Latest / The Manufacturing Blueprint / 9. Stop Rewarding Firefighting: How to Build a Manufacturing Culture That Prevents Fires

Transcript

9. Stop Rewarding Firefighting: How to Build a Manufacturing Culture That Prevents Fires · The Manufacturing Blueprint

• speaker-0: had a thought, tomorrow, what I want you to do, Jason, go out onto your floor and give a big shout out to Jimmy. Jimmy speaker-1: J Jimmy got hit by a bus. speaker-0: We need to find someone else's name. Let's call him Steve, right? So tomorrow you're gonna go into the floor and say, Everybody stop. I want a big shout out to s to Gary who's working on machine four and there's been nothing wrong with machine four for a week. Machine four. Well done, Gary, right? speaker-1: Good job, Gary. Good job. No, that's that's a great speaker-0: But that's the boring shout out, right? If you've got an employee there and they're just working away, standard, they're giving you your nine to five but you have no issues. The quality's good, the machine's running good, there's been no downtime. I mean, we need to give them a boring shout out, right? And celebrate it. Celebrate the celebrate the boring, right? Celebrate the boring. speaker-1: Yeah. Welcome to the Manufacturing Blueprint. This is the show where manufacturing leaders, shop owners, and operators come to sharpen their thinking, strengthen their teams, and improve the way work gets done. From leadership and culture to systems, strategy, and execution, we break down the blueprint used to build high performing manufacturing organizations. No fluff, just straight talk and real conversations, real lessons and real results. Here's your host, Jason Day. Hey guys. Welcome to the Manufacturing Blueprint. My name is Jason Davis and I am here with my great friend Paul Barnes. In today's show, we're talking about leadership, operational discipline, and what it actually takes to build a strong manufacturing organization. If you're enjoying the show, make sure you follow or subscribe on your favorite platform, whether that's Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen. And if the show brings you value, A quick rating and review really helps us reach more people in the manufacturing community. So today we're talking about one of the most common traps in manufacturing leadership, and that is rewarding firefighting instead of preventing the fire. So we know like every great manufacturing operation has that one person, right? That person who stays late, the one who fixes the schedule, the one who catches that mistake right before it ships. And we are grateful for them. And maybe that's even you. I know that I've been guilty of this in the past, but here's the uncomfortable question that I want to ask everybody. Why does your system require saving? When your factory consistently needs a hero, it usually means that your systems or your leadership aren't protecting your people. Firefighting may feel productive, but real leadership is the prevention. Manufacturing maturity isn't measured by how well you respond to a crisis. It should be measured by how rarely a crisis happens. If we consistently reward reaction over prevention, we are quietly building a culture of instability. So Paul, what do you think about in your experience, why does firefighting feel so good? speaker-0: Well, that was a great introduction for me, considering I feel like I've been a firefighter for seventeen years. speaker-1: We all have. We all have. Like I mean speaker-0: We all have right. And whenever you're in a position of responsibility, whether you're owner or a manager or a supervisor, when you got that responsibility, the time comes where you have to just get stuff done, right? And and and that's that's it. Why do we do it? I don't know. Because we're we're crazy, we we we're looking for kicks. But all joking aside, right, ⁓ it's part of business. We have to get stuff out. speaker-1: Right. speaker-0: door. Like I would say I've lost track of the number of times, whether that's month end, year end, quarter end, maybe it doesn't matter for you guys, but you've got a a customer delivery to make. ⁓ yeah. You don't go home until you get it out the door, right? ⁓ yeah. ⁓ like I've seen us working around the clock. Literally I've been in there thirty six hours. Right. You're bringing in pizzas for the guys. All the other guys, right? They go home, they say speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Bye guys, it's the weekend, it's five o'clock, I'm clocking out, right? And then what do you do? You get the good old faithful, the same old crew, right? Six guys that come together. Yep. You turn up the radio, everybody's stuck into it, and you bring in a little bit of food and a few drinks come out and you know what? You knuckle down and you stay there all night and you get it out the door. speaker-1: Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, there there are times that that definitely happens. And I think we've all been there, especially anybody that's been in a business a number of years, you know, you've had those experiences. And sometimes those aren't because of anything you've done. ⁓ you know, sometimes it's because your customer might make a change or they adjust a deadline, or maybe you even had a vendor that didn't supply a product that they needed. So that just left you with no other options. But I think that sometimes that urgency it creates this like adrenaline rush too, you know? It's like you've got this like moment of adrenaline, you've got this project that you're trying to wrap up and then you've got the euphoria of getting it complete and seeing it you know, seeing everything come to the end and making it happen. I mean, there's like this whole emotional roller coaster that that you're on with that. speaker-0: Enjoy that or d does it just stress you out and you can't wait for it to be over? speaker-1: You know, ⁓ I'm maybe a little bit mixed. I mean, obviously, I would say one of the things that I struggle with is as a leader, okay, my guys on the floor or let's say in my engineering team, they start a project and they see it finish, right? There is something that's good about starting and finishing. You know, the same thing with the parts on the floor. They set up a machine, they finish a cycle, they've got a tangible item, right? I will say