7 Awesome Things About Being a Manufacturing Leader
continuous improvement driving results employee development employees factory friendships job diversity lean lean six sigma learning manufacturing personal grwoth production six-sigma supervisorsWhat makes manufacturing leadership such a fun and dynamic career?
- Developing Employees: When a leader provides an environment that is conducive for employee development, then employees have the “green-light” to learn, develop and advance in their careers. Mentoring someone and then seeing their career blossom is extremely rewarding!
- Driving Results: In manufacturing leadership roles, there is no escaping accountability and having this accountability makes it fun! Unlike many careers, leaders in manufacturing get to tally their performance results on a dynamic scorecard called Key Process Indicators (KPI’s). Working hard to deliver results and then seeing your results trend favorably over time is just so rewarding!
- Continuous Improvement: Lean, Six-Sigma and Continuous Improvement teams are just incredible! If you’ve ever been on a Kaizen team, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Continuous improvement initiatives have so many benefits. They can transform a process to new heights of performance and Kaizen events will engage employees to new levels of engagement. Making improvement is just fun, there’s no doubt about it.
- Providing Stable Incomes for Employees: An aspect of our role as manufacturing leaders is to create a financially stable factory. And when leaders are successful at doing this, they’re providing stable incomes for all the factory employees and that helps the employees support their families. When manufacturing leaders create a financially successful factory, they’re supporting the lives of many people.
- Job Diversity: Think about it, manufacturing leaders are working with QA, Finance, Marketing, Sales, Engineers, Planning, Purchasing, and customers. They’re running meetings and troubleshooting processes. Manufacturing leaders have very diverse jobs and as they say diversity is the spice of life – enjoy it!
- Building Long-term Relationships: Manufacturing leadership is such a challenging career that it creates long lasting bonds. The friendships made in manufacturing last a lifetime!
- Endless Learning Opportunities: Manufacturing offers endless learning opportunities. Think about it. There is Lean, Six-Sigma, processes, products, software, financial systems, leadership, team building, personal growth, planning, inventory control and HR aspects such as recruiting and hiring. Not to mention the thousands of books about leadership and industrial history. Tools for the Trenches alone provides over 100 topics. What you can learn by working in manufacturing leadership is endless, and that aspect of the role is awesome!
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