Podcast: Leadership lessons for manufacturing—Why system problems, not workers, hold plants back

Joe Kuhn, CMRP, former plant manager, engineer, and global reliability consultant, is now president of Lean Driven Reliability LLC. He is the author of the book “Zero to Hero: How to Jumpstart Your Reliability Journey Given Today’s Business Challenges” and the creator of the Joe Kuhn YouTube Channel, which offers content on starting your reliability journey and achieving financial independence. In our monthly podcast miniseries, Ask a Plant Manager, Joe considers a commonplace scenario facing the industry and offers his advice, as well as actions that you can take to get on track tomorrow. In this episode, Joe how to tackle reliability and maintenance as a new manager.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

PS:  Hello. Thanks for joining the latest episode of Ask a Plant Manager. I'm Anna Townshend, and joining me is Joe Kuhn. He is a retired plant manager with many years of experience in manufacturing. He works as a consultant now and a YouTube content creator. He has a really great YouTube channel on retirement. You should check it out, but we have him here every month to answer your burning questions about operations, maintenance, and reliability for plants and factories. Sometimes we talk tactical, sometimes we talk leadership or strategic, but what Joe always provides is quick advice and easy ways to improve right away. So Joe, this is our 25th episode. So happy podcast anniversary.

JK: Oh my gosh, 25 that sounds like a lot. I'm excited to be here. I love trying to share some of my experience. And you know, most of that experience is things I did wrong and learned from. And I'm sure, though, folks in maintenance leadership can understand that, but hopefully I can help somebody with a specific question.

PS: Yeah, we've been doing this every month for more than two years now, and I think one of the best things about your advice is a lot of what we talk about is really timeless. I'm always trying to plug our old episodes, but it's really because I think they have a long shelf life, and it's good advice now or in the future. And as always, Joe, thanks so much for taking time out of your retirement, your travels and your time with your granddaughter to talk with us.

JK: Thank you.

PS: So I have a pretty basic question for you today. I don't think we need a whole lot of introduction. I'm just going to throw it to you, Joe. What is your advice to a plant manager who's new to a facility and wants to quickly build credibility with the maintenance and operations teams?

JK: Yeah, I get asked this question a lot, and I've helped people over the years with this. People would send me emails, and some of them are live conversations. But, the first thing I want to say, and this is fundamental, to start off on the right foot, assume every worker, every planner, every technician, every maintenance engineer, expediter, whatever you have in your organization, assume they want to come in and do a good job every day. If you come in a plant and the housekeeping is terrible, people are standing around. They're in the lunchroom too long. They quit early on the day. That's a system problem. Assume that the people want to do a great job when they come into work, and what's wrong with the system? That'll change everything.

And I did not do this right for at least 10 years. I thought, Hey, you come in and you immediately see these problems. Hey, people are on break too long. People are leaving early. People are standing around, but they want to do a good job, and the system doesn't allow them. So that's fundamental mindset.

The next thing, I would quickly start day one with is go and see. You've got to see the waste that's in your plant. And if you've listened to any of my videos I mentioned this, or audio podcast. This is paramount. You need to understand that every single reliability and maintenance tool, every best practice, is targeting to eliminate a waste.

And then, why do you do a PM on a piece of equipment? To extend its life, to not have unplanned downtime, not to increase cost. Why do you do predictive maintenance? Oh, you do predictive maintenance because you can predict problems earlier, before final failure, before increased cost in quality issues. So every tool. Why do you plan a job? You plan a job so you can execute the outage in the least amount of time with high precision. Every single tool, I challenge you to look at everyone and and not have it focus a waste. So I'm a simple person. If every tool in your toolkit is to attack waste, the first thing you have to know is, what waste do you have in your plant? And you do that through intense observation.

Yes, you start with KPIs. What's our unplanned downtime? What's our PM compliance, schedule compliance? Keep these KPIs, but all they do is point you in a direction. Say, for example, your PM compliance is only 50%. Well, you can't just write an email and say, do better. For some reason, we're limited to 50% in our system. Which ones are the most impactful to get us to maybe 75% in a month or two months? Three months down the road, which ones are going to be most impactful, that are going to create some excitement and some performance increases that people can see?

