What Makes a Successful Manufacturing Leader?
Successful manufacturing leadership depends on more than meeting production targets. Plant leaders set expectations, develop employees, make personnel decisions and establish the conduct others follow. Trust and integrity provide the foundation, while confidence, respect and self-control shape daily leadership on the plant floor.
How Manufacturing Leaders Develop Their Teams
If the sweetest sound a person can hear is his name, the most gratifying thing for a follower is that his leader understands who he is. A true leader adds value to people by training them, challenging them to achieve, and honestly evaluating their roles in the company. Knowing their stories and finding out who they are will help you to add value.
Know Your People
Don’t expect you will learn your people’s stories by interviewing them. Walking up to someone on the floor, whipping out your notebook, and saying, “Okay, I want to know all about you, so shoot!” will only ensure that you are labeled as a nut before the end of the shift.
Getting to know people in a workplace isn’t all that different from getting to know them anywhere else. It takes time, effort, and patience. Not everyone will open up at the same time and to the same degree, but even the most hardened member of your team will tell his story eventually. To learn their stories, remember that you must be open to being teachable, or all this effort will go to waste.
Assess Skills and Role Fit
Evaluating people’s skills and temperament and determining their role in the organization will occupy much of your time as a manager. Your company expects you to assess your people annually, which will become a part of their permanent record. Imagine the difficulty in being accurate without knowing who they are!
You do a disservice to your boss, you, and most importantly, your people if you complete evaluations with incomplete knowledge. Consider being passed over for a promotion by your faceless boss because he assumed you were happy exactly where you were! This is just the sort of thing you risk doing to your people if you remain unknown to them and they to you.
The converse is true as well. Warm, fuzzy feelings are a great thing at the annual office Christmas party, but there are those unfortunate times when you need to lead somebody out the door – a termination. So knowing their story will be important here as well, just in case they can be saved.
Promote Employees Based on Role Fit
Strong performance in one position does not automatically predict success in another. An employee may excel at assigned production work but struggle in a supervisory position that requires fast decisions, conflict management, scheduling and communication.
Before offering a promotion, consider the employee’s skills, temperament, interests and response to pressure. A promotion based only on loyalty or past performance can place a capable employee in a role that does not fit. Experience and instinct can inform the decision, but they should be supported by documented performance and an objective review of the new position’s requirements.
Trust and Integrity in Manufacturing Leadership
Trust and integrity shape how employees respond to a manufacturing leader. Team members need to know that expectations will be applied consistently, concerns will be addressed honestly and decisions will not change according to personal preference.
Integrity becomes visible through daily actions. Leaders build credibility when they follow the same safety, quality and conduct standards expected of the workforce. They also need to communicate production problems honestly, accept responsibility for poor decisions and give employees proper recognition for good work.
Trust takes time to establish and very little time to lose. It grows through consistent decisions, accurate communication and fair treatment across shifts, departments and job classifications.
Confidence, Respect and Self-Control on the Plant Floor
Trust and integrity provide the foundation, but manufacturing leaders also need confidence, respect and self-control during daily operations.
Confidence
Employees depend on plant leaders to make decisions when production conditions change, equipment fails or quality problems appear. Confidence does not mean pretending to have every answer. It means gathering available information, making a reasoned decision and communicating the next steps clearly.
A leader who changes direction repeatedly or becomes visibly overwhelmed can create uncertainty across a shift. Confidence grows through process knowledge, preparation and experience, including experience gained through poor decisions.
Respect
Respect develops through consistent conduct rather than job title. Manufacturing leaders earn it by listening to employees, applying standards fairly and addressing problems without humiliating the people involved.
Plant-floor employees often have direct knowledge of equipment behavior, material changes and process conditions. Leaders who disregard that experience may miss early warnings and weaken communication between management and production teams.
Self-Control
Manufacturing environments create pressure. Missed production targets, equipment failures, quality holds and personnel conflicts can test a leader’s judgment. Anger or uncontrolled reactions make these situations harder to resolve.
Self-control allows a leader to separate the immediate frustration from the decision that needs to be made. The leader can address poor performance or unsafe conduct firmly without allowing emotion to determine the response.
Management and Leadership Responsibilities
Manufacturing supervisors and plant managers perform both management and leadership work. The balance changes according to the situation.
| Management Responsibilities | Leadership Responsibilities |
|---|---|
| Production schedules | Communicating direction |
| Process control | Building employee trust |
| Staffing and resources | Developing team members |
| Safety and quality requirements | Modeling expected conduct |
| Budgets and production targets | Guiding organizational change |
| Corrective actions | Shaping plant culture |
| Documentation and reporting | Recognizing performance |
A production schedule requires management. Helping a team respond to an unexpected shutdown requires leadership as well. Strong plant managers know when to concentrate on the process and when the people operating that process need their attention.
Lessons From On the Plant Floor
Bryan Geary and Carlton Sorrell wrote On the Plant Floor: A Practical Guide to Daily Leadership in the Manufacturing Factory after leaving corporate manufacturing roles to start their own business. Drawing on decades of plant-floor experience, they wanted to give new supervisors and plant managers practical guidance they did not have when entering leadership roles.
The book addresses situations manufacturing leaders regularly encounter, including:
- Entering a first management position
- Working with difficult employees
- Managing relationships upstream and downstream
- Setting standards for employee conduct
- Building and changing plant culture
- Recognizing team accomplishments
- Managing conflict and emotion
- Leading employees after a major plant disruption
The lessons come from decisions that worked, mistakes that did not and the realities of managing people inside operating manufacturing plants.
Manufacturing Leadership and Consulting Support
IntoCeramics brings decades of experience in plant operations, manufacturing leadership and manufacturing consulting. Read On the Plant Floor for more practical leadership guidance, or contact IntoCeramics to discuss manufacturing and operational challenges.