one thing that I feel like is I'm always starting things and never finishing things. So I don't ever get that satisfaction of seeing things completed in the sense of the business is constantly growing. Like I don't wanna see the end of the business, right? It's a completely different feel for me because I'm I'm I'm constantly moving, evolving and moving forward and the business is changing, but we I never get that completion. on a lot of things. Maybe it's handed off to somebody else and they get the completion and I'm I'm always starting and speaker-0: longer I've been in leadership, the more I've hated the that feeling, right? Because sometimes it's out of your own control. But I know in my younger days when I was in there, either as a team lead or a supervisor, I mean I used to love it, right? You have a truck sitting outside, that truck maybe has to leave at four PM, it has to be at the dock for six, right? And it's got other product on board, but you're trying to get the last of the product loaded, right? And can you get it on or not? And that truck leaves whether you're done or not. speaker-1: No matter what, right. speaker-0: And I used to love that. I used to thrive on it, right? And I guess in my younger days that's why I was successful because I could we could get stuff done, but speaker-1: Yeah. Well the speaker-0: Live and depend and run your business on that, right? And that's what we're going to talk about tonight. But but there's a certain amount of adrenaline, there's a certain amount of feel-good factor, and there's a certain percentage of your workforce that absolutely love it. speaker-1: Well, that chaos feels important. Like you feel like, yeah, like really important. And and making that save is dramatic. You know, we we end up like re like I said earlier, that we're we're re rewarding those firefighters. And I know we'll touch on that in a little bit, but you know, it's one of those things, having that that, you know, calm doesn't get you applause, right? But calm does build margin, right? And ultimately that's what that's what we want to get to. speaker-0: ⁓ I find ⁓ that those people, those loyal people that you have, they're they're your empathetic people in the business, right? They're the people that feel responsible, even if it's not their job, they want to help you out as and help your business. They're the ones that see the gap physically and they have like an emotional attachment to it. They fear that if they don't do it, no one will. And people carry some of that responsibility and they can carry it Positively, but they can also do it negatively too, right? It can burn out and so on. But you have a certain amount of people who will love to do that. And for them it also gives them a bit of an identity, right? They can be the hero. There's people like that with a little bit of an ego that like to be the last guy there. yeah. Be the guy to switch off the lights when they go home or to shut the door. It they like the pat in the back job and they like that recognition. And you know what? speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: That's so okay too within reason. But again, we can't we can't forever live our business like that. speaker-1: Yeah. Well, and I mean that kind of goes into everybody's personalities. I know there's there's multi everybody has, you know, different traits and one of the traits I think that people have is, you know, when when you talk about words of affirmation, that's really important to some people. And, you know, giving them the words of like attaboy, way to go, great job, like that means the world to them. And other people, maybe they are gifts, like gifts make a big difference to them. So like that pizza or an extra bonus check or a little extra cash, that goes a long way with them. And so it's, you know, understanding and figuring that not everybody responds the same way. And some people are doing things, you know, they may not really want to do it, but they know like if I do this, I'm gonna get praise from it. And that's what ultimately is driving them to to to do that. speaker-0: I used I used to ⁓ enjoy the the newness of it, right? It's like process boredom. You're doing what you normally do, and then a crisis, right? And everyone goes and there's a new thing and you have to maybe we're gonna come and talk to that later about the causes of these things, but generally you have to work around something, right? There's a problem, there's a gap in your process. And for me it's about process boredom, right? It was it was it was not necessarily the recognition, but it was just To do something different, right? It was the thrill of the thrill of doing it. But you're right. Everyone's motivated by different ways. And I I know people and I've seen people in my team that just would lack trust and so would be even slow to let other people come and do it. They think that they're the person that can do it. And they have to be the one to do it. And sometimes that also hurts the business, right? Because a person becomes stretched. speaker-1: Yeah. And I think that can even that can even play into ⁓ leaders. I think that plays into leaders not wanting to give some of their responsibilities away. I think that plays into floor personnel where, you know, somebody's ⁓ maybe they're less talented, even though they want to learn. I have seen this that situation happen in my business years ago. I had an individual, ⁓ let's call him Jimmy, and Jimmy was at work every single day. Jimmy had the best Attitude, but Jimmy wasn't an exceptional machinist. Jimmy was getting mentored by other people in the shop, and they recognized that Jimmy didn't have the highest skill level. And so it was kind of like they they kind of like kept Jimmy from doing more because they were like, well, Jimmy can't do it. Jimmy can't do it. Don't give him that. Jimmy can't do it. But what Jimmy really needed was to be taught and to be brought along. Now, he might have ended up You know, in the end, Jimmy ended up being a middle of the road operator, but that's completely fine because that was what he was happy doing. He didn't have to be the most exceptional machinist in our f on our floor. Jimmy was an exceptional operator, always at work, always had a great attitude, and he was a model employee. So in the end You know, I think that's