Podcast: How plant managers fail as leaders, mentors, and mentees

Key takeaways

Observation on the shop floor drives better decisions than relying solely on KPIs and data.
Poorly executed PMs are common—watching them firsthand reveals hidden inefficiencies.
Working rotating shifts builds empathy and improves leadership for all levels of operations.
Mentorship provides guidance and advocacy, accelerating career and cultural transformation.

Joe Kuhn, CMRP, former plant manager, engineer, and global reliability consultant, is now president of Lean Driven Reliability LLC. He is the author of the book “Zero to Hero: How to Jumpstart Your Reliability Journey Given Today’s Business Challenges” and the creator of the Joe Kuhn YouTube Channel, which offers content on starting your reliability journey and achieving financial independence. In our monthly podcast miniseries, Ask a Plant Manager, Joe considers a commonplace scenario facing the industry and offers his advice, as well as actions that you can take to get on track tomorrow. This episode offers how to use observation to be a better manager, why you should have a mentor and how to be a better mentor yourself.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

PS: Thanks, Joe. You are always very candid on the show, and your willingness to say what others might not want to say, or your willingness to talk about mistakes or negative situations always gives us great answers and discussion. So in that tradition, today, we're going to ask you about mistakes you've made. We've talked in general, about the ways that maintenance managers fail, why it's a failure to be drawn to emergency work, why companies fail to report accurate KPIs, the failures of maintenance micromanagers, and those are some of our most popular episodes also. But today we're getting personal, so, Joe, can we talk about some of the mistakes you've made as a plant manager and what you learned from them?

JK: I'll actually go back, if I can just a little bit more in time, before a plant manager. Why do I talk a certain way? Why do I use certain examples? Why am I so passionate about a few things? Well, they all go back to mistakes, right? I was a mechanical engineer, so as a mechanical engineer, you're trained in problem solving. You're trained in using data KPIs. Early in my career, I remember making decisions from the office, from the conference room based by looking at averages, looking at trends. Say you’ve got a piece of equipment out there. Just as an example, you’ve got a piece of equipment. You’re sitting in the conference room. You say, ‘Hey, wait a second, we had 4% unplanned downtime last year. This year, we've got 15% downtime. Oh, it's almost 4x. What's happening.’ Well, you look at the KPIs. It's just degrading. That's impacting the business. ‘This is how much production we've lost. This is what it's costing us. We need to replace this piece of equipment.’ And then, ‘Let’s start looking at what type of equipment. This piece of machinery is 30 years old. They’ve got new stuff out there with sensors on it. This is really cool. Let's go down that path.’

What I didn't bring to the table when I was 22 and I'll say into my 30s, was observation. And specifically what I'm thinking about is, I want to go out and look at that equipment, how it's running, how the operators are using it. Are they using it outside of the parameters that it's designed to run? Are they running the speed too high? Are they abusing equipment to try to compensate for some problem? I remembered a vacuum tube on an overhead crane. This is a crane that would vacuum up sandy material. Well, that tube, we were having failures on. But if you stood there with an operator for eight hours, there were other problems with the equipment, and they were using this tube as a battering ram to fix another problem. So they were putting side load on this tube that was not designed to take side load. So you see that through observation. So my mistake was, sitting around the conference room just using data.

When I was introduced to the Toyota Production System and observation, I'd see things like the operators are using the equipment in a way it wasn't intended to do. The other thing, as it relates to maintenance, you may look at this equipment and say, ‘Hey, we're doing the monthly PM every single month. We're doing these 12 steps.’ Have you ever watched one of those PMs being conducted? I can't tell you how many times that I've gone to watch a PM and it’s an eight-hour PM, just as an example. And there'll be three people assigned to it, and they have these 20 tasks. They'll shut down the equipment. Well, first of all, they get the equipment late from operations. They're supposed to have it from 7 to 3. They don't get it until 8:30 because operations needed to get this product out, and then they're really concerned. Production really needs that equipment back at 1:00 and so you cut off the corners, and instead of 20 steps getting done, you get 10 of them done. This is shockingly common. And then at the end of the day, PM is checked complete. You're not doing it with precision. You're rushed, and you're not doing all the steps.

