Step 10: Maintenance Teams Need to Celebrate

I attended a plant maintenance conference this week. Among the many excellent technical topics on maintenance management came a discussion on company and team culture. This subject is a real passion of mine as it holds so much influence over the long term success and failure of an enterprise. It has enormous bearing on whether people truly want to get up and go to work and contribute. Do you agree?

Purpose and Goals to Motivate

The panelists were discussing a question from the floor on how to keep team members motivated during a major change initiative or a tough maintenance shut down. It was suggested that the leader needs to keep answering the question of why we're doing what we're doing and what the goal or ultimate purpose is. It was also thrown out that there has to be some positive reinforcement. I couldn't agree more. I believe that positive reinforcement should be offered after some of the small accomplishments have been achieved. Waiting until the end (is there an end?) of a major initiative can be problematic.


A Need for Celebration

I have noticed in my seminars that some maintenance managers and supervisors rarely stop to celebrate with the team they lead. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of the 'nose to grindstone' work ethic that is typical among maintenance leaders. Perhaps many feel that the goal is never achieved. A few supervisors might even be thinking that they are the hardest working member on the team and that if no one from upper management is coming by to celebrate what they've done, then why stop to celebrate with the team they are leading?

Mental Health of an Effective Team

If you've got no employment turn-over on your team and everyone is working collaboratively, and at near one hundred percent effectiveness, then you've got some real magic going for you. Chances are much greater that this not your situation. When you solve problems for a living, it just makes good mental health/motivation sense to stop periodically and celebrate what you've accomplished thus far. This is especially true if you are in the middle of a change initiative and are learning well as a team. The celebration event doesn't have to be expensive or complicated, but it should be done with sincerity and convey meaning. Celebration is a form of positive feedback and reinforcement. It is my step ten in a continuous cycle of steps to remember if you're the kind of leader who believes that the tradespersons and craftspersons on your team are all potential leaders in development. Below you will find the ten steps that were fermenting and churning in my thoughts this summer. Feel free to share your thoughts on these steps.

Ten Step Trades Leadership
1. Hire the best tradespersons
2. Develop the team with continuous training and mentorship
3. Provide the best tools and aids
4. Solve the technical documentation crisis
5. Establish a vision and set high expectations
6. Encourage initiative, collaboration, and true craftsmanship
7. Provide regular feedback and assessments
8. Encourage ownership and team autonomy
9. Insist on accountability and team learning
10. Celebrate team successes!

Giving Up On The Trades? Self Leadership is Required.

How many agree with the following statement? Industrial maintenance trades/craftspersons who take advantage of training when it is offered, and who stretch and acquire new skills or improve the quality of their work, are securing their own future and that of the company and the local economy as well.

This is the thought I was pondering recently after listening to a couple of maintenance managers tell me that instead of training their front line maintenance team, they would just continue to manage and get by. One was bold enough to say that he just didn't think that providing training for his team would change anything. He described the fears and apathy in a few of the personal attitudes on the team.

Corporate Culture - Who's Responsible?

My thoughts about the importance of company culture and making sure it gets built right, and that it never slides downhill were forefront in my mind. Is it possible though that a company makes poor choices when hiring maintenance tradespersons? Is it possible that the maintenance manager is under skilled in motivating, leading and developing his team? I think it's possible that the answer to both questions is 'yes' in many a case. Assigning blame will not solve the issue however.

Economic Reality

At the bottom line is a reality that if team players from all levels in a maintenance team don't find a way to improve their own effectiveness, efficiency or the quality and quantity of the company's production, then ultimately how will a company, indeed an entire region's economy, justify and grant the increase in wages that everybody wants?

As a tradesman, this writer encourages all in the industrial maintenance trades and crafts to take every opportunity to continue the quest for new knowledge and improved hard and soft skills. I believe that a chunk of the North American economy depends on it!

Lead if You're Young, or Any Age!

If you're tempted to blame your boss or 'the company' for a less than progressive and dynamic work culture, don't. Just take the initiative on your own to lead and influence those you can. At a recent training seminar I conducted, it was one of the youngest tradesman in the group who demonstrated leadership and admonished most of his older colleagues to positively focus on the possibilities that accompany a team with a higher level collaboration, maintenance and diagnostic skill set.

