There is always tension between the factory floor and management. They just don't understand each other and there's a good reason for that. Managers often think operators don’t care about the process. Operators often think managers don't understand real work. And both have part of the story. Each job uses the brain in a fundamentally different manner. When they try to imagine how they would do each other's job, they can't perceive how the other's job is "work" by their ow

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

Studies on Lean and Six Sigma initiatives routinely put failure-to-sustain rates in the 60–90% range. Six Sigma failure post-mortems keep landing on the same three culprits: poor training, weak buy-in and bad change management. So let's dissect that. Poor training: Your training system has to overcome 3 things to work. 1) You have to get people to listen. This only happens if they think they need to. 2) You have to get them to remember. People forget 90% of the information

Safety and Quality - Your Organizational Health Indicator Most plants approach safety and quality from a compliance perspective. They expect to achieve or fail in their results based on the level of accountability they can create around each fully independent compliance set, safety and quality. That's a good conventional approach and I do not want to undersell the value of process compliance. It's critical. However, pure compliance won't fix these metrics. I think there is an

In my previous article, I discussed the eight drivers of error rates in a plant and how they can be clearly measured in quality and safety metrics. If I'm walking into a plant that has performance issues, that's a good space to start. It'll lead you directly to chronic issues you can solve now which will typically be your highest impact leadership and systemic issues. For part 2 I want to dig into the nuts and bolts of proper leadership function: the hierarchy. This must be

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

I'm writing these articles to explain the meat-and-potatoes of turning a plant around. Parts 1-3 are not negotiable. There is no other way. You cannot coerce people into excellence. Great organizations are creative enterprises at every level. That requires you to earn the investment of a lot of people. Even if you get people to work with you by keeping them out of the error states and behaving well, you won't survive the complexity of the task without using a well-structured

Process Control is a process. It is one of the most vital processes in any organization. It is also widely misunderstood. I would also argue that being good at Process Control is more important than being good at process design or Process Improvement. To illustrate this, allow me to lead with a case study. The Process Audit Database Case Study: Some years ago, I had a quality manager approach me with the need to show improvement on our key quality metric. This metric was base

For some years, I believed that the fastest and easiest way to turn-around a plant is from the maintenance manager seat. I no longer believe that to be true. However, there are some VERY important lessons I can share here that are useful to the turnaround leader. Reactive Maintenance - What to expect if this is what you have So, first, let's define how reactive maintenance works. In a reactive environment, typically there is not a clear line of execution from finding a proble