That was shocking to me to discover. You sit in a conference room, you say, ‘Hey, we did 12 PMs last year. Every single month they had them on time.’ Have you ever watched one? Okay, so those are the early on mistakes, living in my own mind, maybe in a conference room, talking with other people, and not using observation. It’s embarrassing to me looking back at it. It's some of the capital that I spent decisions that I’ve made, passionate speeches I've given, and I had no first hand observation. And if I did have first hand observation, it was five minutes here, five minutes there. Observation doesn't count in my book, unless it's eight hours, and I think a lot of viewers, maybe our listeners may be shocked at that, but you're going to make better decisions. You're going to have more solutions, many of them free, that you can implement on Monday if you observe. And that was just that's so powerful to me now, but it was an embarrassing lesson in my 20s and early 30s when I didn't do that. I'm the engineer. I'm supposed to know. That was big.

Another one, I'll go a different direction. Here is one of the big mistakes I made. And this is just career wise. It wasn't process or didn't affect the business in any way. But I didn't have a mentor my entire career. I look back and you don't know what could have been. I had a good career. I'm very proud of it, but my ego was a little too big. I'm an engineer. I can do this by myself. I think men tend to have this problem more. I don't know, I don't live the life of a female, but it was like I resisted help, I resisted support from corporate and I resisted a mentor, and I had a mentor maybe a third of my career. But having somebody that is a couple levels in the organization higher than you, who has seen things, has more years of experience that can help guide you and say, ‘Here's a trap. Here's a trap. This is what worked for me. How do you drive change? Do you drive change overnight? Or is it, if it's an emotional change, what are the advantages of introducing that change and deploying the change over 3,4,7, months? What’s the capacity of the organization to change? Tap into somebody that's done that.

Your life as a leader changes when you observe. If you're trying to influence people's behavior, like, hey, ‘I want you to own reliability.’ Show them what that looks like, or what it looks like not to have that on the shop floor.
- Joe Kuhn

The other hidden benefit of having a mentor is, the first benefit is to tap into their knowledge and experience on how to get things done, what they've learned, the other hidden benefit is, now you have an advocate. You have an advocate that's pulling for you, cheering for you, wanting you to be successful, wanting to put new experiences in front of you. You have an advocate. A lot of decisions are made in a conference room that you're not invited to. There's a hallway conversation about a new opportunity. ‘Here's an expanded role for somebody. It's a big business challenge. We need somebody to take it. Who can it be?’ And your mentor is in the room, and they say, ‘How about Joe? I've been meeting with Joe. I've seen this characteristic, this characteristic, I think he can do it.’ That was just a mistake. Who knows the price I paid for that mistake? Maybe the safety and environmental performance of my plants would have been a little better. Maybe the performance would have been a little better. You don't know, but I highly encourage people to have at least one mentor. Two is better. Two is better because there are two different people, and you get two advocates. So mentorship is big.

The other thing, I'm going to come back to observation, because it's just such a powerful thing, and how I manage is when you're in a role where you're an advisor, you're a coach, you can sit down with another plant manager, another maintenance manager, or even operations. You're trying to convince operations to own reliability. Say you're the maintenance manager and you're trying to get the production manager to own reliability. Well, you can just lay out this correct and reasonable logic of why, and this is best practices. You make the decisions. I'm an advisor to you. I know the equipment, but you know the equipment, plus the quality needs, the environmental needs. You’re the owner of this car that is the process.

