Podcast: Building a culture of candor and constructive conflict on the plant floor
Key takeaways
- Superficial harmony in meetings delays critical decisions—candor leads to better outcomes.
- Leaders should hold back opinions to foster open, fact-based team input.
- Clear decision-making processes prevent debates from becoming unproductive conflicts.
- Professional disagreement is vital—silence in meetings and complaints in hallways hurt reliability.
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 tips on how to create a safe space for spirited debate in industrial operations.
Below is an edited excerpt from the podcast:
PS: Hello and good morning or good afternoon, depending on when you're tuning into this episode of Ask a Plant Manager. This is a special series from Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast. I am Anna Townshend, managing editor of Plant Services, and with me is my co-host, retired plant manager, industry consultant, author and YouTube influencer, Joe Kuhn. Joe, we appreciate you being here with me every month, and I look forward to our discussions.
JK: I'm excited too about another challenging question or two coming my way.
PS: You bet. As I mentioned, Joe writes a column for us. You can read those at plantservices.com, and Joe, your last column was about the hero's journey. So this is a phrase you borrowed from Joseph Campbell, who wrote a book called “The Hero with 1000 Faces.” He highlights a universal narrative that we've all heard about, an ordinary person who faces a challenge and becomes a hero. It's the stuff of books and movies that we all love. Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, those were your three examples from your article. And for the ladies out there, I'm adding Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. And if you haven't seen Greta Gerwig recent interpretation of Barbie, that movie exactly what we're talking about here today, too. So that's my plug for Barbie.
We all know this trope, and you can read more in Joe's article about how the author breaks down the hero's journey and how Joe relates that to the plant floor. But in a nutshell, only heroes can navigate all the challenges and succeed as a plant manager. Joe, you outlined in that article a number of challenges to succeeding on this journey as a manager, many of which we've actually talked about in other episodes here in the podcast, such as operations owns reliability, training for new skills, how to deal with team members that aren't changing or adjusting. Those are all other episodes you can go back and listen to, but today, I want to discuss one particular challenge that you highlight in this article, which is: superficial congeniality must be replaced with spirited debate. Okay, Joe, I am intrigued by this idea, so let's talk about what this means, practically on the plant floor. So very simply, what is superficial congeniality, and how do you see it manifesting in plant operations? And what problems does that bring?
JK: I love this question because it brings reality to all the best practices on reliability and maintenance. It brings, what is it like when those best practices hit the culture that you're currently in? So I love it. The term superficial congeniality is not mine. I read it in a book years ago. It was from Jack Welsh, the CEO of General Electric. He wrote a book called “Straight from the Gut,” and I read it around the year 2000.
Let's go into an example. Okay, you're the maintenance manager. There’s a problem with a piece of equipment. Let's call it a gearbox. You do the oil analysis on it, you do heat signature on it, you do vibration and you say, ‘there's a problem.’ And you're running a aluminum rolling mill, but there's a problem in this gearbox. It's getting worse. Production needs to run. Production has a schedule. They have to get this product out on Friday. So they're all stressed that we've got to run, we've got to run, and, say today is Wednesday, and they need this product at the customer on Friday. Quality is concerned. Quality manager is in there screaming and saying, ‘Hey, quality we're on the ragged edge of where we like the product to turn out.’ Okay, so we’ve got quality upset. You’ve got maintenance upset. You’ve got production with a goal.
The plant manager comes in and says, ‘I think we ought to keep running. What do you guys think?’ And you're in a conference room, and people go, ‘Oh, I'm a little concerned about this. You know, I can't guarantee it's going to fail. We'll see what we can do. We'll change the oil. We'll monitor this. Maybe we'll run slower speeds. We'll do this kind of thing.’
And then operation says, ‘Hey, we can push out this product. Maybe we can give you a little longer on an outage on Friday.’ Everybody just says, ‘Well, the plant manager said, Let's run. Let's just go.’ Then you walk out of the meeting, and everybody's upset. The hallway conversation, the conversation that takes place in your office. This is the wrong decision. That equipment's going to fail. We're going to cause $100,000 damage to that gear box. You have all of the heartfelt, even fact-based discussion outside candor.
Bringing candor to the workplace, and I will say professional candor, not where everybody's just throwing chairs; candor doesn't mean I get my way. It means I get all my chips on the table. ‘Guys, this heat signature, it went from 210 degrees to 230 in the last hour. I'm telling you, this thing is going to fail. This thing is going to fail very confidently in the next 24 hours.’ And the money associated with that last time when this failed, we spent $700,000, whatever the number is. Everybody being heard, everybody is getting their opinions out there.
Unfortunately, a lot of people listening here won't have control over this, but the highest ranking person in the room, it could be the plant manager, they usually set the tone. They should not give their opinion first. ‘I think we ought to keep running.’ They ought to seek out each individual. So structure this in the next meeting you're in, say, ‘Let's hear everybody talk.’ Everybody gives their passionate case based on facts, based on observation, based on history, and let's hear everybody talk, and then make a decision. Now the leader can say, ‘Hey, I want to listen to all this input, but in the end, I'm going to decide, or we're going to do it by consensus.’ You can do that, but I've been a part of too many meetings where everybody's just trying to be politically correct in the culture. They're trying not to upset anybody, trying not to be forceful, where, if somebody is really passionate about something, and I'm trying to make the decision, I need to know that now you can be professional.