Leadership is not a lofty position high up on the organization chart. It's a personal choice to nurture one's own potential to lead and it starts on the shop or plant floor. I've always referred to this as leading from the back, or leading from the bottom. Yes it does take a little nerve and personal resolve to lead with enthusiasm when you haven't stepped up much in the past. You have find a way to deal with that fear of being eaten in the jungle (maintenance shop) that may crop up. But if you're earnest, the respect will come in time.

Supervisor Boost

For the overworked and sometimes discouraged maintenance supervisors and maintenance managers, I say look for any spark of passion or initiative within that team you lead, and then fuel it. Offer some autonomy and responsibility, and of course let them know you're going to hold them to account as well. The investment will be worth it if only for the potential to delegate or to expect that the highly trained front line trades and crafts will reduce your burden.

An industrial maintenance tradesperson has an important and valuable contribution to make to the economy, and she can demonstrate this by driving her own continuous training, and by leading the others on her team.

What Motivates Us...to do Our Very Best Work?

I recently visited the Museum of Flight in Seattle. I love museums like this where you can see so many generations of innovation and progress all at once. I have always appreciated the world of aircraft design and engineering.

I was particularly fascinated with a display for the "Corncob". This engine developed by Pratt and Whitney as the R-4360 Wasp Major, powered the F2G Corsair in the latter years of WWII. This engine marked a pinnacle achievement at the end of the piston engine era for fighter aircraft. There are four rows of seven pistons in radial arrangement. If the engineering and problem solving skills needed to make that kind of design work doesn't amaze you, then how about its weight of 3470 lbs with an ability to produce 3500 horsepower. This 1:1 power to weight ratio was tough to beat.

As I studied the detailed cutaway engine on the floor at the museum, I wondered about the people who designed it and built it. What motivated them to do this kind of difficult work...to do their very best work?

The Documentation Crisis

Over the past ten years I've been paying attention to a problem in industry that is wide spread and rather consistent. I've come to refer to it as the documentation crisis. Its effects are very serious. Equipment capital life may be shortened. Production quality and quantity are impacted. The effectiveness of maintenance activities can come into question. Safety and environmental issues can easily enter into the equation as well.

First of all, what is documentation? In the industrial machinery environment, documentation can be thought of as the total collection of information resources pertaining to how a complex system functions, how to install, commission and operate it, and how to maintain and troubleshoot it. For a system that has been in place for a number of years, documentation should also include a historical record of changes, repairs, maintenance activities and developed best practices.

Is it reasonable to expect a team of equipment operators and maintainers to do their best possible work without a comprehensive collection of well designed, accurate information resources? If we look to the world of commercial aircraft we find that the standard and expectation for up to date and accurate documentation is very high. This is understandable given the reliable nature of gravity and the burden of responsibility that falls on those in charge of public transportation.

The reality for many industrial environments on the ground seems to include a story or two about a system or a number of systems within the machinery fleet, or at the mill, plant or mine site where some or many of these resources have gone missing, were never created or are badly out of date. A system schematic is one example of a document that is often not accurate and therefor not useful for system learning and problem solving. There are a good number of reasons that can explain how a schematic turns out to be inaccurate. What is more interesting is how a good number of years can go by with no resolution for these inaccuracies.

Another example of the documentation crisis involves the experience of individuals who work with the complex systems in question for a period of time. It seems like an obvious loss of intellectual property or capital knowledge to find these individuals moving on from the plant or the machinery team without having recorded or passed on what they've learned over the years. Yet this is precisely what happens at so many sites.



One last example among many comes from the program running within a programmable logic controller (PLC). While I don't compile precise statistical data, a fairly high percentage of PLC programs are very poorly documented. If the original programmer doesn't stick around or make it a goal to train another person at the site, the electrical and instrumentation team is left to struggle through their use of the PLC as a plant system diagnostic tool.

The question I often pose to team members in the industrial environment is; how will operational performance and equipment reliability goals be reached without addressing the documentation crisis that seems so prevalent? If the documentation crisis is not an impediment to reaching those goals, then perhaps the goals are not set high enough. Perhaps in that case the goals are not sufficiently based on the expectation of deep learning within the team.

How are you addressing the documentation issues at your site?

