1. Emergency work is running the plant.

Kuhn didn't hesitate when identifying the biggest culture killer. Unplanned or emergency work. "This consumes an organization like a cancer," he said.
When every breakdown becomes an immediate crisis, they consistently override all other priorities.

"You come into work. You've got all these plans that you want to get done," Kuhn explained. "Some equipment breaks, and all of a sudden you drop everything, and it's the emergency of the day."

When organizations continually sacrifice planned maintenance to respond to urgent requests, reliability efforts eventually collapse under the weight of reactive work.

2. Cost cutting becomes more important than reliability.

The second major warning sign is a leadership team focused on reducing maintenance spending rather than eliminating waste. Kuhn described the familiar scenario: maintenance departments are told to cut budgets by 10%, 15%, or 20% without regard for the consequences.

"This is stopping the PdM, stopping work on broken equipment, stopping lubrication," he said. "'Hey, let's just cancel overtime. Cancel all overtime,' regardless of the situation."

Of that kind of culture and money management, Kuhn said: "That is not a reliability culture. That's a cost-cutting culture."

3. Leaders stop actively sponsoring reliability.

For Kuhn, reliability initiatives succeed only when leaders consistently talk about them, defend them, and reinforce their importance.

He described sponsorship as leaders discussing planned work, lubrication programs, problem-solving efforts, maintenance successes, and the importance of taking scheduled outages even when production pressure is high.

"This is not an email," Kuhn said. "It's not an email. This is active talking on the floor and in your meetings."

A reliability culture becomes fragile when leadership support exists only in presentations and slogans rather than daily actions.

4. Nobody connects maintenance activities to business results.

We’ve heard this before on Ask a Plant Manager because it is a topic Kuhn is passionate about, but successful maintenance often becomes invisible. "If you don't have a failure, nobody knows about it," he said. "Nobody knows about the failures you're not having."

That means leaders must continually explain why maintenance activities matter.

If a lubrication initiative leads to fewer gearbox failures, people need to hear about it. If precision alignment reduces breakdowns, leaders should communicate the results.

As Kuhn put it, management must keep "telling people the scoreboard."

5. Accountability is optional.

Strong reliability cultures require people to follow through on commitments.

Kuhn offered simple examples:

"Hey, if you said you were going to do a shaft alignment, did you do it?"

"You said you were going to have an outage on Wednesday for eight hours—did you have it, or was there an excuse?"

He added, "There's always an excuse to do the wrong thing."

Whether it's canceled outages, incomplete preventive maintenance tasks, or unfulfilled commitments, reliability starts to deteriorate when accountability becomes optional.

6. Leaders manage from conference rooms instead of the shop floor.

This may be one of Kuhn's strongest belief. "People managed by KPIs in a conference room—it's catastrophic to a reliability effort." Instead, Kuhn always advocates for a “go-and-see” culture, where management spends time on the shop floor.

One of the easiest ways to evaluate a culture is to simply look around the facility.

"When I go on the shop floor, if I don't run into planners, engineers, technical assistants, safety people—you don't have a culture of go-and-see," Kuhn said.

Here’s another simple test: "If it's 9 o'clock in the morning and they started work at 7 o'clock and they're wearing their street shoes, you don't have a culture of going to the floor," Kuhn said.

Leaders cannot understand reliability problems from reports alone. They have to spend time where the work is happening.

7. The plant shows visible signs of chaos.

If the maintenance shop has tools scattered across the floor, overflowing trash cans, leaking equipment, and generally poor equipment condition, reliability problems reveal themselves without a word. "This isn't about cleaning up," Kuhn explained.

Instead, these conditions often indicate that employees are trapped in a cycle of firefighting and reactive work.

"So you can see there's a culture of chaos, instead of a culture of planning," Kuhn said.

Experienced reliability leaders often develop an eye for these warning signs simply by observing the condition of the facility.

8. Maintenance crews spend more time waiting and searching than working.

Kuhn often looks for signs that jobs are poorly planned. "If I walk out to a job and there are five people assigned to the job, and one person is working—or zero people are working—and everybody's scratching their heads, did you plan that job?"

He shared a story about a plant manager who complained that maintenance workers spent all day driving around on scooters.

After observing the situation, Kuhn discovered the real problem. "Do you know what they're doing?" he asked. "They're looking for parts. They're looking for tools. Those jobs aren't planned."

Whether workers are waiting on parts, searching for tools, waiting on production, or trying to find the resources needed to do their jobs, these delays are usually symptoms of weak planning processes rather than poor work ethic.

9. Equipment that should be running isn't running.

Some reliability problems are impossible to hide. "Production equipment not running—that's another telltale sign," Kuhn said.
Idle equipment is often the visible result of deeper planning, maintenance, scheduling, and operational problems that have gone unresolved.

10. Operations isn't leading reliability—and management blames the craftspeople.

Kuhn strongly believes operations should lead reliability, which is why he immediately notices when operations is absent from maintenance planning. "I will go into a maintenance planning meeting at a plant, and there won't be a single operations person there," Kuhn said.

To him, that's a warning sign that reliability is being treated as maintenance's responsibility rather than a shared business objective.

"Operations leads reliability," he said. "Operations leads the maintenance planning meeting." 

More importantly, Kuhn believes leaders often focus blame in the wrong place when reliability suffers. "If you're blaming the craftspeople, I've never seen that be accurate. Never," he said.

Could workforce issues contribute to problems occasionally? Certainly. But Kuhn argues they rarely belong near the top of the list. "It may be number 20," he said, "but it's not in the top five."

And that reinforces the central message of his entire argument: "The big behaviors that destroy reliability culture are all management."

The key to sustaining a reliability culture

Starting a reliability initiative is one thing. Keeping it alive is another. "It's easy to get a program like reliability and maintenance started," Kuhn said. "Sustaining it when other new priorities come at you is the hard thing."

His solution is consistent leadership involvement and continuous auditing. As a plant manager, Kuhn scheduled four hours every week specifically for shop-floor observation. "You've got to audit," he said. "This means time on the shop floor."

Reliability culture, in his view, isn't built in a conference room. It starts when leaders put on their work boots, and go see the work for themselves.