Step 7: Provide Regular Feedback and Assessments

A number of you have asked me to continue on the Ten Step Trades Leadership writing. I've had the busiest two years of my life working with heavy industry. There have been so many opportunities to learn about teams and about company culture, including our own. I intend to pick up where I left off and post a bit more frequently going forward.

Very few employees desire to work in a performance vacuum where feedback is seldom or never given. Feeling neglected is a common complaint from many in the companies where we visit. 

Traditionally most people think of feedback only as something that a leader provides to someone on his or her team. But it is actually best thought of as a two-way street where feedback can flow in either direction and where it can be initiated from either side. As much as leaders may need to be reminded from time to time to provide feedback to their employees, the employee can and should ask for feedback from their leader. The employee can also provide very useful feedback to the leader. Do you see what I mean about the two-way street?

Feedback doesn't have to come only during the once per year, one-on-one performance review. The often dreaded annual review is actually much easier for both parties if feedback is exchanged much more frequently throughout the year. 

Here's a few examples that can work in the service bays and maintenance shops;

If you're the leader, catch your tradespersons and teams doing things right in terms some work process that has been implemented or emphasized of late. And while you're at it, ask them for some feedback on how well that process is working for them at the shop floor level and for any suggestions on how you as a leader can help make the process work better. You might take a moment to review why their correct work makes a difference to the business. If you have to correct a problem with tradesperson performance, try asking a series of questions with genuine concern for the whole person. You may find out some factors at work in his or her life that will make it easier to move to a discussion on the specifics of the problem.   

If you're the tradesperson, you might take a moment when the maintenance leader is nearby to call him or her over and deliberately ask for some clarification on matters of process or quality in the shop and then give some examples of how you believe your work is in line with the current initiatives or policies. I know that some will worry that this seems like a kindergarten student constantly asking the teacher if his picture coloring is good enough. Well it's not like that at all unless you are doing it constantly. It is a great opportunity to show a leader that you're not automatically cynical about management processes and that you are trying to produce the best work you can in areas of your job. If you handle this exchange professionally and respectfully, you should even be able to send some feedback to your leader about his or her performance as well. If you've got some criticisms for your leader, try pointing out some of the good things he's been doing, then ask if he or she is open to a suggestion. This will likely put both of you in the right mindset for a respectful exchange.

Few people enjoy an all out confrontation in the workplace. Giving feedback and conducting assessments should turn out to be a positive experience if there is a culture of regular feedback and communications within the maintenance department. 

Step 8: Encourage Ownership and Team Autonomy

Continuing with the Ten Step Trades Leadership

When I'm out there training a group of maintenance tradesmen in industry I often hear "my supervisor won't let me do what I know needs to be done on that machine. I have to put in a report or work order and then it gets overlooked completely until a failure occurs."

Well there may be a few procedural problems to be dealt with here. But ultimately I haven't found too many maintenance leaders who don't want to let their teams own processes, procedures and even machines. It's just good leadership and delegation to let a team of passionate and reliable tradepersons 'run with the ball'.

I always encourage the tradesperson on the floor to communicate with his maintenance management group to find out more about the prioritizing of general service work vs. immediate/emergency vs. planned maintenance work so that he knows the process in use. The process of planning and scheduling work isn't meant to remove the qualified tradesperson from having a sense of ownership. As a leader, you know that it's about making sure that maintenance work is tracked, parts and materials are ready, that jobs are grouped up if possible to make the most efficient use of downtime.

On the other hand, teams and individual tradespersons on the front line can be developed into potential leaders if they are given as much ownership and autonomy as possible. This is where a lot of job satisfaction comes from.

If you're a tradesperson, ask to be included in the maintenance planning meetings where procedures are ironed out. You may get your chance in this environment to claim some additional ownership if you can make a good business case. Yes try to learn about the business/accounting realities in maintenance management. This will help.

If you're a supervisor, consider giving additional autonomy and ownership to your best team. Let them know what the parameters are and how they'll be held accountable (see Step 9) and then deploy. Done right, this should ease some of the workload for yourself and your planner.

Step 9: Insist on Accountability and Team Learning

If as manager of maintenance you encourage ownership and team autonomy in your plant or shop environment, then this is the next logical step isn't it? It should be a natural fit.

If a team of technicians and their support group have shown that they can look after overall maintenance of a machine or group of machines without a manager breathing down their necks every day, then they are probably ready for a mission. A mission is a challenge. The challenge might be to increase the availability of a piece of mobile equipment, or it might be to beat last year's unplanned downtime by a certain number of hours in a particular corner of the plant. It might be to find an innovative practice that prevents a certain type of wear or a particular breakdown.

Once a reasonable challenge has been given and accepted, the autonomous team can be held to account. They accepted the challenge, therefor the results are theirs to speak to. Chances are great that they will beat the minimum requirement of the challenge. That's the nature of this kind of challenge given to an autonomous team. If they do in fact succeed they will have learned together in a powerful way.

If they don't succeed, then once again there is some team learning that can take place if it hasn't already. The function of accountability in this case is not to reprimand, but rather to help analyze where the efforts or execution of the challenge went off the track. A very open discussion on why the challenge was not met and what mistakes were made may find some tender spots in the egos of some team members. If blaming is avoided and amnesty is given for honest mistakes, the criticisms should allow team members to recommit and to carry what they've learned forward and to restructure the challenge and try again.

Was the manager leading this accountability meeting? Was the manager's presence even required in the discussion? What could or should the manager contribute to the team to coach their team learning? Your thoughts?

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?