Maintenance Mindset: What manufacturing leaders can learn from military training

The connection between the military and manufacturing is strong. I’m thinking of not only the many manufacturing facilities that support U.S. defense efforts, but also the well-traveled career path from the military to manufacturing. I’m always struck by the number of former military service men and women that find their way to maintenance and reliability, and this phenomenon was on full display at the keynote address for this year’s Society of Reliability and Maintenance Professionals (SMRP) annual conference in Fort Worth, TX. The Plant Services team attended the event in early October.

The keynote speaker was retired lieutenant colonel James Harris from the U.S. Air Force, and he asked during his speech a show of hands from other former military. As always, many hands in the audience popped up.

Harris outlined some training and procedure best practices from the military that translate well to manufacturing, but he was focused on one aspect in particular. “Today we’re going to talk about the reliability of the most important element within your teams, within your organization, and that’s the people,” Harris said.

One of the biggest challenges in the workplace, as Harris sees it, is fear, but when it can be coupled with exhilaration, something interesting happens. “At the intersection of fear and exhilaration is one word that gets us through those challenging times,” he said, “and that’s trust.”

What a skydiving lesson also teaches about reliability in a plant

Harris started his military career at the United States Air Force Academy at the young age of 17. After his first year, he was encouraged to sign up for a leadership program called Airmanship 490, which was very simply skydiving, or as Harris called it, “jumping out of a perfectly good airplane for no good reason at all.” Harris is fourth generation military and wanted to make his family proud.

When you first skydive as a civilian, it’s a tandem jump, where you’re strapped to an experienced diver, who makes all the critical decisions. However, in Airmanship 490, your first jump is by yourself. But, first, the trainees do go to class. 

On Monday, they get a physical assessment first to make sure they can handle all the physical stressors of skydiving, then they go to the classroom. They are educated on all the processes that make up the skydiving mission—how to properly deploy the parachute, how to properly land it, and all the mechanics and information needed to execute the mission. They also spend time learning about all the things that can go wrong. On Friday, that same week, it’s time to prove what you have learned.

“We look around at each other with that nervous energy, that nervous laughter energy that says, ‘I'm scared, but I'm not going to look like it, but I know you're scared too, right?’ We're looking back at each other, and we're putting on our parachutes, getting ready to go line up to get into the aircraft. As we start lining up, I figured I would be the smart guy, and I would get in the back of the line, figuring it gives me some time to watch everybody else do their thing. Perhaps you all have heard the statement that says the last shall be first and the first shall be last. Well, I got to witness that because I realized, as we start getting in the plane, being the last one in meant that I was going to be the first one out,” Harris said.

Despite signing up for the skydiving mission, Harris was afraid of heights, which became glaringly clear to him when the plane took off with the door still open. The loud noise was deafening, and Harris started to panic. “My fear was that I would fall out of this perfectly good airplane before I had a chance to actually jump out of the airplane like I was trained to do,” Harris said. But neither the jump master or the pilot flinched at the open door, so he adjusted to the environment, until they were eye level with the Rocky Mountains, 4,000 feet off the ground.

That breath-taking scene was abruptly interrupted by the jump master’s command, “Stand by,” which means move all the way to the open door. Then, the next command: “Stand in the door,” where the jumper leans down with one hand on the edge of the door with his head out of the plane. “The wind hits my face. I start panicking,” Harris said.

The jump master gives the final command: “Go.” Harris looks back at the jump master and says No, and the jump master pushes him out of the airplane. “As he shoves me out of the airplane, I proceed to start tumbling furiously. When you’re tumbling fiercely out of an airplane, what you see is ground sky, ground sky, ground sky, because you are tumbling uncontrollably. In that moment, I forgot all my training that they had done for me that week,” Harris said. But as he continued to fall and tumble, the training starts to kick in. He remembers he’s supposed to count to 10. At 17 seconds, the automatic activation device on the parachute will fire, and that can be dangerous if you’re out of position.

“I remember, I'm supposed to count to 10. I figure I'd probably fallen a good eight or nine seconds, so let me just give it one or two Mississippi's. And then I realized, okay, I'm supposed to arch my body. I then arch my body like I was trained to, get nice and lined up now steering down the ground, pull my head back, one hand behind my head, another behind my back, tossed my drag chute out, and in that split second, the world slowed down. I slowed down. The parachute opened up, and I realized it worked,” Harris said.

