When Being Busy Becomes the Job

When Being Busy Becomes the Job

TPSbyKatsu | Leadership, Culture & Continuous Improvement

I once worked with a manager who was always running.

Not metaphorically.

He actually ran.

From his office to the shop floor. From one meeting to another. From one problem to the next.

He seemed to be in a permanent race against something nobody else could see.

One day, I approached him.

“Do you have a minute?”

“Sure. Walk with me. I’m heading to the shop floor.”

“It’ll only take a minute.”

“Then walk with me. Otherwise, wait here until I come back.”

And off he went.

I remember standing there for a moment, wondering what had just happened.

There was nothing particularly wrong with his suggestion. Walking together could have been a perfectly reasonable way to have a conversation.

But this wasn’t an isolated incident.

He was always moving.

Always rushing.

Always on his way to something more urgent.

And I began to wonder whether he was running because everything was urgent, or whether everything had become urgent because he was always running.

I never doubted that he worked hard.

What I questioned was whether all that movement was helping him accomplish more.

Or simply making him look indispensable.

When Commitment Has a Clock

Years later, I experienced a different version of the same phenomenon.

I worked for an organization where the official working day ended at 6:00 p.m.

And I usually left at 6:00 p.m.

My work was completed. My responsibilities were covered. My performance evaluations were excellent.

And often, the following day’s work was already prepared.

For example, when I had supplier negotiation meetings scheduled for the next morning, the necessary reports were already printed, reviewed, and ready.

The important points had been highlighted.

I wasn’t planning to spend the first hour of the next day searching for information, reviewing numbers, or figuring out what needed attention.

That work had already been done.

Not because someone had asked me to stay ahead.

But because that was how I had learned to work.

My father had taught me the value of preparation long before I ever heard the words Toyota Production System.

I didn’t know the terminology.

I simply understood that preparing today could make tomorrow’s work easier.

Years later, I would recognize some of those same principles in TPS.

But back then, I was just doing my job the way I believed it should be done.

And when 6:00 p.m. arrived, I went home.

The work was done.

Tomorrow was prepared.

My results were good.

Yet somehow, staying another hour would have been considered a stronger demonstration of commitment.

Most of my colleagues stayed until 7:00 p.m., sometimes longer.

Nobody had officially changed the working hours.

There was no written rule requiring us to stay.

But there was an unwritten expectation.

Leaving at 6:00 p.m. was technically acceptable.

Culturally, it wasn’t.

Over time, I discovered that my results and my perceived commitment were being evaluated through two very different lenses.

One measured what I accomplished.

The other measured how long I remained visible.

And the second seemed to carry more weight than I had imagined.

Eventually, I lost that job.

I cannot reduce an employment decision to a single cause. But the experience left me with a question that has followed me throughout my career:

When did being present become more important than being effective?

Think about the message such a culture sends.

Someone who finishes the necessary work, solves problems, and leaves on time may appear less committed than someone who struggles through the same work and stays two hours longer.

Someone who eliminates a recurring problem may become less visible than the person who heroically solves it every afternoon.

And someone who quietly builds a reliable process may receive less recognition than the person constantly rescuing an unreliable one.

The organization may say it values results.

But its daily behavior teaches something else.

People notice.

And they adapt.

Too Busy to Improve

There is an old cartoon I have always liked.

A group of cavemen is struggling to move a heavy cart.

The cart has square wheels.

Someone approaches them with round wheels, offering a much easier way to move it.

But the cavemen refuse.

They are too busy pushing the cart.

It’s a ridiculous situation.

Until you realize how often it happens in real organizations.

A supervisor spends every afternoon expediting orders because the production schedule keeps changing.

A maintenance team repeatedly repairs the same equipment without finding time to investigate why it keeps failing.

A manager attends meeting after meeting to review problems that nobody has been given time to solve.

An improvement team produces reports, presentations, and activity trackers to demonstrate how much improvement work is being done.

Everyone is busy.

Everyone is trying.

Everyone has a perfectly reasonable explanation for why they cannot stop.

And the cart keeps moving on square wheels.

Slowly.

Painfully.

At enormous cost.

The tragedy isn’t that people refuse to improve.

Often, they genuinely want to.

The tragedy is that the system has made improvement feel like something they must do after finishing their real work.

And their real work never ends.