Space Telescope Repair - Maintenance Planning for Astronauts

I just finished watching the Nova program; Hubble's Amazing Rescue. The May 2009 shuttle mission to service the Hubble space telescope was the last in a series of maintenance and repair events. The mission was twelve days long, involving five space walks. One of the spacewalks lasted over eight hours.

As I watched the show I was impressed with the meticulous nature of the two plus years of planning and preparation for the repair and maintenance activities. Of course the margin for error on the mission was near zero. If the astronauts encountered problems that were not accounted for during the planning and training phases, the chances of success for the mission would be minimal.

All procedures from working with the smallest threaded fastener to moving eight hundred pound assemblies had to be carefully choreographed well in advance of the mission. Each task had to be scripted and practiced numerous times by the astronauts in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory swimming pool in Houston. If the procedures for tasks did not practice well, the procedures were rewritten and then tested and practiced again. You can read the transcript of the program here

The total number of people and teams that prepared the astronauts for the Hubble work was impressive. The complexity and thoroughness of the planning, procedure writing and training was impressive. Training was carried out right up to the time when the actual final mission began.

If we compare this space mission to an industrial maintenance event (shut down), then the astronauts were the tradespersons and the heavy equipment operators who worked with the tools, materials and components at the workface. Every possible effort was made by the mission engineers, planners and trainers to ensure success in orbit. The astronauts were the front line, the final expression of an enormous team effort. To have prepared the astronauts in an ad hoc or random fashion would have brought disappointment for many players and stakeholders.

The same holds true for an industrial team during a plant shut down. The front line trades and equipment operators need to work from the best possible preparation and planning in order to help them achieve an efficient work cycle. They also need the best possible training to make sure they are ready to solve problems as they arise. Problem solving is, after all, the reason why humans are needed to complete the complex work carried out during a shut down.

If you catch the program on PBS, be sure to watch for the glitches and problems that crop up during the actual work on the telescope and how the teams and support experts work together to solve them.

Maintenance Has To Report!

Further to my 'Blow your Horn' post on May 06, here is more encouragement.

Of course the industrial maintenance department has to report on matters of cost and budgets. But how about reports from the tradespersons on the plant floor, or from technician in the fleet maintenance shops?

Many tradespersons I speak to have been quietly monitoring some aspect of the machinery they look after. They often have valid ideas for improvement that no one else has heard. Initiatives and reporting can and should start at the tradesperson level. If you are a tradesperson and you've got a sense of initiative and some great ideas and you work hard, then start blowing your horn. This is your company, with its expensive assets that you are helping to manage. Don't worry if others in the lunchroom are giving you strange looks as you compile your data and as you write your reports.

Perhaps you are thinking "What should I report?" Most people involved with maintenance, whether a tradesperson on the floor or a shop supervisor, have at least one pet project that they are interested in exploring deeper. Your commitment to report about it monthly or quarterly will help you keep the project on track. If you are convinced that you can coax better overall performance from your machinery and your department by starting with a particular initiative then wait no longer. This is your year!

If you have made some notable progress by the time the corporate annual report is being compiled, then submit your work and ask to be included. Be as assertive on this as you can get away with. If it doesn't make the report this year, ask why and perhaps ask for some guidelines on how to prepare your materials and then try again next year. If you're serious about your work, as most every maintenance department is, you'll get into that annual report eventually.

Wouldn't some recognition for your department's efforts and contributions help to paint the big picture?

The Future of Industrial Trades

I was very lucky to serve as a Skill Ambassador for the Polymechanics/Automation competition at World Skills 2009 in Calgary Alberta last week. What an event!


The 17 to 22 year old competitors had already won the national competitions in their home countries. They are the best of the best! The national competitions are tough. I know this because I was involved with creating and judging an electronics troubleshooting event when the Skills Canada event was in Red Deer back in 1997.

The young men and women who came to show the best of their skills and talents in areas such as CNC machining, Polymechanics (Millwright work), Industrial Automation, Manufacturing, Mechatronics, Welding, Electrical Installation and many more were absolutely first rate. Learn more at www.worldskills.org


The future of industrial skills around the world is in great hands if this year's competitors were representative of the next generation.

The challenge for industry will be to employ these amazing new artisans in a very open and progressive work culture and in a way that lets them express their full passion for their respective crafts.