“What I realized is that I had to trust the people that trained me. I had to trust the equipment that they had provided me, and I had to trust myself to execute the mission through that fear and exhilaration all coming together at one time,” Harris said.

After reviewing the tapes, Harris got to see how long he was actually tumbling. “I barely fell four seconds, sir, but it seemed like a lifetime,” he said.

“Our frontal lobes were not even fully formed yet, but here it was. We were trusted to jump out of the airplane and safely get to the ground, and we did that five times to get to earn our wings. How is it that the Air Force can do that? They're able to do that because they realize that if you provide people with the right training processes, then you can empower them to execute the mission and handle complicated, challenging environments,” Harris said.

In his presentation, Harris also presented some startling stats about employee trust and the companies they work for:

• High trust organizations get more energy, higher productivity and more engagement.
• Individuals in a high trust organization get 74% less stress, 40% less burnout and 29% more satisfaction.
• 65% of working Americans researched the culture of a company before accepting a job with them.
• 77% of Americans will leave a company if they don’t feel they can trust their leadership, including 82% of Generation X.

“People are looking at your company, and they are determining if they are even interested in applying to your company based on what they're hearing from others. They're doing the research before they ever show up. What's the reputation of your company right now? Is it a high trust organization where the reputation precedes itself? Or is it that company that folks are trying to avoid because you've got that reputation?” he asked.

No fail trust requires two types of trust. One is the function side of trust: the skills sets and knowledge needed to be able to do your job. The other side is the relational side of trust.

“How do you build that level of trust through the relationships that you create in the workplace?” Harris asked. “It’s a combination of those two things that allows us to get to what I call no fail trust and that allows us to elevate the level of trust within our organizations.”

7 important ingredients to creating no fail trust for high-reliability operations

Harris shared other anecdotes about his time in the military and his work as a commercial pilot to show the connection between training and trust. In his stories, you’ll find an outline of the necessary culture and leadership that leads to trust and good decision making.

“This is what I call no fail trust, being able to deliver when jobs and lives are on the line, being able to deliver when the stakes are high, being able to deliver when failure is not an option,” Harris said.

1. Problem solving is a skill that can be learned. 
   There are seven critical skill sets of problem solving: professional knowledge, situational awareness, assertiveness, decision making, communication, leadership, adaptability, and flexibility.
2. Culture gives people something to feel a part of.
   “It's about the culture that you're creating that allows people to feel like they're part of something bigger. You create that culture with leaders. Leaders, not in your job description, but in how you show up every single day. Are you leading people? Are you managing people? Or are you being the boss of people?” Harris asked. “You manage systems and processes. You lead people.”
3. Leaders achieve accountability through compassionate coaching.
   “They lead with compassion. They lead with empathy. They lead with kindness. They lead in a coaching, mentoring way, and most of all, they hold their people accountable. And let me be extremely clear, at no point when I talk about a leader, will you ever hear me say anything close to coddling people, because that is not how we lead. We lead by holding our people accountable,” Harris said.
4. Psychological safety is at the core of trust.  
   How do leaders create the space to earn their titles? The first step, Harris said, is psychological safety, or “the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.”
5. Acknowledgement builds the foundation for trust.
   “People want three things. They want to be heard, they want to be understood, and they want to be acknowledged. What are you doing to hear, understand, and acknowledge people?” Harris asked.
6. Leaders take action.
   Harris credits his wife for making this point to him: acknowledgement and understanding are great, but they mean very little without action. She said, “Here's the deal, you might have heard me when I told you take out the trash and I know you heard me because you were within earshot, and I know you understand me because we speak the same language, and I know you acknowledge me because you nodded your head. But if you don't take action, it's not good enough. Leaders take action.”
7. Trust will never be formed without connection.
   “We create connection that leads to commitment and accountability, that then leads to trust. How are you creating ‘donut moments’ in your organizations with the people that matter most to you?” Harris asked.

“Donut moments” is the name that Harris gave to a ritual Friday night outing with his daughter. Those outings were about much more than sharing donuts though; they were about forming a connection. In times where workforces face challenges keeping and finding employees, it seems even more important now to build connection and trust.

All of these things will eventually lead to better operations. Like the rookie skydiver jumping out of a plane the first time, you must trust your trainer and your training, and you’ll make the right critical decisions.

It’s not in the moment that you figure it out. It’s in the preparation ahead of time.