Podcast: Maintenance micromanagers — Are you a hero or a leader at your manufacturing plant?

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. This episode offers insight into how maintenance micromanagers prevent workers from making decisions and learning from their mistakes.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

PS: So back in April, we did an episode on how maintenance managers fail. Be sure to go back and listen to that episode if you haven't heard it. But my quick summary is that maintenance managers fail by trying to focus on everything instead of a handful of things, they fail by not knowing the current state, or in other words, they haven't done enough observation to understand reality, and they fail with poor time span of control, or they don't have the right proportion of their time spent on daily, monthly, quarterly and annually planning or working.

So today, we're going to hit on another maintenance manager fail. I hope they don't feel like we're picking on them at all, but today we're going to talk about maintenance micromanagers. Are you the problem? If you micromanage too much, no one in the plant floor is allowed to make any decisions. So Joe, what are the pitfalls of a maintenance micromanager? How might someone fall into that role, perhaps with good intentions, and how might ego play a role when workers ultimately feel immobilized by their inability to make decisions about their own work?

JK: Yeah, great topic. I mean, the result of micromanagement is the organization is making progress at a glacial speed because you’re doing that. Think about a production process where everything has to go through one bottleneck production center, and so if every decision needs to be made by one person, or people are afraid to make decisions because they're going to be second guessed. Why did you do that? You didn't think about that? Get reprimanded. ‘Oh, okay, I'll, just bring everything through the leader,’ and it really slows down change. Also, with that is if the micromanager, and I sometimes substitute the word ‘hero.’ If everything has to go through the hero. Whose plan is it? Whose skin is in the game, okay? And if the plan starts to fail, the hero has to save the day. Nobody else takes ownership in the direction of the plant.

Okay, those are the big problems. Now, how does this happen? Well, most people, most maintenance managers, that's not your job, when you turn 18, you're a maintenance manager. Most of them were exceptional individual contributors. They may have been a mechanic, an electrician. They may have went through the planner ranks. They may have went through a supervisor ranks, maintenance engineer rank, reliability engineer. They were once good at that role. Then, you become a maintenance manager. And you know that can have a little paperwork associated with it, a lot of meetings associated with it. So you're in these meetings, you're talking with HR and finance, you're managing a budget, you got all this stuff going on, and then a piece of equipment fails. Well, you love putting on your individual contributor hat, because you used to be good at that, and you love doing it, getting your hands dirty. Okay, so that's, the gravitational pull of a leader, is they want to go back into being an individual contributor at times, because they loved it and were good at it. Who wouldn't rather be out troubleshooting a piece of equipment instead of being in seven meetings today? And maintenance people tend to be hands on, get ‘er done kind of people. But like I said, you can't be everywhere, and you are throttling the advancements of the organization.

You're also denying people the opportunity to learn a lot. And I'm not trying to insult anybody here, but it's a little bit like being a parent and you have children. You know sometimes, let's pick an age, say, 14-year-old child. You want them to cut the grass at your house. Well, they're not going to do as good a job cutting the grass as mom or dad, right? You need to let them go out and do it. You coach them, you give them the safety review, all that kind of stuff. And then, they cut the grass, and they miss spots, and they damage the flowers, different things happen. You let them fail. You let them learn. You reflect on that, and then you get better. Same thing with operating or managing a team, you need to let people make their own decisions, and some of them are going to be great. Sometimes you fail. And if, as long if you fail, and you don't lose a lot of money, and nobody gets hurt, that can be an exceptional learning opportunity.

So leaders need to take the long view. Yeah, somebody may fail. They did this wrong. It was inefficient, or we had this problem coordinating with production, whatever it happened to be, but the leader could have solved it. Look at the lesson that's learned, and that won't happen again for the next 5, 10, 15 years, however long that person is employed with you there. But, yeah, it's a trap. This is a huge trap for leaders. You fundamentally have to decide if you want to be a hero or be a leader. A leader grows people, grows other leaders, grows the technical expertise of people.

Do you want to be a leader or do you want to be a hero? A hero is the person that controls everything. They're the puppet master behind the scenes, making everything happen. What do you want to be? I challenge you to be the leader. The hero is a very short term. It stifles the organization and keeps people from growing. It's really a trap. You feel good in the minute, ‘Hey, I told them to use this kind of bolt instead of that kind of bolt. They were going to work on that for another two hours. I saved them, all that work.’ Pat myself on the back. The long term, you're losing.

PS: Good stuff. Be a hero or a leader. I very much like that, and you hit on this, but I think the problem with micromanagement is twofold. As you said, people aren’t actually learning their jobs. They also might have insights into how to do something that can improve operations. And those get lost in that process, and they're ultimately handicapped. And the second part is, I think there can become, like a fear or a psychological component to where they've been told over and over how to do their jobs, step by step, and been told that they aren't allowed to make those decisions. And so then, they maybe start to believe themselves, that they're not capable, rather then, like you said, allowing them to make those mistakes or two along the way that they can then apply to the future.

JK: Yeah, it's really one of the things you touched on is, how do you treat failure? You're in the morning meeting and somebody made a decision yesterday around, ‘hey, let's not shut this piece of equipment down for maintenance,’ and then it ends up failing catastrophically some way. How do you handle that in the morning meeting? Do you yell at everybody and say, I don't want anybody making any decisions like that unless they run it by me. Do you handle it that way? Or do you say, ‘hey, let's, reflect for a moment. What would we do different next time? What did we learn from that? And to have that dialog that it's okay to make decisions and fail, as long as you learn from that and we get better and put in systems. I'm not saying I want everybody failing all the time, but if you keep people from failing, you're going to be the bottleneck toward them growing and the organization growing and getting better. And that's really one of the keys of reliability is, are you better on Friday than you are on Monday? And if you're micromanaging, you're not.

PS: Yeah, nobody wants to fail all the time. But as you said, sometimes failure is only way to learn some of those lessons and really reinforce the best practices. Well, thanks, Joe, that'll do it for this episode. As always, we very much appreciate your time and your insights.

JK: Great. I glad to be here, and I'm looking forward to next month's question.

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.