Leadership Series

Change management and organizational resistance are constant topics for anyone trying to lead change. I hear all the time how resistant people are to change, but I disagree. People aren’t resistant to change, they are resistant to consequences. Their habits are resistant to change. We treat these as the same problem but they aren’t. Most management teams don't have the tools in place to help people change, which is a large part of why it's so hard to do. A habit is a brai

Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer, ran an experiment on 50,000 people. He gave them all the same coding puzzle but he split up the people into two groups. When Group One failed they saw the message, "That didn't work. Please try again." Group Two saw, "That didn't work. You lost 5 points. You now have 195 points. Please try again." The no-penalty group had a 68% success rate and the group averaged 2.5 more attempts before completing the puzzle than the other group. The group

Somewhere along the way, "leader" became the junk drawer of the org chart. Develop people. Set direction. Coach performance. Manage conflict. Hit the number. Communicate the strategy down and the reality up. And, quietly tucked in underneath all of it, inspect and catch every process deviation before it becomes a problem and deliver accountability and retraining as needed. Oh, and as you do all that, we want your people to be happy too. So you better go build some strong re

Are you battling a retention issue? Most retention plans treat the symptom. A pay bump, extra PTO, an exit interview nobody reads. None of it holds for long, because none of it touches the actual mechanism: how the job feels. Fix the motivational framework and retention takes care of itself. Here's the model I use to diagnose it: Octalysis, developed by Yu-kai Chou. It maps eight "core drives" behind human motivation: Epic Meaning, Development & Accomplishment, Empowerment/C

A bitter and disengaged workforce is the product of a certain type of leadership structure. I'm a professional leader who's been building organizations for decades, but I've long regarded the video game industry's study of motivation as the gold standard for understanding how to deliver engagement. I like to unpack the "bitter and disengaged" question through the lens of their research because it describes the scenario exactly. Yu-kai Chou's Octalysis framework incorporat

The video game industry spent forty years solving one of the hardest problems in human systems design: how do you make a task so attractive that a person will pay you for the privilege of doing it? The underlying motivational analysis in modern game design is a masterclass in systems design and thinking. Think about all the things in sport/games that aren't inherently fun... and nobody argues that they are. Running 26 miles, for instance, why is that fun? Or chasing an oblong

“Shared accountability" is one of the most misused phrases in manufacturing leadership. Most of what gets called shared accountability is actually shared blame. They are not the same thing. Blame is divisible. Accountability is not. If you're assigning percentages: 50% operator, 50% supervisor, that's blame. You're dividing a fixed quantity of fault until it adds up to 100%. Accountability doesn't divide. When something goes wrong on the floor, the operator is 100% accountabl

There is a frequently-missed moment in every conflict that decides who is actually the leader and it has nothing to do with who's right or in charge. I teach it as a leader skill, but it's just as important and relevant in peer conflict. Once you know it, you'll always see it. As a leader, suppose someone in your organization becomes angry. It could be in your office, the monthly meeting, wherever, and you have to deal with it. You have two options: match that anger, or do

Every plant manager I talk to says the same thing: "We can't find good techs." They're not wrong. The skilled trades pipeline has been shrinking for decades and the guys who came up through apprenticeships in the 80s and 90s are retiring faster than anyone is replacing them. But here's what I've figured out: the shortage is a market condition, not a sentence. Some shops never feel it. They're the ones who are paying fair-to-good and who do the following things well. 1. Stop

In 2006, I was deployed with a unit that set a record for the best AH64 Apache maintenance performance in Army history. I was a platoon leader. If you know the aircraft, you know it's a maintenance pig. It takes relentless, disciplined effort to keep one flyable. You don't get reliability by accident. You get it because people believe in the checks they're running and do them right, every time. That deployment, my battalion set the record for the highest fully mission capab

In Afghanistan back in 2008, I was a battle captain and an aviator in an aviation task force. I was on night shift so I could plan the next day's missions while my team ran operations. That worked fine during the winter until the passes thawed in the spring. Operational tempo spiked when it started to warm up. Suddenly I was managing live operations all night and trying to produce a full day's worth of mission planning. Something had to give. I'd come off shift scrambling to

When I walk into an underperforming plant, I expect the usual: bitterness, low trust, people going through the motions. I'm rarely disappointed. In that environment, I expect to hear management describe their own floor as lazy, pointing at guys barely out of their teens who "don't want to work." Picture a lazy kid on the shop floor at 1pm: leaning on a broom, phone in hand, doing just enough to not get noticed. Now picture him at 1am: video game controller in hand, hunched

A supply chain expert in my network told me something today that I thought was worth discussion: he plans better when he can visualize how his schedule actually unfolds on the floor and that only happens when he's out there, talking to the people running it. He said he thinks great organizations always have leaders on the floor. He's right. Leadership is just a relationship, and relationships start with interaction. If there is no relationship there cannot be leadership. W

Every organization runs on 4 levels of work. Technical. Tactical. Operational. Strategic. Technical - does the work in accordance with process. Tactical - ensures the work is done in accordance with process. Operational - writes the process. Strategic - wields the entire organization. Each level has the same 3 core systems: Daily operations - do what needs to be done (planning and execution) Process improvement - learn from feedback, improve the standard. Accountability

I keep seeing leaders throw "culture" at broken operations like it's a cure instead of a symptom. Ping-pong tables. Core values on the wall. Town halls about trust. And nothing changes. Here's the truth: you cannot build a bad organization with a great culture, and you cannot fix a bad organization by working on culture. Culture isn't a lever. It's feedback. There's an old story. The Sun and the Wind are arguing over who can get a farmer to take off his jacket. The Wind goes

"A bad system will beat a good person every time." - Deming We've all seen the stats, they're clear: 70–90% of Lean, Six Sigma, and TPM implementations fail. The process excellence community's explanation: Leadership. "Superficial commitment." "Treats lean as a toolbox, not a culture." "Weak supervisors." "Doesn't give the floor a voice." The objective function is: We said do this and it didn't happen. It must be the leader's fault. But we already know that weak operational s

Sustaining in 5S isn't hard. But there is a trick to it. You have to do 2 things well: 1) Make success something the operators can control. 2) Check it daily. But everyone fails at #1. The night-shift operator takes a tool home. By the time dayshift figures out it's gone, there's nothing to do about it, even with an audit. Here is the easy way to beat it. Before you add some tool to a 5S board, set up a shelf that has space to hold spares of everything you'll 5S. In a bucket

There. I said it. Not because people can't learn. Not because your trainers aren't talented. Not because the content is wrong. Not because people are bad. Training doesn't work because of how we're wired and because most organizations aren't compensating for how people learn. The numbers are brutal. Studies consistently show that only about 15% of training is ever applied on the job without additional support. Only 10% of companies have a formal strategy to ensure training co

The Uncomfortable Truth Behind Manufacturing's Leadership Crisis Every year, companies spend billions on leadership development: executive coaches, management training, accountability systems, values workshops. Yet, in facilities across the country, the same problems continue to occur: simple repeat errors, accountability complaints, machine downtime, poor morale and unfollowed processes. Looking at the outcomes, business leaders reach the same conclusion: leadership problem.

Every organization I've ever walked into has the same meeting problem. Not too few meetings, but too many of the wrong kind. Let me give you nine laws that explain your calendar and a case for rethinking where decisions actually belong. Sayre's Law: The passion of the argument is inversely proportional to the stakes Wallace Sayre, a political scientist at Columbia University, observed that, "in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the