the other part. I mean, I know we're getting a little bit off subject, but we've got to have stages. We've got to have all different stages of people. We've got to have have the people that we're going to depend on for these things and we've got to have people that are going to show up and help when we need ⁓ So I think while it is important to have firefighters and it is important to have people that we trust and we depend on, there are gonna be times that we have to do some of that because of what our customer requests are or because of maybe a situation a vendor puts us in. But what we want to make sure that we avoid is putting ourselves into a firefighting situation because of our own systems. speaker-0: Hey everybody, what do you think of when I say OTD? Well, in making chips, we've got lots of acronyms to deal with, but OTD is on-time delivery. On-time delivery is part of Hill's mission. Deliver quality parts on time every time. When I was shopping for an ERP system, I was looking for something that would ensure that we do that on a regular basis. Delivering jobs on time was something we struggled with, and I know that most shops struggle with. I think I saw recently that 70% of shops struggle with. Delivering parts on time. So the best decision I made in that, enter Pro Shop. Did you know that many of ProShop's customers quickly experience 95% or better on-time delivery rates with their customers? And now ProShop has a guide to help all shops, whether you're using Pro Shop or not, visit ProShoperP.com slash 95. Again, that's ProShop ERP slash 95 to get your copy today. speaker-1: So yeah, so like I think we kind of transition to that next part. So thinking about the the first section that, you know, the calm doesn't always get the applause, but the calm helps build the margin. So then we want to identify what the next step is is what does firefighting look like in manufacturing? Right. So I think we kind of got cause and effect here. So the effects and the things we see are maybe we're dealing with ⁓ weekly material expedites, maybe we're dealing with overtime to have to recover our schedules or we have to reshuffle our schedules. We're constantly moving things around on the floor, stopping somebody from doing this and making sure they're doing that. Well maybe getting caught in reworks because we're we're catching things at final inspection when they should have been manufactured properly the first time. ⁓ engineering involvement and having to to reengineer things or you know, you've got a supervisor that's constantly having to reprioritize things mid shift. I think those are all effects of the thing and the things we see and what it firefighting ends up looking like in manufacturing. But one of the things I want us to talk about is what are those causes and how do we identify those causes and and then work to eliminate those ⁓ in our shops or in our manufacturing facilities. Have you got have you got any examples of of things that you've identified as causes for these types of things? speaker-0: I've seen it before that generally we become heavily reliant on one or two people, particularly for difficult processes. Sometimes you might have ⁓ a machine setup that maybe doesn't happen very often. Maybe it's the difficult setup. Takes a long time. It's very technical. And there's maybe only one or two experienced guys that can do this, right? Sure. Machine whisperers, right? speaker-1: ⁓ Yeah, yes. speaker-0: Nobody else can do it. Nobody else can seem to get right, but they can just get it exactly right, what it needs to be right within the process. And those are the people that you rely on and those are the people that you're gonna miss if something happens to them. Then you've got those workaround kings, right? The work around so that's the employee he knows all the unofficial shortcuts. Not not breaking any rules, they're not breaking any cardinal rules, any quality processes. But they have all the tribal knowledge. They have all the go to things, right? They're able to bypass the the faulty systems. If there's delays, they know how to keep production moving. Yeah. ⁓ and it's those sometimes those undocumented processes that are heavily people reliant. They're the places that you're gonna find that you end up firefighting the most. And then you have the emergency firefighter, right? The emergency firefighter who's who's the manager who spends ninety percent of their day reacting to crises rather than doing what they should be doing in a proactive manufacturing environment. Right. They're whether they're rerouting shipments, reallocating labor because planning and processes failed. You have those people and they're in those jobs because they're the people that make the business tick. speaker-1: You really touched on a good point, especially in manufacturing and especially in a machine shop like we have, having individuals that we're obviously gonna have some people at that are better at some machines than others. It's really important that we have operators and we have set up personnel and machinists that can set up multiple machines, multiple types of machines, multiple controls. That's one of the things that we work to making sure that we have that coverage. Whether somebody's out sick or something happens with their family and they can't be there. So that way you're not tied down to one person being able to do it. But I think the other part, and this is the one that's really difficult to get to, is the documentation, right? Making sure you have a system and a way of documenting that information. So that way, ⁓ it's it's kind of foolproof. If you're not here, maybe somebody else might not. Ma the other person might not do it as fast as you would have, but they could still get it accomplished, right? The set of instructions are there, the set of parameters are there. We've got that documented, that process, so we know and we could open up the document, we can walk through that step by step, do this, this, this, this, and this, and we can accomplish it. Again, it might take a little bit longer, but we can still get it done. But that is so hard to do because we're not we're not wired I think to do that. We're wired to just get the job done, right? So often it's like, I want it done as fast as possible. Like don't take an hour and a half if it takes an