So go and see. And I'm talking about go and see where the waste is, where the people are working, your technicians are working. Go out and watch a crew for eight hours, watch another crew for eight hours, watch a third crew for eight hours, watch a fourth crew for eight hours. After that four-day observation, you will see. You will see what actions you need to take.

When I get asked, I don't know where to start, what I hear is I didn't do observation. And I'm not talking about observation on the shop floor, where you're walking from one meeting to the next for five minutes and I saw what was going on. I'm talking about wallowing around eight hours watching a crew, and for example, if you're watching that crew for eight hours, and then you find, operations shut down for eight hours to allow maintenance to do this job. And then the crew shows up at the job at 7:15 in the morning after a toolbox talk, and the first thing they do is look for parts for an hour and a half, and then you come in the next day, and the first thing the crew does is looks for parts for an hour and a half, and then on the third day, the same thing. By the fourth day, you figure out, we’ve got to do something better with getting the right parts to these people. Okay, it is so obvious after you do observation, what to do. And there's no substitute for that. KPIs, opinions in conference rooms are all pointing you in the right direction, but you have to do observation. You may find out, I did an observation on a job, and they had all the parts and pieces together there, but they argued for eight hours, no exaggeration, eight hours. It was a full ship on how to lock and tag the equipment. Well, is that a fault of the crew? The crew was standing around doing nothing. Some of them went to the break room while management tried to work this out. The system problem was we didn't have good lockout tagout procedures, not that the crew didn't want to work.

If you have poor PM compliance, you may say, ‘Okay, guys, based on my observation and KPIs, half of our unplanned downtime is from poor lubrication practices.’ Every time we do these root cause analysis of poor lubrication. So let's get great. Let's try to get 100%, not on all PMs, but on lubrication PMs, and watch things improve when you can get people excited, focused, and rallied around one thing. So I would, to repeat that: it's assume everybody's going to do a great job. They want to do a great job today, and the system is preventing them from doing that. And then go and see, and it'll be laid out in front of you.

Now I will mention some bonus do not do's. Don't go out and immediately start disciplining workers for being in the lunchroom too long, leaving the job site early. Don't show you're the boss, because there's a system problem, I already alluded to that. Poor job performance, say somebody doesn't install a chain right, and it breaks. If they wanted to do a good job, why did they not install it right? You may find out that they were rushed. You may find out that it took two hours to do the job right? And everybody said, ‘I need it back in 30 minutes. Don't align it. Don't do the proper procedures. Just get it going as fast as possible. I don't care if it breaks down tomorrow. That may have been what happened. These are all real-life experiences I'm reviewing. And, don't immediately blame the worker. I'm telling you that's a bad path to go down. And you may find that 5% of the workforce doesn't want to do a good job, but the worst thing you can do is treat the other 95% that way. Worst thing you can do.

PS: Yeah, we've talked a lot about system problems and not blaming employees for problems in the system. And just as an example, what if you come into a system that is really running fairly well, but you're still the new manager? Do you just hang back and let things run as they should and how do you again? How do you establish yourself and build up that credibility in a new situation that maybe doesn't need massive changes? How do you do that?

JK: Well, there's always waste. Anna, there's always waste in the organization. You may be at 100% PM compliance, your unplanned downtime may be at 2% but at what cost? Is there a cost opportunity? And also it maybe you have a 12-hour outage every Wednesday, and you're losing potential volume, because you could sell more product, but we're down for 12 hours. Well, hey folks, how do we get that to eight? How do we get that to eight? What would have to be true to get that to eight? So you have to think of what's the business opportunity? So if you inherit a great state of the art maintenance organization, there's always opportunity to do it in less time.

