Still the most challenging topic most companies face in maintenance and reliability is one of leadership. Many organizations feel that they are not achieving the effectiveness and efficiency they believe they should due to a lack of understanding of leadership. The one thing that has stood out in my recent visits to organizations to help with this challenge has been the lack of a fundamental of leadership – managing. The interesting part is that each organization recognized they needed work on things like motivation, inspiration, involvement, engagement etc. but none recognized that their structure and systems for managing were broken. If we don’t have the systems in place to manage and control how do we expect to demonstrate those afore-mentioned traits of leaders? We need to remember that a good manager may be a good leader, but good leaders MUST be good managers. Too often we think of leadership in the philosophical terms that were mentioned but as the leadership guru Peter Drucker’s “Effective leadership is not about making speeches and being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.”
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Recently I was facilitating a leadership seminar with a group of maintenance and reliability leaders. Everyone had finally agreed that, to improve performance, there had to be change, because as Albert Einstein said “If you do the same things every day and expect different results then that’s the definition of insanity!’. This led us to a discussion around perhaps the most maligned and forgotten management tool available – Change Management. We had an interesting discussion that got a little heated when I suggested that Change was really easy – you simply stop doing one thing and start doing another. The group was a little puzzled as to why I would bring up the topic as being much maligned and then tell them it was easy. That was until I explained that the difficult part of Change Management is the transition of behaviours from the old way to the new way – getting the transition, and so the behaviours you want, is the challenge. I used a work order as an example of what I was saying – if the goal is to change from paper work orders to electronic work orders – the change is fairly simple – you stop using paper work orders! The transition may not be so easy – when you used paper work orders the tradespeople would give great feedback and suggestions on the work order and allowed for continuous improvement but after the change to electronic all you get is ‘complete’ on the bottom of the form. Is that the behavior that you wanted – if not – what went wrong? We talked about the many reasons why the transition didn’t turn out the way we wanted and suggested that things like aging workforce who didn’t have confidence on the computer, people not understanding the benefit of the new system or being part of the development of the new system might have come into play.
Many times we hear this refrain along with, “I’ve told them what needs to be done, but they don’t seem interested!” Who is “them?” It could be your boss, your peers, or those working in the same department. If you’re a Maintenance and Reliability leader, it could be the tradespeople you work with – but it doesn’t matter who it is, the problem’s the same. You have identified a need for change, someone has told you that you need to change or you’ve simply been given the change to implement. Of the three, the last is the most difficult as the actual change has been foisted upon you and so hopefully the person doing the foisting has read this article and found a way to get your buy-in!
guru who tried to help explain the challenges of improving the performance of maintenance departments and the need for change to achieve it.