hour. Well, if I take an hour and a half, I'm starting to do my documentation and if something does happen, then it will be there for you. But so often we just we're just better off. Like, just go get it done and we'll fight that fire later. speaker-0: Sometimes we we'd miss those standard operating procedures just because everyone knows what to do. Everyone just knows what to do. Mm-hmm. Until that person leaves the business. Right. And then that's when you realize, ⁓ wait, he always done that. How else is supposed to be done? And then that's when you start introducing the randomness into your business. Or it's that vacation anxiety, right? Vacation anxiety. I've seen production lines and you've got a really difficult speaker-1: Right. Yeah. speaker-0: piece of the production and you've got these little knack points and you have to whenever you're putting parts on you have to make sure that it's centered this way or angled that way. There's these guys and they're just like craftsmen and they just know how it goes together. And you have that think vacation anxiety and you're like, ⁓ no, he takes two weeks off and I know it's coming, right? He's gonna go on vacation for two weeks and what am I gonna do? Yeah. Because and that's the dread you have, right? But You've when you've the same people, you've got you don't have the problems, but at the end or just new people, that's when the problems resurfaced. speaker-1: Right. Well, and if you take a different individual and bring them over and let that person, that first person, person A train person B, you're slowing down production. You're not getting out the hundred pieces that you need today. You're only getting out eighty, but you're protecting yourself in the long run. So I I like what you do. That's right, Jimmy, that's right. But I like to call that bus proof, right? It's buff bus proof because if person A gets hit by a bus speaker-0: Jimmy. speaker-1: person B needs to be able to step in and No we No we don't want Jimmy. Jimmy J we want Jimmy to not get hit by a bus. ⁓ maybe we want everyone to be smart enough to not get hit by a bus, but ⁓ I don't know. speaker-0: Business can become like a glorified crisis management thing where we only ever give praise and recognition or pats on the back for last minute sales rather than teams that can just achieve with zero incidence, with stable processes, right? They're the they're the teams that don't get the recognition because they fly under the radar. speaker-1: Well, I think that's the trap that that leadership falls into is they unintentionally reward firefighting, right? And that is by publicly praising the last minute save, right? Or ⁓ not taking like I I think the other part is, you know what, we're gonna need those sometimes, but after the whole process is over and we had that last minute save, okay, maybe there is some thank you for that. But then we've got to take the next step. We've got to look at the root cause of it. We've got to take that next step and and do some follow-up on the corrective actions. ⁓ because if we allow those things to continue, then we're just right back where we are. We're rewarding that inconsistency. We're praising that person who pulled us out of a jam. And so we just fall into that leadership trap and that loop of. Praising the individual that's doing an amazing job. And they are, they they deserve it, but we don't want to get caught in that long term cycle. speaker-0: Yeah. Sometimes you're just so glad to see the back of a job, right? You shut the door late at night and you're just like, ⁓ I never want to think about that again and you move on because you don't right, because it's just hurt you for weeks over the businesses. It's just struggled for days and days and you're worn out and you're exhausted and the team are tired and you just move on. speaker-1: My wife and I we run a women's ministry and we just had an event actually last weekend and it is a very, very large event that we put on and the there we have a amazing team of volunteers. There's about ten or twelve just really core team members. And one of the things that we've started doing after this after our events is we will go to dinner that evening and we will just enjoy ourselves. We'll laugh, we'll cut up, we'll tell stories about great things that happened through the day, and we'll just have a time of positive reflection. Then the next morning, nine AM, we get up and that is when we wash over all the things that went wrong. Right. And we talk about, okay, we what are the things that we can improve for the next one? What are the things that we can change for the next one? So I think that's something that we can put into our businesses as well. Like Yeah, like you're exhausted, you've just finished this thirty-six hour shift and you know, you're you're you've been living on pizza and and sugar for the last two days. You're not in a any position to go back and determine what was wrong or what was what needs to be fixed. But what you have to make sure you do is the next day or the next week, once you've been able to kind of recoup. now start to look at, okay, what happened in my system that allowed me to get to this point, right? Was it something that, you know, is there a step that we're not completing that's not pushing this job to my purchasing group fast enough so they have enough time to get the material here? Or it's not going through engineering at the right pace so that quality has time to finish it. I know I've got we've got some businesses that we work with and they're prototype, like they do a lot of testing and inside of that, the engine you know, if they have a a twenty week program, if they have a if they have twenty weeks allotted and it's supposed to be, you know, ten weeks for engineering and two weeks for purchasing and whatever, you know, you fill the whole thing out. Well, the next thing you know, engineering ends up taking eighteen weeks of the whole process. And then by the time it gets ordered, it l leaves the manufacturer like a week to do the ⁓ you know, a ton of work. And so, you know, in in that moment we just gotta get it done. But then we gotta take that step to go back and like let's make changes so that way we don't get stuck doing this over and over and over again. But we we just so often we don't. We just keep doing what feels