Top 5 Challenges For Manufacturing Supervisors: #1 Accountability
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: #1
1. Accountability:
Ownership of Company Results
The number one challenge that I see within the supervisor ranks is that they don’t always connect with a company’s big picture vision and goals.
For example, I find that when supervisors attend plant financial review meetings, those led by Plant Controllers, supervisors often have difficulty following the financial breadcrumbs back to their own performance. Many supervisors don’t know how to follow the numbers through an Income Statement and recognize how their performance impacted the plant’s financial results for a given period.
Additionally, sometimes when supervisors are talking with employees about different situations or policies, supervisors will use the phrase… “the company” as a pivotal obstacle preventing action or problem resolution. Maybe you’ve heard supervisors respond this way too?
Let’s say for example that your plant’s volume is seasonally low and in order to cover absorption costs, the Plant Manager dictates that spending be curtailed. Now in this case, what would happen if an employee went to a supervisor and asked for a new workbench? What would a production supervisor say to that employee who was asking for a workbench purchase? Would the supervisor say;
- “Sorry, ‘The Company’ won’t let us spend money right now.”
or
- “Sorry, the plant volume is low right now, so we need to wait until volume improves before we purchase the workbench. Please see me next month about it”. (Key word being “we”.)
What is the difference between these two responses? Well in the first response, the supervisor is deflecting the problem to some vague, unidentifiable entity called “The Company”. This supervisor is saying to that employee that; "We are all victims here". “The Company did it to us again!" "I don’t like it any more than you do.”
However, in the second conversation, the supervisor understands why plant spending is curtailed and they used the word “We” instead of “The Company”. When they use the word “we”, they are including themselves within the scope of the company’s leadership structure. They are taking ownership of their plant’s financial results. They recognize their role and their impact. They are taking personal accountability!
Whenever you hear a supervisor use the words, “The Company” they are seeing themselves as an individual who operates external of the leadership team and that’s not good. When a supervisor says “The Company”, they are not connecting themselves to any company decisions or its results. They are lacking the cause-and-effect connection that happens through their efforts or lack thereof. They do not understand the concept of personal accountability and this gap is affecting your plant’s results.
A lack of personal accountability among your frontline leaders is the number one hinderance throttling-back your plant’s results. When you hear a supervisor use the words “The Company” when talking to employees, then that supervisor needs to be trained in the concept of personal accountability. Tools for the Trenches, Concepts in Manufacturing Leadership Level 400 provides a training session on this subject. CML406: Personal Accountability will get them connected to your plant’s results.
IN SUMMARY
For your manufacturing supervisors to overcome these five common challenges that all supervisors face, they need training. Providing them with the proper leadership training will improve their knowledge and hone their skills. In turn, this will lead to improved plant results. Don’t underestimate the impact that your frontline leaders have on the plant metrics, including bottom-line P&L results.
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