Think of the Indianapolis 500 pit crew. They're always trying to get it, how do we make that pit stop six seconds instead of seven seconds. There's always opportunity. Maybe there's a quality opportunity where something in maintenance starts to fail and the quality slips. So you can improve, always improve quality. You can always improve your cost. You can always improve downtime, planned or unplanned. There's always an opportunity. I haven't been in that organization, Anna, where it wasn't pretty obvious what to work on. And I think I my last count is 41 plants that I've been into, and some of them, yeah, they were highly regarded. Their KPIs are great. But when you dove into that, it was like, okay, there's three people assigned to that job, and we really can do it pretty easily with two in the same amount of time. That's just one example. And shortening an outage that, I can't tell you a single production person that would say, I don't want my outages any shorter, maybe you're doing a great job of PMs, but that takes an outage where you can add condition monitoring, and you don't need to take the outage to go in and inspect the equipment. It can just be running, and you can find problems earlier. You can do root cause analysis. ‘Hey, we go through 100 pumps a year, and they're all planned. Why 100 pumps? Why not 60? Why not 10?’ So there's always an opportunity. I promise you, if you go on the shop floor, you will see waste. You will see waste. So maybe problem solving is the next step. If you have a great organization, how do you cut the outage length, and how do you prevent the failures that you accept because you've had this weekly outage, and you're always changing out these pumps. And we're great. We change out two pumps every single week. Why not one? Why not make a design change? That's only one or zero.

PS: There’s always room for improvement.I will, I will take your word for that, for sure.

JK: Yeah, my wife says that about me all the time. There's always room for improvement.

PS: Yep, that's any marriage, right? Alright, so this is the part of the episode where we introduce another question that has allowed our listeners to get to know us a little better over the course of our 25 episodes, and I hope it gives them an opportunity to think about some of these questions that we're raising and what that means for them. So in honor of our 25th episode, I am officially naming this part of the podcast Cup of Joe and Anna. Admittedly, I really wanted to call this podcast Cup of Joe. I'm not sure why I'm so in love with this turn of phrase, but I was overruled on the official podcast name, and rightfully so, by you and others. So I think we made the right decision. We have a very professional and fitting name for our series, but I'm bringing back my idiom here. So get your favorite caffeinated beverage, because it's time for a little cup of Joe and Anna. So all right, today's question, and, Joe, this kind of relates to what we're just talking about a little bit. It's a good match. Do you believe people are born leaders, or do they grow into leadership?

JK: You know, I really don't put them in one category or the other, so I'm sorry not to answer the question directly. There are some characteristics that I believe people are born with. They're inquisitive. They’ve just got a natural inquisitive nature to how things work. My background is in engineering. I always want to know how the car works, how the engine works. I don't just drive the car. My wife has no interest in that. So I think a leader needs to be inquisitive, needs to be willing to listen to alternative ideas. Having a strong, powerful voice, I think matters. People that want to study, want to learn. Those are some things I think people were born with.

But as far as growth, man, I mean, you could overcome so many things. I talked about voice and how they talked. George Patton, the famous general, had a very high pitched, squeaky voice, if you've ever heard him, and you wouldn't say this guy's a leader. I mean, it kind of aggravates you how he talks, but he was a leader. But reading books, I guarantee you, I've read more than 300 books, listened to, most of them on audiobook, back in the day when there was a cassette, just how other people led mistakes they've made. Hopefully, the reason people are tuning into this podcast, you don't have to learn things by failing. You can learn from other people. They put it out in podcast, it's on YouTube, it's in books, their whole story. So I think the good ones are born with some advantages. Being an extrovert helps. Being an extrovert does help, but you can grow into that by learning from others in your free time. When you're driving back and forth to work, listen to a podcast on leadership from some others. For me, it was Jack Welsh back in the 90s, with being the CEO of General Electric. I've still got all three of his books on my shelf back here.

But the other facet, the third leg to this stool, that I want to add that was very powerful, and I used this at my plant was, not only are leaders born and they grow into being a leader, but they're also nudged okay? And let me explain that a lot of people don't look in the mirror and see themselves as a leader, but you as their peer, or even their supervisor, or supervisor of another department, you look at this person and say, Anna, this here's a live conversation that happened to me when I was 22 years old. I had a guy named Ed Tune. He has since passed away. He worked with me, and saw me as a young engineer. And he said, ‘Hey, Joe, I can see you running this plant someday.’ And I'm laughing at him, for a couple weeks. And then he finally came back to me, and he had me start filling in for vacations, for supervisors, maintenance supervisors that went on vacation or working on some weekends, on some jobs, had me start filling in. But if Ed would not have nudged me, I could have worked my whole career as an engineer.

