I was facilitating a workshop recently when the concept of kaizen came up. Kaizen is a Japanese approach to continuous improvement built around the idea that small, ongoing changes can add up to meaningful improvements over time. As I was talking about it, my brain immediately went to the 1986 movie Gung Ho, starring Michael Keaton. I mentioned the movie to the group and was met with blank looks. Apparently, my Gung Ho reference was not nearly as universal as I had assumed.

Naturally, that meant I had to go back and watch it again.

There is plenty about Gung Ho that reminds you it was made in 1986. The movie relies heavily on exaggerated cultural differences for its comedy, and some of its portrayals of both American and Japanese workers deserve to be viewed through the context of when the film was made. Still, underneath those stereotypes is a workplace story that feels surprisingly relevant nearly forty years later. In fact, although kaizen was what made me think of the movie, I came away thinking much less about continuous improvement and much more about what happens when new leaders enter an existing organization convinced they already know how to make it better.

A New Leader Arrives With a Solution

At the beginning of Gung Ho, Hunt Stevenson travels to Japan in an effort to convince Assan Motors to reopen the automobile factory in his struggling Pennsylvania town. The company agrees, bringing jobs back to a community that desperately needs them. That should be the beginning of the happy ending. Instead, it is the beginning of the conflict.

The Japanese management team arrives with an established way of operating. Their methods have worked within their organization, so there is an understandable expectation that those same methods should work in Pennsylvania. The American workers, meanwhile, have their own expectations about what work should look like. They have history with the factory, relationships with one another, and established ideas about their jobs and community. Almost immediately, both groups begin interpreting the other through their own assumptions about the right way to work.

This is where Gung Ho starts to look remarkably like something that happens in real organizations all the time.

A new manager enters an organization because they have experience, ideas, and expertise. Often, they were selected specifically because someone wants change. They may have successfully implemented programs, processes, or management approaches somewhere else, and it is perfectly reasonable for them to bring that knowledge with them. The problem begins when experience turns into certainty.

What worked in one organization worked within a particular system. It was shaped by that organization’s people, history, relationships, resources, expectations, policies, pressures, and culture. Moving the practice somewhere else does not move all of those conditions along with it.

Before You Change the System, Learn the System

Systems thinking gives us a useful way to understand why this matters. An organization is not simply a collection of procedures waiting for a new manager to improve them. It is a network of relationships, formal and informal practices, history, expectations, feedback loops, and accumulated experiences. Some parts of that system are visible to a newcomer almost immediately, while others may take months or even years to understand.

This is why one of the most valuable things a new manager can do is resist the pressure to demonstrate their value by immediately changing things.

There will almost certainly be processes that could be improved. There may be practices that exist largely because “we have always done it that way.” There may even be serious problems that require attention. However, before deciding that something makes no sense, it helps to understand why it exists. Today’s inefficient-looking process may be yesterday’s solution to a problem the new manager has not encountered yet. An informal workaround may exist because the official process does not account for something that frontline employees deal with every day. Resistance to a proposed change may have less to do with employees being unwilling to change and more to do with previous changes that were poorly implemented, quickly abandoned, or imposed without understanding their consequences.

None of this means new managers should preserve every existing practice or avoid making difficult decisions. It means diagnosis should come before prescription.

The People Who Were Already There Know Things You Don’t

One of the recurring problems in Gung Ho is that the Japanese managers understand automobile manufacturing, but the American workers understand this particular factory, workforce, and community. Neither perspective is sufficient on its own.

That distinction matters for new leaders. Expertise and positional authority can provide one kind of knowledge, but neither replaces local knowledge. The employee who has been doing a job for fifteen years knows things about that work that may never appear in a procedure manual. The person at the service desk knows which policy routinely confuses customers. The administrative employee knows which seemingly simple request requires six unofficial steps behind the scenes. Longtime employees know which ideas have already been attempted, why certain relationships are strained, where people go when they need something to actually get done, and which organizational stories continue to influence decisions years after the original events occurred.

This is also why “Why do you do it this way?” can be either a genuinely useful question or an incredibly irritating one. The difference often lies in whether the person asking is actually curious.