You don't start off by saying, ‘Hey, Joe, you're stupid. It's not what you do.’ You start off with saying, ‘Hey, you know, I'm representing the equipment out there. This has happened before. Here's the sequence of events. This is what we're seeing right now. I don't believe that a piece of equipment is going to be able to run more than 24 hours. That's my professional opinion. I'm an advisor. You're a decider.’ I can air it out in there. I don't air out my grievances and opinion and facts in the hallway or in my office behind closed doors after the decision is made. That's too rampant in manufacturing. It was when I retired six years ago, and I really worked hard to get the candor level up. And I see it a lot now. I mentor a few people, and it's just it appears to be worse. And that's why I brought up that a term inside of the article is it seems like, and I don't know a better way of saying this, it seems like people are so afraid of hurting people's feelings that they don't give all the facts to help people make better decisions.
PS: Yeah, I love the idea about the hallway conversation and that that is really people's true feelings and what they really think and what they should be saying in meetings but instead are saying in the hallway. Number one, why do you think that happens? Why are people generally intimidated to not bring up all of that to those meetings? And then how do you foster an environment to make that happen?
JK: Well, the intimidation is you want to be seen as a team player, and I 100% agree with that, but a team player that's not doing their job is not a team player. If you look at a football team, the guard is supposed to block for the passer. If he's not doing his job, that's not the expectation. Everybody's got a role to play, and are they playing it? When you're an advisor, a maintenance manager, maintenance planner, maintenance engineer, whatever you need to do your job. And that doesn't mean you throw things or get upset. It's your job to see the business different than everybody else. You have to convey that.
I think people are trying to be polite. They're trying not to hurt people's feelings. They're trying to be a team, but a team, you think of like national sports teams, they yell at each other a lot. I'm not saying to yell, but they argue. They yell. They get spirited but when they come out of the huddle, they come out after the halftime talk, they're a team. Okay? Just because there is spirited debate doesn't mean you're not part of an effective team, quite the opposite, in my opinion. So I think people are trying not to make waves. You're difficult to work with. This person got upset in the meeting with what you said. You have got to, as a team, make it safe for candor. So all the information is there. Why? Why do you want all the information? To make the best decision in this meeting. And I gave that example of a meeting. Those are the kind of things that happen every day. You’ve got a difference of opinion; you want the best decision made.
Maybe the decision is, ‘Hey, let's go ahead and ship, and this is what I would do. Let's go ahead and shut down the equipment right now. You said the temperature's rising. You've been watching this where, you know we can't optimize when this is going to fail. Let's shut it down right now. I the plant manager am going to call the customer and tell them, ‘Hey, we're going to be 24 hours late, but the long-term customer performance is going to be a lot better if we fix this equipment now. And maybe we have to run a shift into the weekend. But what is an alternative to we shut it down and miss a customer shipment, or we run and damage the equipment? Well, how can we have both? What's the solution? What would have to be true? Hey, maybe we can tell the customer that we're going to be a little bit late, we're going to be 24 hours late. And what does that mean? What can you do? How can we minimize that impact? Too many people act like being a member of the team means I bite my lip and I go with the team decision. And honestly, like I said, the leader sets the tone. And you could set the tone in your next meeting, set the tone to where we listen to everybody, not challenge them. And this has happened before, for me is saying, ‘Guys, let's not go out in the hallway. Let's not go out in the hallway and talk about why this is a wrong decision or right decision, or you have other input. That's cheating. Cheating is going in the hallway or going to the water cooler and not in sharing information you didn't share here. That's cheating in the culture that we're trying to create.’
PS: Great I like the suggestion that you also made in terms of the meetings and discussions that the manager doesn't give his opinion, his or her opinion first, to influence people or make them lean one way or the other, and you can hear everyone's ideas first.
And you've talked a lot about candor, which I think is important in any career, in any relationship, and but we're really also talking about this idea of spirited debate, which I think takes it one step further. And debate is really suggesting that there is a disagreement, and so you're trying to foster a environment where that's okay, and debate can be tricky when people don't agree and you don't want arguing or constant disagreement. So any thoughts about how you support a culture of debate without it getting ugly all the time, or how do you keep those debates productive?
JK: One of the things that really helps with debate is a clear understanding of how the decision is going to be made. Sometimes with debate, where it gets a little ugly, two people are arguing, and whoever wins the debate work, they're going to get their way quite often. As a plant manager, I'd come in and, I mean, this is from training, you'd come in and say, ‘Hey guys, I'm going to make this decision. I'm going to make this decision. I want everybody's opinion. I want everybody to weigh in. Everybody to give their vision from a different angle than I have. You guys are focused on the equipment, you're focused on quality, you're focused on safety.’ And when you say, ‘Hey, this is not about you winning or losing,’ a debate when it comes to winning and losing, I think that's where it gets tense and can get elevated.