normal. Revenue is great, but if you don't understand the numbers behind your business, growth can get expensive fast. On Buy the Numbers, Mike Payne digs into the financial side of manufacturing, cash flow, KPIs, capital investments, acquisitions, profitability, and building business value. If you want to make better decisions with your money, check out Buy the Numbers Podcast, part of the Making Chips Podcast Network. So we've talked about why firefighting feels good. We've talked about what it looks like in our manufacturing. We've talked about the leadership trap. Let's talk about the hidden costs that we deal with in firefighting. So I think one of the biggest things I think is happens is from an individual standpoint is a burnout, right? Because you're just constantly under pressure. You're constantly having to like put so much effort into it. But you just can't sustain that for long periods of time. So that's something that we really gotta be aware of and we gotta protect against. speaker-0: Yeah, and whether that's you or your employees. I I've seen it in both where the manager tries to carry it so much that you just lose them, right? You high turnover of staff or your employees and you end up in like a hostage situation. Yeah. You have to negotiate with your employee to try and keep them there because you're too scared of losing them, right? You're burning them out. You know you're burning them out and you're trying to give them time off, but you can't afford to give them time off. You're right. And you and you become in this really speaker-1: Right, right. speaker-0: difficult position where you're just relying on someone and you're kind of as a business owner or as a manager you're kind of held hostage because you really need the skills that you can't seem to cascade. And then it also puts you at a succession risk because at some point they will leave. Right. And how do you replace those guys? Those people that you rely on, right? They're your A players. And A players are hard to find and in my opinion getting harder and speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and then that that leads to a process inconsistency because once they transition, if you lose one of those eight players, now you're processed. If you don't have it documented properly. So so A to begin with, you probably didn't have it documented properly to begin with. Now that they've left, you're gonna have a much more inconsistent process because there wasn't a documentation. These things kind of just start to to to snowball on one another 'cause you're relying on that tribal knowledge. speaker-0: I think it's like a patchwork maintenance, right? That's what I I kind of thought about here. It's like instead of fixing the root cause of a machine failure, the hero kind of applies like a band-aid, right? And it gets the line moving, it fixes it for now, and then we try and move on. But over time we're compounding that, right? The temporary patches accumulate and the system then becomes so complex and fragile, then even the hero can't do it anymore. As your business continues to grow. speaker-1: Right. speaker-0: You can't multiply your heroes and what happens is it it becomes so expensive and so burdensome it eventually breaks down, it eventually falls over and your business is at risk. speaker-1: Yeah. Well, and in addition to that, not only the business at risk, I mean, if you want to scale that business and grow, like you you you can't grow more than what that one person can take on. And and I have definitely experienced that in the past where it just feels like, you know, we're doing things right and you're growing, and then you just hit this plateau. And and I think that's that's one thing that I have found is once you get And and it's different for every organization, right? Every organization's gonna be a little bit different. But you're gonna get to a point where things are pretty easy, right? It's well, I I say easy, maybe they're not easy, but it's you know, they're they're they feel stable, right? You feel profitable and you're moving in the right direction. But as that grows, you've got to be able to bring other people into the fold. You got to be able to pass off some of those responsibilities. You've got to have well documented processes so that way other people can take responsibilities and you can grow that organization. Because if you're just relying on that one or two people to like solve everything, there's only so much capacity they have. They only have so many hours in a day. They only have so much time to firefight. And if you keep putting them under pressure, they're going to wear out. Like that's just no doubt about it. So ⁓ so so you're right. That's that's definitely one of those speaker-0: I think other team members I I have seen instances where other team members will actually stop trying to solve problems and they will leave it to the heroes because they know the heroes will step in. And that's quite dangerous too because y your your middle of the road players, your B players don't strengthen, right? They will they will just pass the ball off to your A player and l and let him take and take the shot and that's that's not good. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: And then as you said, if you're as you're growing your business, it's hard to hire more superhumans, right? And your onboarding time goes up. And what happens if you end up paying more in wages, right? Employees more because you really want to keep those people because they know how to run your business. It's it's not a documented process. You just can't hire someone on a standard wage that works for across all your employees and just give them a standard operating procedure and let them perform a task. You end up paying a premium to your team because they know how to run your business. You can't speaker-1: Well, I'll tell you here's another issue that I think you run into is if you have that B player or that C player who's always going to the A player or they've they that A player has earned that reputation because they've been a good firefighter. They've been somebody who could solve problems. And I think we fall into the trap of I don't know the answer and I'm just gonna go ask that person instead of trying to figure it out on myself on my own. So now that A player is