Watch the recording of the webinar:
View and download the slides:
Alternative Slides Download (PDF)
Listen to the recording via our podcast:
Most lean programs don't survive a CEO change, let alone four of them. The Electrolux Manufacturing System has now run for 20 years across 34 factories and four CEOs, and the program is still evolving. In this session, Sandro Casagrande -- the first Italian to achieve EMS Master Gear certification at Electrolux and now the Group Methodology and Documentation Leader -- walks through how EMS started, where it almost plateaued in 2014, and what the leadership team did to break through.
The honest part of the story is what makes it useful. After nine years of training, change agents, and master classes, only three of Electrolux's sites had reached gold certification and only one had reached platinum. Something was missing. What they identified -- and how they responded -- is the substance of this webinar.
Electrolux launched EMS in 2005 to solve a specific problem: the company had grown by acquisition, which meant dozens of different ways of working, different visual standards, and different metrics across the manufacturing footprint. Leadership wanted one Electrolux. EMS was the vehicle.
The early architecture was familiar. A model house with strive-for-zero goals -- zero safety incidents, zero quality defects, zero cost waste, zero missed deliveries, all people engaged. A foundation of conditions for manufacturing, material handling, logistics, strategy deployment, and leadership engagement. A panel of methodologies and tools layered on top, drawn from automotive benchmarks and good practices from acquired companies.
The deployment was fast. By 2007-2008, EMS was live across every site in the group. Then came the long part.
Sandro is direct about this. After nine years of training, master classes, change agent development, and methodology rollout, the assessment results were not what leadership had hoped for. Three sites at gold. One at platinum. The rest stalled at lower levels despite the same investment.
The conclusion the team reached: the difference between sites that progressed and sites that didn't wasn't training, methodology, or tools. It was leadership. Specifically, how leaders interacted with their teams, what routines they actually followed day-to-day, and what behaviors they brought to those routines.
Some sites had leaders doing this naturally. Others didn't. And the EMS program at the time had no systematic way to develop the missing piece.
This is the part most lean program leaders need to hear. Electrolux didn't add more tools. They didn't replace the methodology. They added a deliberate system for developing leadership routines and behaviors as organizational habits -- not as personality-dependent practice.
The team grounded the redesign in three concepts.
The first was Charles Duhigg's habit loop from The Power of Habit -- cue, routine, reward. Sandro's framing: when designing a new way of working, start from the reward. What does the person doing this routine actually gain? Why is the new behavior better than the current one? Most change initiatives skip this and lead with the routine, which fails because the loop never closes.
The second was Mike Rother's Toyota Kata. EMS needed shared routines that could be repeated and iterated by leaders across all 34 factories. The kata structure -- improvement kata for the learner, coaching kata for the leader -- gave them a way to do that systematically.
The third was neuroplasticity. The brain rewires through repetition. New routines don't stick after one good training session; they stick after enough repetition that the neural pathway becomes the default. This sounds obvious until you watch how most lean training programs are designed -- one-week course, then back to work, then surprised that nothing changes.
These three ideas combined into what Electrolux calls the EMS Way.
The model has two halves. Leadership processes generate the routine and structure. Leadership behaviors influence the quality of how those routines are executed. You need both. A perfect routine executed with the wrong behavior produces compliance, not improvement.
Leadership processes are mapped to the strategy framework directly. Strategy is supported by business plan deployment and operational communication. Activities are supported by current and target conditions and rapid PDCA cycles. Conditions are maintained through standards, visual management, and the leader audit process. Holding it all together is leader standard work, which gives leaders a defined routine for showing up consistently.
Coaching runs through every layer. Coaching the strategy by challenging the business plan and provoking reflection on whether it's still the best plan. Coaching conditions by reviewing visual management not just for compliance but for usefulness -- if you were the team leader running this area, would the visual aids actually help you run the business? Coaching activities through the kata cycle, where the coach guides from behind while the learner runs the experiment.
Leadership behaviors are six specific patterns. Goal alignment -- being explicit about what the future condition should look like, not just what the metrics should be. Process and result -- a right process produces a right result, so a leader's job is to make processes robust, observed at the gemba, analyzed on facts. Standards -- encouraging creation, revision, and adherence, and treating deviation as a question to investigate rather than a violation to punish. Question and challenge -- developing people by asking, not telling, and challenging the way of thinking when "we've always done it this way" surfaces. Coaching the rapid PDCA -- creating the playground, then stepping back so the learner runs the experiment. Support and recognition -- removing barriers, celebrating small wins, and thanking teams when an experiment fails because the team learned something about the process.