And so, I did this exercise with my staff. We were having problems hiring supervisors. And I went to my staff, and I said, has anybody nudged anybody? Has anybody gone to an individual and asked them and told them that they saw leadership qualities in them, that they can do this? And well, that was the second question I asked. The first question, and I had 10 people that worked for me around the table, I said, tell me why you became a leader. And did somebody nudge you? Every single person had an experience where they were working as a metallurgist, as an engineer, or they were a planner. Every single one of them said a name of somebody that said, ‘Hey, I think you can be a leader. I think you can do this job. You may not see it, but I do.’ And that little nudge pushes many people into considering leadership that may not have. That is very, very powerful. So who have you nudged? There's the action if you're not getting supervisors or not getting, superintendents or maintenance managers. When was the last time you personally nudged somebody? And towards that end.

PS: Very interesting, you outline some great leadership qualities, inquisitive, powerful voice. But that idea of the nudge I hadn't really thought about, it's very interesting. And this is really a psychological or even philosophical topic, and I like that. And my gut, my gut says you're born a leader, because there needs to be that desire to be a leader. I'm really thinking about this in the business context, and you did a really good job of bringing that into the manufacturing world. But typically, I don't think you're going to accept a leadership position if you don't want to be a leader. Maybe you got that nudge, but if you really didn't want to, you're not going to take that, or you're probably not going to be in the position to be considered for a leadership position if you weren't already displaying some of those qualities that you talked about. I'm sure it can be taught, but if you don't want it, how well you're going to learn or execute that.

JK: How much effort you going to put in on Saturday, while you're working, cutting grass that you have a book on somebody that used to run U.S. airlines or something like that.

PS: Yeah, yeah. Well, it makes me really start to think about this in a philosophical way, in terms of, you know, the idea of fate versus free will. Are you fated to be a leader, or are you choosing that path by putting yourself into the position to be a leader? Or maybe you don't want to be a leader, but you're thrown into it or nudged, as you say, and you struggle at first, but then succeed victoriously at the end. I think, pretty sure I've seen that movie plotline many times. So are you faded to be a leader? Are you choosing to be a leader? I keep resting back on born leader. I can remember back even in elementary school or middle school, high school, it's always that same group of students that sought out the leadership positions. And I can bet it's those same people that, for the most part, are the leaders today in their careers.

And I think it's interesting, it's very easy also, to point out a leader who shouldn't actually be in a leadership position. They’re very arrogant. They have poor communication skills. They don't uphold others. They try to keep people down. You get someone who hasn't had a lot of power in his or her life, and then they abuse it in that position. Plant Services has a column called Captain Unreliability. It's sort of done tongue in cheek. It gets written very sarcastically about things not to do as a leader, but it's what I'm thinking about. And it's very funny, but it often rings very true. And the gist of that is often that leaders that shouldn't be there really stick out like a sore thumb.

JK: Yeah, and I wouldn't even define them as leaders, they're managers or dictators. And the smartest person in the room kind of thing. Instead, a leader is one that can inspire the team and back away a little bit. Think about like a professional football coach. The coach is the leader, but he doesn't score the touchdowns. He doesn't get the first downs and doesn't get the wins. It's the team on the field that get all the glory, and that's key to being a leader is helping people achieve things that they may not have thought was possible. So I like to throw out that nudge, because that was awareness for me that in this just one example of my leadership team, every single one of them had an individual that convinced them to go into leadership. Every one.

PS: Interesting, and I'm sure you can probably learn to be a leader if you don't have those communication, compassion and management tactic skills. But I still think there's something intangible, something inside you that lights up at the chance to lead or, you have that unexplainable drive. Either you have that spark or you don't.

JK: Yeah, yeah. I think it's all the above, yeah.

PS: Well, thanks, as always, Joe for joining me and I'll talk to you next month.

JK: As usual, it was fun. Thank you.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.

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