by Ted Stiles and David Portney
Stiles Associates

Over the last several decades, American manufacturing organizations have become faster, more productive and more responsive to customers’ needs – they’ve had to. In an increasingly global manufacturing economy with plenty of low-cost labor options, those organizations that continue to manufacture in the United States need to be very, very good at it.

While this is achieved with the coordination of highly effective functional leaders across the organization, the Manufacturing Operations Leader is one of the most critical components of this team. They set the vision, culture and expectations for how things will run out on the floor or across multiple plants in the case of multi-site leaders.

To do this, today’s operations leaders are very different than their predecessors from 20 years ago. The best of them share several core traits:

They develop leaders

Antiquated American management culture has often heralded the achievement of the individual. While this widely led to the promotion of leaders who “got things done” by any means, it eroded the organization’s ability to develop highly engaged, learning work teams. It also often reinforced command and control work cultures where teams felt immobilized and disconnected from the organizational goals.

While great operations leaders might know how to do everything, they also keenly understand the importance of developing their people. This is a fundamental shift in how an operations leader views their job. For today’s top leaders, the main objective is to develop the capability of their teams. They have a constant focus on upgrading the skill level of their teams and have demonstrable track records establishing resilient and coordinated manufacturing cultures.

They understand that developing their team to handle the bulk of the day-to-day tasks pays much higher dividends. This might prove challenging for leaders new to an organization, so they often spend time observing the team around them and live out on the floor to establish connection and build trust.

Taking weeks or months to develop a deeper understanding of their teams and surroundings gives leaders the opportunity to identify the three types of players:

• A-players: Ensure they’re ready to move up when the time is right.
• B-players: Put them on a meaningful improvement path or reshuffling their roles and / or responsibilities to play to their strengths and gain confidence.
• C-players: Reassign them to roles that are mutually beneficial.

Identifying those players helps set up senior management for long-term quantitative and qualitative success. Good operations leaders can rattle off the operational metrics they’ve improved upon, and while great ones can do the same, they also show how much of their direct reporting team has been promoted up the company ladder.

This is the single-most requested trait our clients seek when hiring manufacturing operations leaders.

They understand servant leader leadership

Another big step in the evolution of the operations leader has been turning the traditional leadership model upside down. In the servant leadership model, leaders work for the individuals on the floor, even though they are not above them in the org chart. They view their responsibilities as listening to the needs of those on the front line and removing all obstacles.

This, of course, is easier said than done. If you consider the path of any leader, they often arrive at that position by working relentlessly and having all the answers, so breaking decades of habits is required to change the mindset. As our clients now look at leadership styles a little differently, gone are the days of driving performance through fear, and in are the days of positively reinforcing direct reports that the leaders work for them.

They create a visual factory

There is a tactical best-in-class method to making things understandable and visible on the floor. This is not only for the benefit of the hourly associates, but for the supervisors, managers and directors as well. There has also been a huge cultural shift in the willingness to manage this way. Instead of keeping critical information about performance rates and organizational goal metrics closely held, world-class operations leaders create a connected management system. The top organizational goals are openly shared as are the critical KPIs. This information cascades through the organization down to the floor level and monitored daily if not hourly.

Even today, there are still manufacturing plants that give the gameplans to managers and let them call the plays with minimal input from the floor. The new and innovative class of manufacturing leaders are using a different approach of driving engagement by being transparent; sharing the big picture with the team makes everyone more connected, efficient and effective at their jobs.  

They make problems a good thing

It sounds cliché, but problems are truly opportunities. Today’s leaders know this and know how to create cultures where workers are encouraged to bring forward problems for three reasons: (1) they know it will help them run their zones better; (2) they’ll have input on how to fix it; (3) they not only won’t get reprimanded, they might get rewarded.

If they have an office, they rarely use it

We hear this every day from our clients: “We need someone out on the floor with the people.”

Top operations leaders instinctively like to be out on the floor. They know they can’t make critical decisions without understanding the floor realities as it pertains to people, process and infrastructure. The benefits are massive, and it’s core to their ability to building trust and rapport with the organization.

To speak with a member of the Stiles team regarding your hiring needs, please submit this brief form.

Learn more about how you can apply these traits and practices into recruiting and retaining the top leaders in this space.