Sandro spends time on a study from Aubrey Daniels on feedback. Feedback can be classified on three dimensions: positive or negative, immediate or delayed, certain or uncertain.
The most powerful feedback is positive-immediate-certain or negative-immediate-certain. Immediate and certain are the conditions that make feedback work. If you wait, the connection to the behavior weakens. If feedback is occasional rather than every-time, it becomes background noise.
The second insight is harder for most leaders to internalize. Just delivering immediate-certain feedback creates compliance behavior -- people doing things because they have to. To create proactive behavior, the ratio of positive to negative feedback should be roughly four to one. Not because negative feedback is bad, but because most leaders deliver almost none of the positive kind. They give negative feedback constantly and forget the positive entirely.
This is one of the few moves a leadership team can make immediately, with no software or program rollout, that changes team behavior measurably within weeks.
A practical reframe Sandro offers for visual management audits. Instead of walking an area as the senior leader checking compliance, put yourself in the shoes of the person who leads that team and reports to you. If you were running this area, what would you need to know to run your business? Do the visual aids actually give you that information quickly?
This single mental shift -- from auditor to imagined operator -- usually reveals visual management systems that were built for a previous version of the process and never updated. It's also the difference between a leader audit that drains energy and one that transfers it.
The image Sandro uses is leader-coach standing behind the learner, not in front. The learner is the one carving the path forward through experiments. The coach is observing how the learner approaches the problem and offering procedural guidance.
This is the opposite of what most lean programs produce. Programs that put the coach in front -- showing the right answer, demonstrating the technique, leading the kaizen event -- produce followers. They produce people who can execute when the coach is present and stop when the coach moves on.
Electrolux is explicit about wanting the opposite. The longer-term goal is to develop people who own improvement of their own processes, who become the protagonist of the next stage of improvement rather than the audience for it. That requires the coach to step back, even when stepping forward would produce a faster short-term result.
The development model is structured as 70-20-10 -- 70% practice, 20% peer learning, 10% formal lesson.
Phase one is a one-week intensive academy. Leaders go through every leadership process and behavior with explanation, then practice each one on the actual shop floor against real problems. The training is hands-on, with peer learning across participants and real-time feedback from observers. The objective at the end of the week is competence, not certification.
Phase two is back at the home site. Each participant leads one improvement activity using EMS Way routines, with external coaching observation. Then they begin acting as a coach themselves, with a second-level coach observing them. Over several months, the second-coach support gradually decreases as the leader develops independent capability.
Phase three is the Leader Gear certification. Each candidate runs a project over 7-8 months with periodic external observation, peer-to-peer reviews, and follow-up observation cycles. The cycle is deliberately long because the development goal is habit formation, not knowledge acquisition.
The numbers as of this webinar: 39 academy editions run. 458 leaders trained. 90% of plant managers and 75% of area and supply chain managers certified as coaches. EMS Way routines in place across 77% of teams worldwide. More than 700 workshops reported.
Sandro is honest about the trajectory. The journey doesn't only go in one direction. A site that reaches gold or platinum can regress when there's significant turnover, a major automation investment, or a new product launch -- because those events take the process back to instability. What changes for sites with a deeper EMS Way culture is recovery speed. They have more people who know how to address problems, so they can multiply the effort and rebuild faster.
The certification thresholds themselves have moved over 20 years. The level required for gold today is meaningfully higher than the gold level a decade ago, because the program continuously raises the bar to keep pulling sites toward better performance. Platinum sites this year aren't doing what platinum sites did in 2015.
The CEO support across four CEOs in 20 years has been a critical factor. The current CEO, hired this year from outside the company, has continued the program and is challenging the team to evolve it further. That kind of leadership continuity across executive transitions is rare, and Sandro credits the visible business benefit -- safety, quality, efficiency -- for sustaining executive interest through changes at the top.
Electrolux became a KaiNexus customer around 2017. The starting use case was improvement action tracking. A single site managing 4,000-5,000 improvement actions on paper boards and email threads had hit a scale problem that wasn't solvable with more paper.
