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

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

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

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

I was on the floor when an operator ran by me with a bucket. I followed him to the lithographic printing press where I watched him dump the bucket of chemicals into a chiller by hand. I asked why. He said he was having trouble setting his color. This was how they dealt with it. The top downtime in the factory was color setting time, the top quality defect was color variation, and the top waste was color setting waste. We had the Pareto charts. Everyone in ops knows the 80/20

Your organization has a structural problem that's destroying productivity. It looks like this: train the workforce, then hold supervisors accountable for adherence. It sounds reasonable. It fails reliably. Training doesn't transfer the way we assume it does. You can almost pick your study, they all say the same thing: the average transfer rate of training is between 10-15%. And what little does transfer, doesn't stay: Hermann Ebbinghaus mapped this in the 1880s with his for

It was already July and we were set to miss our quality target for the year. The quality manager asked if I had any ideas. In truth, I didn't. But I love a challenge. I'd just read The Power of Habit and I was enamored with the idea of using habits to improve process. So I set about building a method, and it came out pretty simple. I proposed that people break rules for 2 primary reasons: They don't know the standard or they don't think the standard is important. I proposed

My best operators had the worst OEE. Not because they were bad, but because they were the only ones who could run the hard jobs. OEE was the metric. On paper, my strongest people looked like my weakest. They knew it, I knew it and it made performance discussions impossible. We had over 200 dies in that department. Every SKU had its own die, some were easy to run and some were not. And more than that, OEE didn't tell me what to do. It was a number that described a problem wit

When I took over maintenance at a struggling facility some years ago, I found a machine rated at 14,000 units per hour running at 10,000. I did the math. At $0.60 spread per unit, that gap was worth $2,400 per hour in recoverable value (throughput accounting). I made promises. I found the money. I fixed the machine. The next week, it ran at 10,000 units per hour. No improvement. The operators told me the machine just couldn't go faster. The material wouldn't allow it. That's

Your inbox isn't just a mess, it's an indictment for how broken your processes are. I talk to leaders routinely who get 150-200 emails a day. If your process software owns routing, approvals, assignments, status, and escalations... what are you doing? It's like taking the parts you need to assemble something useful and mixing them in a big bowl with large quantities of similar looking useless junk. And then obligating yourself to look at everything in the bowl while you try

Lean is irrelevant to your operation right now. Not because it doesn't work. But because if you keep having the same problems, which is where most of industry lives, you have a control problem. And Lean doesn't fix control problems. It hides them. Here's what a control problem looks like: An operator puts the wrong date/label/product/lid/quantity on the wrong box/pallet/product, and now you're scrapping, reworking, or apologizing your way out of another disaster. This happe

Everyone in industry knows Deming's line: "A bad system beats a good person every time." It's true. Systems make success. But systems require a foundation. Without it, they don't work. We can prove this experimentally. Lean is one of the greatest system-building tools ever conceived. And it fails the vast majority of the time. The statistics are clear and supported by thousands of iterations. Why does it fail? Ask the Lean practitioners and they'll tell you: leadership. But i

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