It's a completely different experience to try to convince somebody by going out and observing the process in reality. Going out and let's watch operations run the equipment and see how maintenance interacts with them for the next three days. Let's just observe, be a fly on the wall for three days. And I would take a plant manager or maintenance manager, and I'd say, ‘Okay, I'm going to teach you to observe. I'm going to teach you to see waste. I'm going to teach you to see interactions between groups.’ And it's a shocking experience for most people, so the correct and reasonable, logical conversation almost never worked for me. If I'm trying to change somebody's thinking, it never worked. When I took them and said, I need three days of your time and I was their coach and saying, what are you seeing now? You're not allowed to intervene. But look, that guy just called for maintenance. Let's watch what happens. Let's watch this outage that's eight hours long. Let's watch the quality of the work, the precision of the work. Do we give them eight hours? Are they rushed? Do they understand what they're doing? Are they doing it safely? Your life as a leader changes when you observe.

If you're trying to influence people's behavior, like, hey, ‘I want you to own reliability.’ Show them what that looks like, or what it looks like not to have that on the shop floor. Not only has observation helped me to make better decisions, it's the go-to tool for me to influence people to see the opportunity. So observation has two major lessons for me, because one of the jobs I had was I was a director of reliability and maintenance for the company. I worked for Alcoa, and that was global role. So I had to influence all these plant managers and maintenance managers. And it was frustrating my first year, and then my second year, I adopted this observation process, and it was really a week long. It was an introduction on day one, three days of observation. And then on the last day, we were like, ‘Let's put in action what we just observed,’ and what everybody's shocked with is how simple culture change is, how simple actions we can start on Monday that are free can impact the business. So it's a way to change a culture and also a way to change yourself. Those are my big learnings. So that took me, oh, 50-60 years to learn.

PS: Well, having gotten to know you over the course of 20 episodes, I'm not surprised to hear that observation was a theme in there. It's a big theme on the show and something that we talk about a lot. And you've made the case many times for why it's so important. And I think we'd probably be shocked to find out how many people actually do that. I think it's probably pretty low.

JK: Yeah, usually when I'm speaking, I will ask people to raise their hand if they consider themselves a floor manager. I'm on the floor. I'm connected with the floor, and almost every hand goes up, and then you ask them, okay, when was the last time you dedicated eight hours purely to observation? I've gotten one hand to go up in probably 8,000 people. ‘Eight hours, that's freaking crazy.’ And I said it's part of my daily or my weekly routine, was to spend eight hours on the shop floor. As the plant manager, people are like, what? Well, only if you want to make good decisions.

PS: And you questioned whether asking questions was a male problem. I don't know if I'm allowed to comment on that, but I would say yes, and I'm blaming that one on my husband.

Alright, well, we're continuing our get to know Joe and Anna part of this series, and I need to come up better name for this. I'll work on that. But today we're talking about mistakes, so we're going to keep it in that arena, and we're going to talk about, what is something in your life that maybe you thought was a mistake at the time that it happened, but you realized later it wasn't, or an important mistake that you learned from later. And I'll start us off today, and I'm going to keep it in the career world, so to speak. And it's weird for me to think about, but my entire career in the world of B2B journalism as it stands today, could have been a huge mistake when I first started, but in the end, the early struggle was worth it, and I'll explain.

So my entry into B2B journal journalism was not my first magazine job, but again, my first publishing job, in business media. My daughter, who is graduating from high school this year, she was one year old at the time when I started this job, and I was basically just so desperate to get back to work as a journalist in whatever way I could. So I took a part time job. I worked 29 hours a week for this company, because if I worked 30 hours a week, then they would have to give me benefits, and I went into the office every day about an hour and 30 minute commute one way. So I sat three hours a day in a car for a part time job. I started super early in the morning just to try and beat a lot of the traffic. And my husband thought I was crazy, and I probably was. We did end up moving closer a few years later, but overall, it was not really a good company, not a good office culture. Many of the people that work there really did not treat me or others very well. It was really awful, but I stuck it out, and in the four years that I worked there, I started it as assistant editor and worked all the way up to editor in chief by the time I left that company four years later. And even better, that magazine that I worked for got bought out by another publishing company. So I got to leave that terrible company and keep my job. And I started working from home at that point, long before everyone started doing that, and I went to a fantastic company with really amazing employees, and I stayed there until I came to my current position about five years ago. So had I not stuck it out at that first awful job when I probably had more than enough reasons to walk out at any time, I probably wouldn't even be where I am today, even on this podcast talking with you today, Joe. So you never know when those struggles turn into success later on. That's my story.