The platform's role expanded from there. Layer audits run digitally now -- mobile-based, with photos attached and improvement actions nested directly into audit findings. KPI tracking, team info boards, and business plan deployment boards all live in the same platform, which gives leaders one place to see how strategy, daily improvement, and routine audits connect.
Sandro is direct about the value: the platform doesn't generate ideas. It makes ideas effectively manageable at the scale Electrolux operates. Coverage is now around 60% of sites, with complete coverage in Latin America, near-complete in Europe, and progressive expansion to other regions.
If your improvement program has hit the scale where paper, email, and spreadsheets stop working -- not because they're wrong but because there's too much improvement happening to track manually -- that's the problem KaiNexus is built to solve.
Sandro Casagrande has more than 30 years of hands-on experience in lean methodologies and has built his career driving operational excellence at Electrolux. His lean journey began in 1994 with Total Quality Management exposure, and he was instrumental in the first pilot activities for the Electrolux Manufacturing System before its official 2005 launch during 12 years at the Solaro Dishwasher Plant. He became the first Italian to achieve EMS Master Gear certification, co-led EMS implementation in new acquisition plants in Egypt, and has co-led the global EMS digitalization since 2017. As Group Methodology and Documentation Leader, he coordinates EMS activities across all Electrolux business areas.
What is the Electrolux Manufacturing System (EMS)?
EMS is the lean and continuous improvement program Electrolux launched in 2005 to unify ways of working across factories that had been acquired over time. It includes a strive-for-zero goal framework, leadership processes, leadership behaviors, methodology and tools, and a site certification process. The program has now run for 20 years across 34 factories, supported by four CEOs.
Why did Electrolux's lean program plateau after nine years?
By 2014, after nine years of training, methodology rollout, and change agent development, only three sites had reached gold certification and one had reached platinum. The team concluded that the missing factor wasn't training or tools -- it was leadership routines and behaviors. Sites with leaders who naturally coached, asked, and reinforced the right behaviors progressed. Sites without that leadership pattern stalled. The EMS Way model was developed to make those leadership patterns systematic rather than personality-dependent.
What is the EMS Way?
The EMS Way is a leadership management system that combines defined leadership processes (business plan deployment, current and target conditions, rapid PDCA, standards, visual management, leader audits, leader standard work, and coaching across all of these) with defined leadership behaviors (goal alignment, process and result, standards, question and challenge, coaching the PDCA, support and recognition). It is grounded in habit science -- cue, routine, reward -- and treats coaching as the connective tissue across the system.
How does Electrolux develop leaders in the EMS Way?
Through a 70-20-10 model. Phase one is a one-week intensive academy with hands-on practice on real shop-floor problems. Phase two is back at the home site, where the leader runs improvement activities with external coaching observation, then begins acting as a coach themselves with a second-level coach observing. Phase three is the Leader Gear certification, a 7-8 month project with periodic observation and peer review cycles. The cycle is long because the goal is habit formation, not knowledge transfer.
What role does coaching play in the EMS Way?
Coaching runs through every layer of the system. Coaches challenge the business plan rather than approving it, guide the team to define current and target conditions together rather than handing them down, and stand behind the learner during PDCA experiments rather than in front of them. The intent is to develop people who own improvement of their own processes -- not followers who execute when the coach is present and stop when they leave.
How does positive feedback ratio affect team behavior?
Research from Aubrey Daniels indicates that immediate, certain feedback is the most powerful kind, and that the ratio of positive to negative feedback matters significantly. A roughly four-to-one positive-to-negative ratio shifts teams from compliance behavior (doing things because they have to) toward proactive behavior (proposing ideas, taking initiative). Most leaders deliver negative feedback regularly and forget positive feedback entirely, which is one of the most addressable behavior gaps in lean leadership.
How does Electrolux use KaiNexus?
Electrolux uses KaiNexus for improvement action tracking, layer audits, KPI dashboards, team info boards, and business plan deployment boards. Layer audits are run digitally on mobile devices, with photos attached and improvement actions nested directly into audit findings. The platform is currently deployed across roughly 60% of sites, with complete coverage in Latin America and near-complete coverage in Europe.
.svg)
Copyright © 2026
Privacy Policy