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.

There are Three Systems Every Plant Needs and They Have to be Implemented in Order There are three core systems in every manufacturing operation. Most plants only build one of them and it's the wrong one to start with. Your first system is Accountability. It's the system that gets people to follow a process. Your second system is Continuous Improvement (CI). It's the system that makes the process your people are following better as you learn things. Your third system is Daily

There are two kinds of accountability and only one works. Negative accountability is what most companies default to. Something goes wrong. We hunt for the rule that wasn’t followed and we punish the person who did it. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: even if the rule was trained, what if nobody ever checked whether it was being followed? That employee probably deviated dozens of times before the disaster. Likely, other employees are deviating too. The inductive principle o

Have you noticed how much better a team's processes look on audit day? If we can run the way we're supposed to on audit day, why can't we just do it right every day? Pearson's Law: "When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates." This one is critical in maintaining any systemic function of a team. If it needs to happen, someone needs to be checking. If you want that process followed dili

A leader's behavior is guided by three critical realizations and pre-considering these makes the difficulty of facing a hard organization easier. 1) Your people cannot follow someone who isn't going anywhere. You MUST study greatness well enough to be able to guide them there. I think a lot of leaders think the job is to report performance of their organizations and manage the assets and how they're allocated. And, yes, those are components of the job. But that won't make any