What Leaders Accidentally Reward

I have spent much of my professional life studying and practicing TPS.

One lesson has become increasingly clear to me:

People learn what an organization truly values by observing what its leaders recognize, tolerate, and reward.

Not necessarily what appears in its mission statement.

Not what is written on a poster.

What happens every day.

If a manager praises the employee who stays late to recover a missed shipment but never questions why the shipment was at risk, people learn that heroic recovery is valuable.

If a supervisor celebrates someone who repeatedly fixes the same machine but never creates the conditions to eliminate the failure, people learn that firefighting earns recognition.

If leaders constantly emphasize how overwhelmed they are, their teams may begin to associate exhaustion with importance.

And if someone manages to simplify the work, eliminate unnecessary activities, and create time to think?

That person may suddenly look less busy than everyone else.

Which creates a peculiar contradiction.

The better someone becomes at eliminating waste, the less committed they may appear in a culture that rewards visible effort.

I don’t believe most leaders intentionally create this situation.

Many are simply responding to the same expectations that shape everyone else’s behavior.

They inherited a system where urgency demonstrates responsibility, long hours demonstrate dedication, and constant availability demonstrates leadership.

And without realizing it, they reproduce that system.

The running manager may not have created the culture of urgency.

He may have been one of its most visible products.

That distinction matters.

Because blaming him would be easier than examining the conditions that made his behavior seem necessary.

The Difference Between Working Hard and Making Work Better

TPS is sometimes misunderstood as a relentless pursuit of efficiency.

Make everything faster.

Eliminate every spare minute.

Keep everyone fully occupied.

But a system where everyone is constantly occupied has very little room to respond when reality differs from the plan.

And reality always differs from the plan.

When every minute is already committed, a small disruption becomes an emergency.

When every person is already overloaded, helping a colleague becomes a sacrifice.

When supervisors spend their entire day reacting, coaching becomes something they hope to do tomorrow.

And when improvement depends on finding spare time, improvement becomes permanently postponed.

There is an important distinction here.

Working hard is not the problem.

There are moments when extraordinary effort is necessary. Customers have emergencies. Equipment fails. Unexpected situations demand immediate attention.

I have been there.

And I have worked alongside people whose willingness to go beyond expectations made a real difference.

But extraordinary effort should remain extraordinary.

A system that requires heroism every day is not demonstrating the strength of its people. It is revealing the weakness of its design.

The purpose of improvement is not to make people work less because work is undesirable.

It is to make the necessary work easier, safer, more reliable, and more meaningful.

To reduce the effort consumed by problems that should not keep happening.

To give people the capacity to think, learn, and help one another.

And to make extraordinary effort available when it is genuinely needed, rather than consuming it as a daily operating requirement.

A Different Question

Looking back, I sometimes think about that manager running toward the shop floor.

I wonder what would have happened if, instead of running from one urgency to another, he had occasionally stopped to ask why so many things required his immediate attention.

Perhaps he would have discovered problems that only he could solve.

Perhaps he would have discovered decisions that others could have made.

Perhaps he would have found opportunities to develop people who were waiting for his direction.

Or perhaps he would have discovered that some of those emergencies were not emergencies at all.

I also think about the organization where leaving at the official time could raise questions about commitment.

What might have changed if leaders had asked why some people consistently needed additional hours while others did not?

Was the workload uneven?

Were the processes unreliable?

Were some people eliminating unnecessary work?

Were others simply staying because everyone else stayed?

Those questions might have revealed something useful about the system.

But they would have required looking beyond appearances.

And appearances are much easier to measure.

A full parking lot at 7:00 p.m. is visible.

A problem that no longer occurs is much harder to notice.

A manager running through the plant looks engaged.

A manager developing a team that no longer depends on constant intervention may look surprisingly calm.

Yet the second may be creating far more value.

Perhaps leadership should pay less attention to how busy people appear and more attention to why so much effort is necessary in the first place.

Because being busy is not the same as being productive.

Moving faster is not the same as moving forward.

And staying longer is not necessarily evidence of greater commitment.

When being busy becomes the job, improving the work becomes a distraction.

I still remember that manager running toward the shop floor.

Sometimes I wonder whether he ever found the time to stop.

Not to rest.

To think.

TPSbyKatsu — Learning to See. Developing People. Improving Systems.