Seven leadership practices that transform manufacturing culture one week at a time

I have sat through more “culture change” rollouts than I can count. New slogans. Posters on the wall. Town halls full of good intentions. And then Monday morning arrives, the equipment behaves exactly as it did last week, and people go right back to doing what they’ve always done.

Culture never changed because of a speech. It changed because something different happened on a random Tuesday at 10:30 a.m.

After decades as a plant manager working through reliability problems and cultural inertia, I learned a hard truth: culture does not change year by year or initiative by initiative. It changes one experience at a time. And those experiences are created by small, repeatable leadership actions—not big ideas. Here are seven.

1. Are you better on Friday than Monday?

Here is the simplest test I know for whether culture is actually changing: are you better on Friday than you were on Monday? Not philosophically better, but operationally better.
Did something improve this week? Did a problem get permanently fixed? Did someone learn a new skill? Did a standard become clearer—or actually followed?

If nothing changed, then culture didn’t move. Improvement doesn’t require heroics. It requires evidence of learning. Week by week, those small improvements compound into belief that change is possible.

2. How much one-on-one time do you spend on the shop floor?

Reality does not live in conference rooms. It lives at the equipment, in workarounds, shortcuts, tribal knowledge, and frustration. The most effective leaders I’ve worked with spend intentional one-on-one time on the shop floor—not supervising, but learning. They ask questions. They listen. They coach in real time. This is how capability is built. It’s also how trust forms. When people see leaders genuinely interested in how work is actually done, not how it looks on a slide, engagement changes.

3. Culture changes one experience at a time

Culture is often described as beliefs and values. That’s backward. Beliefs are formed by experiences. Experiences shape beliefs. Beliefs drive actions. Actions create results.

If you want different beliefs about reliability, accountability, or safety, you must create different experiences. A leader’s response to bad news, a supported decision during a shutdown, or how a missed target is handled will be remembered far longer than any written policy.

4. Create a culture of experimentation

Most organizations claim they want innovation, yet they punish failure severely. That contradiction freezes learning. One of the most powerful tools I’ve used is the 90-day experiment. Small scope. Clear hypothesis. Fast feedback.

Experiments force learning. They reduce fear because no one is betting their career on a five-year plan. When an experiment fails (and some should) the leader’s reaction matters more than the result. Publicly thank the team for learning. Kill the experiment cleanly. Move on smarter.

This is how organizations learn without paralysis.

5. Make seeing reality a weekly requirement

If leaders are serious about improvement, getting out of the office cannot be optional. A minimum of four hours per week should be spent seeing reality—at the equipment, in maintenance planning meetings, during shift handovers. Not auditing. Observing and listening.

Something remarkable happens when leaders do this consistently: decisions change. Capital requests get sharper. Preventive maintenance becomes realistic. Priorities align with actual constraints instead of assumptions.

Awareness reshapes behavior.

6. Make the tough personnel decisions

One of the hardest jobs of leadership is dealing with poor performance.

“A” players are easy to manage. “B” players are just solid. “F” players are dealt with quickly. “C” players are the real challenge.

They do some things well, but they miss by-whens, produce inconsistent quality, and quietly drain the energy out of the team. Left in place, they normalize mediocrity for the entire organization.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: by the time you realize a person needs to be removed or upgraded, the entire organization already knows. And now they are judging you, not the employee, for poor performance as a leader.

Addressing “C” players is one of the fastest cultural upgrades a leader can make. When people see standards enforced fairly, trust accelerates, and results follow quickly.

7. What you tolerate becomes the culture

Culture is not what you say you value. It is what you allow to continue. Examples: Late preventive maintenance. Incomplete job plans. Unsafe shortcuts. Excuses disguised as explanations. Every tolerated deviation teaches the organization what really matters.
This is where leadership discipline must show up. Every leader and every process owner must routinely audit standard work against reality on the shop floor. Not once. Not annually. Continuously. You inspect what you expect.

Without inspection, drift is guaranteed. Standards slowly erode, not because people are careless, but because work is complex and pressure is real. Auditing is not about blame. It is about protecting the system from decay.

When leaders consistently close the gap between standard work and reality, credibility grows. When they don’t, standards become suggestions, and so does culture.

Small actions, relentless consistency

Culture is not built by thinking bigger. It is built by acting smaller, over and over again.
Every conversation is training. Every reaction is remembered. Every week is an opportunity to improve or to drift.

If someone walked your facility on Friday, what would be visibly different than Monday? And more importantly, what did you personally do to make that change happen?

That is leadership in action.