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More Manufacturing Industry Insight from Paul Hogendoorn, FreePoint Technologies Founder:

“..I’m continuing the top 10 tips gleaned from successful companies and leaders that I’ve worked with over my 40-year career.  Although the two tips shared in this column are very similar and intricately related, they are also critically distinct.”
~Paul Hogendoorn, Founder

“If you want something important done, ask a busy person.”

A colleague on a church board once said to me many years ago, when the two of us were assigned a task, “If you want to get something important done, ask a busy person.”

Here’s why that’s a great tip for a manufacturing setting.  Truly busy people in manufacturing have a knack for getting things done.  They are not looking to put new things on their list but instead are trying to find the quickest way to get an item off their list.  Yes, there are people in manufacturing that know how to make themselves busy or keep themselves busy, but successful company leaders innately know the difference between routinely busy people and truly busy people that get things done.  How do I know this is true?  Easy.  A task that is critical and needs to get done seldom gets assigned to a person with a track record of managing never-ending projects that seem to go on.  They get assigned to people trusted to deliver an outcome.  Without even deliberately knowing they delegate tasks in this way, they do.

Truly busy people know how to delegate, when to stay out of the way and when to roll up their sleeves and just do it themselves.  Their focus is on getting the important tasks done and making themselves less busy.  Routinely busy people are looking to remain busy, and often without knowing they are doing it, they keep tasks open and keep themselves positioned as a critical communications conduit.  They resist closing the task out to get assigned another task, or worse (in their minds), have no important task assigned to them.  Truly busy people don’t have this aversion, because as soon as they have any bandwidth at all, other important tasks are assigned (or reassigned) to them.  What I’ve observed over the last four decades is that most progressive company and department leaders already instinctively know this.  They just aren’t aware of it.  The key is to not burn out your truly busy people.  Instead, let them graduate up the ranks as they succeed, confident that there is another high-achieving candidate ready to follow their lead and fill their shoes.
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Successful manufacturers build on the people that take them forward.  As they empower, enable and grow the people, they build their businesses.  The company’s culture encourages its people to imagine, plan and persist on finding ways to move forward.
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“Leaders find a way.”

The second tip comes from someone I was also on a board with.  We faced many challenging situations together.  His closing mantra was “leaders find a way”.  And indeed, they do.  The leader is not the person with the position or title, or the education, or the letters behind their name.  The leader is simply the person that finds a way when others don’t or can’t.  In all of our workplaces, there are many people that can point out the reasons why something can’t get done.  In fact, we often admire, empower, and even promote individuals that have great abilities to foresee or articulate problems that others can’t see.  But how does that get a company ahead?

At best, it keeps the company from going backwards – It doesn’t pull the company forward.  Many managers are to some degree inclined to keep companies from going backwards, but leaders are more often inclined to find a way forward. There are leaders in every organization, in roles up and down the org chart.  In the most successful organizations I have come across, the people that find a way (leaders) are supported, encouraged and appreciated.  In less successful organizations, the folks that have a knack for finding a way become discouraged and move on.  A leader’s true role is to develop new leaders.  A successful company’s culture fosters and encourages people to imagine, plan and persist on finding ways to move forward.

This is a key differentiator that I’ve observed that sets successful thriving manufacturers apart.  They build on the people that take them forward.  As they empower, enable and grow those people, they build their businesses.

Who are those people in your organization – the ones that find a way and get things done?  Are you building on them?

Paul Hogendoorn co-founded FreePoint Technologies with the goal of giving manufacturers the benefit of information technologies that inform, empower and motivate their most critical asset – their people.

Access Paul’s full series of Leading For Success: Tips in Manufacturing Automation Magazine here: https://www.automationmag.com/author/paul-hogendoorn/

 

@AutomationMag #SmartManufacturing #Industry40 #IIoT #MESsystem #MachineMonitoringSystem #ContinuousImprovement #ManufacturingAutomation #LeanManufacturing

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Manufacturing Industry Insight from Paul Hogendoorn, FreePoint Technologies Founder:

“..I’m continuing the series of sharing tips I’ve learned from manufacturing companies and leaders I had the privilege of working with that were clearly succeeding and thriving, rather than just surviving. The tips are the best things I gleaned from them. The idea behind this series is to share all so everyone can do even better.”
~Paul Hogendoorn, Founder

 

“What gets measured gets improved.”

You might’ve heard this before, but there’s a catch – two actually. The first is “what” you measure is very important. If you measure the wrong thing, the improvements you make won’t make much difference – if any at all – to your operation. The best example I saw was a large tool and die company undertaking a major project to measure the OEE of their critical machines to improve that number. Several years into the project and their second attempt at doing it, one very astute manager concluded that they were focusing on the wrong thing. He observed that the time “under spindle” was relatively short compared to all the time that the pieces of work sat on skids at the end of aisles waiting for the next process to be run on them. He also found that minimizing the time between machining processes was a more pertinent objective than minimizing time under the spindle. The net result of measuring and improving that more relevant metric was a near 100 percent capacity increase in their facility, eliminating all overtime and outsourced operations as well as winning more business and taking on more work. The second catch is that to engage everyone in the improvement effort, the measurement must be shared in real time and be meaningful for the people actually involved. Sharing reports at the end of a month may be good for plant managers and executives to review in their meetings, but that has little motivational or behavioural change value.

“You can get a lot more done when you don’t care who gets the credit.”

I learned this one early on, from one of my mentors at the London Economic Development Corporation (LEDC). He quarterbacked all sorts of small and large initiatives, deferring the credit to others. He was making investments into the people that he knew could leverage the projects’ successes, and if he ended up placing great champions to lead them from that point on, it would become a recurring win with an exponential result. Plus, he’d be free to quarterback another project. One of his most successful endeavours was the formation of the London Region Manufacturing Council. He initiated it and then placed it in the hands of a series of people (myself included) that received a lot of the credit for what the organization accomplished. Twenty years later, his initiative continues to be a strong advocate for manufacturers in the region.

But there is a catch to this tip too. Be careful that the right people get the credit. There are ‘credit takers’ in every organization who will quickly fill every credit void. Even worse, there are ‘credit destroyers’, people sensitive to the perception that when someone else looks good, it’s not good for them. To counter this, praise and credit should be shared publicly and evenly sprinkled over a larger group. The primary praise and credit should be shared more specifically and shared up the ladder a couple of rungs so that the individual may receive more opportunities to do even more great things for your company. Giving credit where it’s due adds to your currency in the organization as well as puts another potentially impactful contributor on the corporate radar. True winning team players are never afraid of having another high performer on the team. ‘Credit’ is an important currency and needs to be invested back into the business wisely.

Paul Hogendoorn co-founded FreePoint Technologies with the goal of giving manufacturers the benefit of information technologies that inform, empower and motivate their most critical asset – their people.

Access Paul’s full series of Leading For Success: Tips in Manufacturing Automation Magazine here: https://www.automationmag.com/author/paul-hogendoorn/

 

@AutomationMag #AutomationMag #SmartManufacturing #Industry40 #MachineMonitoringSystem #IIoT #ManufacturingExecutionSystem #MESsystem #ContinuousImprovement #ManufacturingAutomation #DowntimeTracking #OEE #LeanManufacturing