having to answer questions, that the other person needs to work out and figure out on their own. Like even if it takes a few extra minutes, like don't rely on that manager or the that supervisor to answer every single question. Like I have been in the situations where I want people, I know as humans, we're not always going to get things right. We are going to make mistakes. I have made my fair share of mistakes. But What I'm looking for in individuals is I'm looking for somebody who will at least make an educated decision and have some action. Right. If even if it's the wrong decision that can happen, at least you made a decision and you started walking that direction or you started running that direction and you're not walking into my office saying, Hey, ⁓ you know, we're looking at paper towels and we can get red or we can get blue or we can get green, right? I don't care. I don't care what color they are, like who cares? Just make a decision and move on, right? And so I think we get but we get caught in that trap where that that person who is in charge, that firefighter, that person who's always belling everybody else, next thing you know, now they're just answering simple questions that don't matter. So speaker-0: And what you're doing is you're making that firefighter then become inefficient, right? 'Cause they're going everyone else is becoming lazier. This firefighter who's who's doing a really good job is then being distracted from what he should be doing and which being speaker-1: Everybody's coming down. speaker-0: And then and then what happens is everybody looks to him as a leader. Mm-hmm. Then what's the next step? We promote the firefighter, right? And just because you're a good firefighter doesn't mean you should be a good manager. Maybe we're gonna get there and talk about that later, right? But to avo to avoid to avoid the fires is better than to be a good firefighter, right? And that's the point. speaker-1: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I agree with that. I agree with that. And I think that takes us into our our last segment, ⁓ which is really what do we want to reward instead? Right. So we've we figured out like what it looks like in the manufacturing, we figured out what the leadership trap is, what our hidden cost is. So how do we change that? How do we recognize and reinforce the standardized work, the clear communication? We want to avoid those last minute changes. ⁓ we want to have processes that prevent confusion. ⁓ we want to have an early identification of risks. So let's talk about maybe some of the things that we can that we can walk through to help put us in a situation for success. One of the things that I see as a a real big improvement is when we started looking at our new jobs, we s we took a whole new approach to new work, right? So once speaker-0: That's the speaker-1: our work comes in, we've got a lot of processes that it has to go through. It has to go through quality, ⁓ for we we need to review it from a quality aspect. Can we inspect it? How are we going to inspect it? Create a plan for that. We've got to go through engineering, ⁓ look at how we're gonna hold it, fixture it, ⁓ cut the parts, those types of things. You know, all of these processes happen in the background when the old days was we just, you know, you get a job and you just start making it and we didn't really evaluate any of the risks that were involved with it. We didn't we didn't pay attention to maybe what gauges we might need or special tools. So then we get started, it hits the floor and it's like, ⁓ well, we forgot to order this certain plug gauge that we didn't already have. So now we're like trying to call around and get a plug gauge and then, you know, ⁓ well we need this special cutter. And so we have taken the steps to to go through a very detailed process of walking through new parts. So that way we make sure that we're prepared. When they hit the floor, we're able to work at getting a a good part the first time around. Do we always succeed at that? Absolutely not. We we have our struggles. I mean manufacturing is gonna have your struggles and there's going to be curveballs thrown at us. But we really want to try to standardize that work up front and identify those risks early so we can mitigate them. I know that you've probably got situations that you've dealt with the exact same type of thing, but what do you see on your side? speaker-0: I had loads of ideas there just when you were talking, but if I wanna talk specifically about a very process driven methodology for your business, we should be looking at process maturity models, right? So being able to document here's all our processes and then we should score speaker-1: Let's talk about that. What what is the talk talk me through this this model of documenting and scoring them? speaker-0: You're gonna put me on the spot. speaker-1: I ⁓ speaker-0: It it'll it can depend on the level that you want to get into as a business because you could go down and and you could get into this any depth you want. But if you haven't got this, document your high level processes. Talk about your risks, right? You're looking at causes, effects, and risks and score them and then score them. So have you got standard work? What is what's the risks that can go wrong with it? In the event of a failure, what should you do? And build yourself a business continuity plan around speaker-1: Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, so you're kind of thinking like what's the the quadrant where it's like the likelihood of it happening and then if it happens, is it catastrophic? The likelihood of we've we've seen this before where ⁓ it's like a scale of one to ten, it's like a box where or may maybe it's like one to four, but it's like the likelihood of a failure happening, then it is if it happens, what is the severity of the defect? ⁓ is it scrap part or is it death? Like, you know, so it's so it's it's like this mixture of speaker-0: Then but then score it. What do you want from your processes, right? You need to understand what does good look like. Have you got your standard operating procedures? Is there standard work? What's your inputs, right? If you're talking about your PSYOP processes, have you got that documented for each process and h what's the health of that? Is that good or is it not good, right? Have you got your standard operating procedures or not? And then target what is your biggest risks to your company first. And what you're trying to do is identify all those potential fires. