory leadership.
When it became my turn to be the CEO, I felt it was important to give wings to an experimental culture and enable the growth of both the company and its personnel to the next level. Our employees must be involved in thinking and developing in order to meet the requirements of the rapidly evolving external environment in the future. The pace of change is fast, and we don’t have the time to wait for things to be discussed at different levels of the organization. All of them should take part in the conversation right from the beginning. This is an important foundation both for growing the company and to better serve the current and future customers.
I want to make the corporate culture visible so that our history, where we are going, and why, coexist side by side. The tools I use to help our employees to succeed include Jim Collins’ Level Five Leadership and LEAN.
LEAN provides an excellent framework for information management. Thanks to the daily management based on the LEAN model, we see a snapshot of the situation all the time, which provides the necessary basis for information management. Things are done and monitored – everything has a purpose, and the effects can be seen quickly.
Efficiency has always been at the heart of what we do. That thought in is my genes, inherited from the previous generations. We’re an engineering company, and we want to understand how things work. We don’t just want to create different capabilities, but rather aim to be competitive as well as serve our customers. In addition, as a family company we want to create a better future for the next generations through our responsibility program.
Our LEAN model is there for everyone: it enables us to give responsibility and authority to employees and integrates them fully into the development of the company. Once we’ve built the company’s goals together, everyone should think about them more closely, both individually and with their own team. Thinking about the goals for each job is beneficial, as well as how everyone can do their part in achieving those goals. Our customers, in turn, benefit from the fact that what we do is immediate and direct. Development work progresses rapidly and there is no waste in doing it. This leads to efficiency and profitability.
LEAN thinking lives and evolves every day and enables us to adapt to change. This is also appreciated by our customers. They don’t have to worry about today’s challenges, and we’ll be offering them solutions to the problems of the future.
Aleksi Arpiainen
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Aleksi Arpiainen is the CEO of TT Gaskets in the third generation. According to him, the success of a family business is fueled by continuous development and innovation. In the blog, Aleksi sheds light on his thoughts on where the world of gaskets is going.