JK: Great example and the one decision sticks out to me. I started off as an engineer, and then I became a department manager. And I had, let's say, 70 or so people in the department. I was working day shift, and I had a nice job, and I was on this career path to advance, and somebody came to me with the opportunity to take a rotating shift job. It was a step down, but I managed a crew of people. This was operating people, production. And so I'm working like four weeks of day shift and four weeks of afternoons and four weeks of midnight. And I did that for almost four years, and a lot of people look at that as a step backwards. And I was like, did I make the right decision here? This is affecting my family life. I had three kids at the time, and they weren't in school yet. Maybe the oldest was in school, but I was having trouble sleeping. I couldn't always do things in the evening. It was just really working rotating shift, if you've done it, it affects your life a lot.

And then to transition from working afternoon shift to midnight shift, you stay up. I was always tired, but the lesson, and then I didn't learn this lesson during that. I thought it was a mistake most of the time, but then, when I got a promotion from that, I was a far better manager because I knew reality. I knew how work gets done. When you're managing people that are working midnight shift, they're different animals. They're different. Sometimes your goal for midnight shift is to not fall asleep. And that may sound crude to say that or appalling, but you're exhausted. Everybody's going through these emotions and the time that they may be away from family and what else they could be doing, and the society seems to be built for Monday through Friday day shift. I really was able to empathize more with the work that needed to be done and with the people, because I went through that and I have been a change leader for going through that experience.

So that experience, I can't say it was great, but I had a lot of fun along the way. I really did. It wasn't all bad, but it was like, Oh my gosh, what did I do? And a lot of people looked at me, what did you do? Well, this is a step back. You're an engineer. You shouldn't be, but I learned so many things about great people trying to do good work. But you don't have as many resources on afternoon shift. You're there at 7:00 pm trying to get something done. You don't have a team of engineers to call on. You don't have a team of technicians. You're out there by yourself doing the best you can with what you got. So I manage people differently because of that experience. That's my best example of something I thought was a mistake that ended up being one of the best experiences that I cited, I’m telling you, daily as a plant manager.

PS: That's interesting, especially those mistakes that you learned from later on I find most interesting, and I hadn't really thought about that midnight shift. I mean, I am an early bird. I am laying with my book by 9:00 p.m. every night, so the thought of trying to keep myself up all night working definitely sounds like a tough one.

JK: I actually had I set goals like if I can make it from midnight shift, our shift started at 11 p.m, so at 1:00 a.m., I can buy a soft drink. So that was my goal. And then, then at 3:00 was, you ate your meal. And then, if I made it to 5:00 a.m., I'm going to buy an ice cream sandwich. So I had these little, sometimes it was a Rice Krispie treat, but it was, ‘hey, I could make it. I can make it.’ It's funny looking back on those, but you weren't always on. You didn't always have the company flag at the highest setting and charging the line on midnight shift, it's tough. It's tough on people. So how do you make it a little better for those folks on midnight shift?

As a plant manager, I came in on midnight shift. I'd get up at four o'clock in the morning and I'd come on in and walk around, talk to the people, and they're like stunned to see somebody at my level there. I wanted to recognize them, and say what you're doing is important, and you're not alone out here. Let me know if I can help you with something. So, yeah, it changed how I manage.

PS: Yeah, it's a good point to think about how work changes from shift to shift, and how you might need to manage differently for those different employees. So good point.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.