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: And then tackle them on a priority basis. What's your biggest risk to the business? Yeah. Now that's very technical, but I think there's simple things that we can do as well to tackle this, right? And sometimes we're guilty of it. Of course. We talked earlier about how we celebrate when we put out the fires, but how do we celebrate those boring days when nothing happens? speaker-1: Court. Yeah. No, that's that's it. That's that's that's really a big part of it because, you know, I have gone through times where we are just super busy and I feel like we are firefighting. Then we make adjustments and I look at the schedule and the schedule's green and we're like we're really like in that sweet spot where we're a couple weeks ahead of the schedule and I'm I'm like inside I'm getting uncomfortable. I'm like freaking out a little bit 'cause Like things are going right. And so I'm like, Who what's wrong? Why so I'm instantly like, Why are we why are we doing good? Like, why aren't they going right? speaker-0: Let's call that the green streak, right? The green streak bonus is gonna come out from now on. We're gonna track how many days have we been green, how many days have we had our number. And whenever we break that record for the number of green days, that's the day we're getting the pizza, right? Not the day that we all work late, right? How do we celebrate being good? And sometimes that goes against our nature, right? speaker-1: We're doing something wrong. Yeah. It does. It does. Because and I think it's like it's the whole like saving for a rainy day thing, right? There's so there I mean, that's not that's not in our nature to like really save for a rainy day. There it is in some people for sure. I'm I'm definitely one of those that that kind of works for me. But it takes time. And when I was hearing you talk about, you know, documenting your risk. I mean, documenting it and creating your processes and and looking and scoring, like those things take time. They take time to do. And if we're ⁓ if we're in a situation where we're up against the wall on scheduling, ⁓ where you know, we're already in a tight situation with time, I think the reason why we don't do it is not because we don't feel value in it, but because it's like, okay, my options are I can go document and try to prepare this and prevent this from happening again in the future, or I can go make that next job and ship it to my customer and get paid immediately. Right, right. Like it's it's that whole paym pay me now or pay me later type thing. speaker-0: It's all about how you celebrate it, right? Because you could celebrate that firefighter and getting that out the door, but what about your documentation hero, right? What about what about Jimmy, right? He's your B player. He's working. He doesn't know how to do it. But you know what? He's gonna write down and he says, ⁓ this guy show me how to do it, right? I'm taking notes so that whenever he's not here, I know how to do it. Jimmy can be your documentation hero. When do we celebrate that and say, Look, yeah, Jimmy Bru for just our standard operating procedure. Everybody else might like, Yeah, we know how to do that, but it doesn't matter, right? It's about a creation of a culture of people documenting their process. speaker-1: Yeah, it really is important for the longevity. I think you may not see it, the benefit in doing it today, ⁓ for tomorrow, but you there is a benefit in doing it today and tomorrow for the future, for the next one year, next six months, one year, two years. It's really what helps build an organization that's scalable. It's it's there to help ⁓ an organization have a be more profitable. ⁓ but it definitely takes time and I think that's probably the hard part and the thing that I had to learn is that, you know, the those things aren't necessarily paying off tomorrow financially, but they are going to pay off in the long run. speaker-0: had a thought tomorrow what I want you to do, Jason, go out onto your floor and give a big shout out to to Jimmy. speaker-1: Jimmy Can't Jimmy got hit by a bus. speaker-0: We need to s find someone else's name. Let's call him Steve, right? So tomorrow you're gonna go into the floor and say, Everybody stop. I want a big shout out to s to Gary who's working on machine four and there's been nothing wrong with machine four for a week. Machine four. Well done, Gary, right? speaker-1: No that's speaker-0: That's a great But that's the boring shout out, right? If you've got an employee there and they're just working away, standard, they're giving you your nine to five, but you have no issues. The quality's good, the machine's running good, there's been no downtime. I mean, we need to give them a boring shout-out, right? And celebrate it. Celebrate the celebrate the boring, right? Celebrate the boring. speaker-1: That's it. Celebrate the boring. Shift that language from a great save to a great prevention. Right. You're right. You're all over that. So speaker-0: There you go. What about the near miss award? Can we do one of those? Give a near miss award, right? So who's that employee who identified the potential failure just before it happened? Right? Don't wait till it's on fire. Who can find that who finds that kindling before it goes on fire, right? speaker-1: Yeah, so Yeah. That was Bobby. speaker-0: Let's celebrate Bobby. Hey, it's Paul from Making Chips. If you've been burned by recruiters who don't understand manufacturing, you are not alone. That's exactly why we created Hire MFG Leaders. We're not just recruiters, we're current and former shop owners and we know what it takes to lead in this industry. Whether you're hiring your next operations leader, sales manager, or production supervisor, we'll help you find someone who actually fits. Learn more at making chips.com/slash hire. Think about those root causes. We're talking about near miss awards, right? How do we prevent that? Right. What about the root cause? Instead of rewarding the quick fix, how do we reward that root cause analysis that someone puts in, even like a pokeyoke