Top 5 Challenges For Manufacturing Supervisors: #2 Effectiveness
Among our plant supervisors, I see some consistent patterns that represent performance shortfalls. All manufacturing supervisors face similar challenges but unless they are trained and coached how to overcome these challenges, performance shortfalls may not be of own their fault. Most probably, your supervisors give you great daily effort, but maybe they just don’t have the knowledge to overcome the leadership challenges they face. In this series of articles, I outline and discuss the top five of these common challenges, from the least impactful to your business to the most impactful to your business. Explore these points for yourself and see how your supervisors stack-up against these challenges.
Top 5 Challenges: #2
2. EFFECTIVENESS:
Leadership for Long-Term Results
Are your frontline leaders really supervisors or are they coordinators? The difference between them is that a coordinator will coordinate shop floor activity, but they don’t really take on any leadership responsibilities or continuous improvement projects. If your frontline leaders spend 90%+ of their time on the production shop floor and they roll-up their sleeves to build product and operate machines, then they are coordinators or team leads, but not really supervisors.
An effective supervisor spends about 50% of their time on the shop floor. The balance of their time is spent solving operational problems and doing some required admin tasks. But foremost, the importance of their operational problem solving cannot be overlooked. It’s how a supervisor spends their time away from the shop floor supporting the shop floor that makes all this difference.
Let’s say for example that a process is struggling with a certain raw material. Consider that this material may be of subpar quality and maybe out of spec. The operators are suspicious of the material, but no one is absolutely sure yet if it is the root cause of their process problems. What is certain is that the process isn’t running optimally. In this scenario, a frontline line leader that is performing as a production coordinator will try and help the operators fight through the processing issue. This coordinator may even successfully run-out the material lot and move onto a new material lot, one that performs better. Good, right? Well not exactly because their effort came at a cost. Labor costs and scrap costs were increased as they fought through the processing problems.
Meanwhile, in this same scenario, if the frontline leader was a supervisor performing as a true leader, they will handle things differently. Instead of fighting through suspect materials, they give their operators instructions to pull the material, quarantine it via the appropriate QA procedure and then switch to a different lot of material. Then they take a material sample to the QA lab and ask for it to be tested and compared to the raw material spec. Next, they visit the Purchasing Department and provide a material sample and inform Purchasing that lab testing is underway. If the material is out of spec, then the supplier will need to be notified and asked to submit a corrective action. The supervisor in this scenario was faced with an issue and they acted to minimize the impact and the cost of the issue and they worked in a way that could provide a long-term resolution.
Frontline leaders that don’t allot time for fixing operational problems are only coordinators. Effective supervisors however realize that some of their time needs to be allocated towards fixing longer-term problems, costly problems, problems that reoccur. Leaders accept their role in supporting the shop floor with effective corrective action.
If results are important to you, teach your frontline leaders how to be effective. Tools for the Trenches has a training session in their CML100 level, which is CML108: Effective Management. This training session teaches supervisors how to effectively use their worktime. It is about more than just time management, it’s about being more effective with their time thus delivering optimal shopfloor performance.
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