If the question really means, “Explain this to me because I want to understand,” it can uncover valuable information. If it means, “Explain why you haven’t figured out the obviously better way I already have in mind,” people tend to recognize that too.

A new manager does not have to agree with everything they learn. They do, however, need to learn it.

Where Kaizen Actually Fits

This brings me back to the reason I thought about Gung Ho in the first place. Kaizen is often translated simply as continuous improvement, which can make it sound like an endless organizational quest to become faster, more efficient, and more productive. There is more to the philosophy than simply changing things all the time.

Continuous improvement requires learning. It depends on noticing what is happening, identifying problems, listening to the people involved in the work, making changes, observing the results, and adjusting again. Improvement is not a single transformation imposed from above. It is an ongoing process informed by what the system tells us.

Seen through that lens, Gung Ho is not really a story about the Japanese managers teaching the American workers a better way to manufacture cars. Nor is it a story about the Americans proving that the Japanese approach is wrong. Both groups have something to learn. The factory begins to function differently as each side develops a better understanding of what the other brings to the work.

That may be one of the most useful interpretations of continuous improvement for someone entering a new leadership role. The first thing you continuously improve may need to be your own understanding of the organization.

Culture Is Not Something You Replace on Your First Day

New leaders are often told they have been brought in to “change the culture,” which makes culture sound like an outdated piece of software that can simply be replaced with a newer version. Organizational culture does not work that way. Culture lives in shared expectations, stories, habits, relationships, rituals, memories, and assumptions about how things really work. A new leader becomes part of that culture the moment they arrive, but they do not instantly understand it simply because they now have authority within it.

This creates a particular danger when leaders arrive with strong ideas about the culture they want to create. There is nothing wrong with having values or aspirations for an organization, but attempting to install a new culture without understanding the existing one can produce exactly the resistance leaders then complain about.

People may be protecting something valuable that the new leader has not recognized yet. They may also be protecting practices that genuinely need to change. The only way to begin distinguishing between the two is to listen long enough to understand what those practices mean within the larger system.

That requires humility, particularly when a leader has been successful elsewhere. Previous success is evidence that you learned how to operate effectively within one system. It is not proof that you already understand the next one.

You Were Hired for What You Know—and You Still Have Things to Learn

There is an understandable tension here. Organizations generally do not hire managers because they want them to spend six months observing quietly and never making a decision. Leaders are expected to bring knowledge, judgment, experience, and ideas. Sometimes they are walking into situations where changes genuinely cannot wait.

The lesson from Gung Ho is not that new leaders should abandon everything they know and simply adopt whatever practices already exist. The movie ultimately suggests something much more useful: neither side has the complete answer.

A new manager should bring their experience into an organization, but they should bring it as a resource rather than a template. Instead of asking, “How do I get these people to work the way we did at my previous organization?” the more useful question may be, “What did I learn there that could help us here, once I understand what here actually looks like?”

That small shift changes the relationship between leadership and the people already doing the work. Employees stop being obstacles to implementing the manager’s vision and become sources of information about the system they collectively need to improve.

The Lesson from Gung Ho

Nearly forty years after Gung Ho was released, the cultural caricatures have aged much more noticeably than its central workplace problem. Organizations still bring in new leaders with mandates to change things. New managers still arrive eager to demonstrate that they were the right choice. Employees still become frustrated when someone who has been there for three weeks begins explaining how everything should work. Leaders still sometimes interpret resistance as stubbornness before asking what people might actually be responding to.

Kaizen may have been what sent me back to Gung Ho, but continuous improvement is only part of what the movie has to teach us. The larger lesson is about what improvement requires in the first place.

When you enter a new organization, you bring valuable knowledge with you. So do the people who were there before you arrived. Your experience can help you recognize possibilities they may not see, while their experience can help you understand conditions you cannot possibly know yet. Neither perspective needs to win.

The best leaders do not enter a new organization asking how quickly they can make it operate like the place they came from. They spend time learning why this organization operates the way it does, what is worth preserving, what needs to change, and what the people closest to the work already know about both.

Perhaps that is where kaizen really begins for a new manager. Continuous improvement starts with continuous learning, and sometimes the first thing that needs improving is our assumption that we already know the answer.