design error, some error proofing? Someone that comes with a bright idea, right? Like really f fixes a process. We may not see it today, but that poke yoke speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Could prevent a fire if someone else leaves the business who maybe someone knows how to do it without that. At least you've got a tool or a fixture or something that error proofs your business. And we have to celebrate those bright ideas. And what that does is builds a culture of fireproofing, right? speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah, that's really critical 'cause I've I've been in that situation where we have a really particular part and yeah, the for years and years we knew exactly how to we knew what we needed to run it slightly undersized because of this special plating or that happened or this assembly and then but if it wasn't documented right then the next person who's running it, they run it to exactly what, you know, the they run it within the tolerance, but they don't keep it on the low side of the tolerance. And so then it doesn't fit later on into the next operation where if that was documented properly, that would have been prevented. So, you know, that's the other part is, I mean, you might save hundreds or thousands of dollars later on because you've documented it properly because now you didn't, you know, you had raw material, you had labor, you had finishing, you had all these processes that w that happened that that are costing you money. that now the parts are scrap and you can't do anything to rework ⁓ or reclaim ⁓ and they're just done. So I I think yeah, having having that drama free execution is really, really important. So ⁓ it's good. So speaker-0: And you can you can take that even right into your maintenance, right? Quite often we'll measure downtime. Machine down, how long has it been down before maintenance can get it running again? Why why do we not celebrate running time, right? Uptime. What's our record? How long has it been since with the last machine downtime? Can we set a new record, right? Right. Why don't we celebrate it? Okay, we've now went three months, we've had no machines down. Let's celebrate with the maintenance team, right? They're doing a great job preventing the downtime. Yeah. Sometimes we can only celebrate the guy who fixes the machine because we're so relieved that the machine's working again. Rather than saying, guys, she's done a great job, it didn't break for three months before, right? We weren't celebrating that. We only celebrate the fix. speaker-1: That was Susie. Susie was the one that was operating that machine for three straight months ⁓ with no failures. Susie knew she knew what she was doing. So Yeah. So I think as a as a practical reset here, a couple of things that we can make sure we do is we can track repeated emergencies. And if we're seeing those emergencies happen happen more than once, then then maybe that's a system issue, right? That we're gonna have emergencies, those things are gonna happen. But if it's happening more than once, speaker-0: Good job, Susie. speaker-1: Then that's a system issue. And that's where we need to put something into place to help prevent that moving forward. So as we as we think about a bit of a reset here, I think it's important that we track repeated emergencies. ⁓ if it happens twice, then it's a system issue. We we we've got to make sure that we're preventing those problems from happening a second time. We want to shift our language toward prevention and toward stability, Paul. speaker-0: Sometimes our firefighting heroes can make our broken systems still look functional when they're not. ⁓ yeah. And we become reliant. So our our operators go to those guys every day. And what happens is we end up promoting them because they're the ones that we rely on. They're the ones that the other people depend on, and we put them into promotions. The problem with that is when it's time for a promotion, we shouldn't be just picking the best firefighter. We should be picking the person. From the department that's the most self sufficient and quiet, the most reliable department. speaker-1: Yeah, that's good. speaker-0: At the end of the day, they're the ones that's got the leadership and the process stability and the capability to build stability that you need as you scale your business. speaker-1: That's really good. So I think as we wrap this up, the first thing we talked about why firefighting feels good. You know, it's creating an urgence it's creating urgency, ⁓ an adrenaline. We we've got visible problems and we're bringing those to a conclusion and that that chaos feels important, that save, it's dramatic. ⁓ then we looked at what firefighting looks like in manufacturing. Then we talked about what firefighting looks like in manufacturing, and that's can be your expedites, your overtime, your rework. Those are The effects. Next we talked about the leadership trap. So that's publicly praising the last minute saves. You know, we're not looking into the root causes. We're failing to follow up on our corrective actions. We're allowing those reoccurring issues to continue. We covered the hidden cost, whether that's that's burnout, your process inconsistencies, poor documentation, your margin leak. Then we talked about what to reward instead, recognizing and reinforcing those individuals that have standardized work. Have clear communication, are are early identifiers of risk and that root cause elimination. And I think the biggest part as we finish this up is strong manufacturing leaders, they don't build heroic cultures. They build stable ones. And that's that's a real key point for us. Don't build a heroic culture, build a stable one. They design systems that protect their people and reduce the chaos. So thanks for joining us today on the Manufacturing Blueprint. If this episode gave you something to think about, make sure you follow or subscribe, whether that's on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And if you'd leave a quick rating or review, it really helps us reach more listeners in the manufacturing community. And if you know someone running a factory, leading a team, or trying to improve their operation, share this episode with them. And remember, we're not just talking shop, we're giving you the blueprint to build it.