Shop Floor Rat vs Management

Okay, I’ll admit it!  I’m a shop floor rat at heart. There, I said it!

There are several reasons I’m, in some ways, more comfortable on the shop floor than I am in the boardroom, which I’ve had experience in both worlds. I started in manufacturing a very long time ago out of necessity. Recently married with our first child on the way and waitering & bartending just wasn’t cutting the cashflow requirement. So, I need a steady income in place of tips.

I began what turned out to be a life-long career in manufacturing. I was the second shift shipping clerk. I got orders ready for the next day and loaded semi’s with pallets of goods. I was an excellent fork-truck driver.  Maybe not the safest!

It was here when I started to realize that management was making decisions and changes that impacted us directly on the shop floor and no one asked us first about the pending changes.  Here comes Monday and guess what? New process(s) we must follow now. These changes were on a personal level with no input. “Do as we say or else”.  We had no choice but to adapt or face the consequences. There was no such thing as Change Management back then. The offices were in the front of the building and the manufacturing plant behind. We called it “The Wall”. All the managers sat in the offices and barked out orders to the supervisors who were responsible to make sure the changes were made and conformed to without regarding the impact on us peons.

As the years went on, I progressed through the organization and one day became a manager and had an office on the other side of “The Wall”. I still spent most of my day on the shop floor when I wasn’t in some useless meeting that I should never have been a part of. And then, at a staff meeting, a decision was agreed that would impact the shop floor immensely that would be implemented on the following Monday. This change was made at Friday’s staff meeting, meaning no time to discuss with the supervisors nor the personnel impacted by this. Silly me asked the question if we could first ask the folks on the shop floor for their opinion or at least communicate the change to let it “marinate” on them over the weekend. Essentially, I was told to sit down and shut up “new guy”.

Here were the lessons learned from that one single meeting:

1. No decisions made that impact peoples daily lives at work should be made without first telling them the change and then listening
2. Feedback from the actual people that the change impacts is vital for the success of the change
3. No money is being made in boardrooms or conference rooms. The real money is made on the shop floor or in the field so why not get the moneymakers involved in the decision-making process?
4. Management MUST be visible. GEMBA walks are essential to understand the roadblocks and issues preventing people from achieving the objective
5. Leadership MUST understand that titles don’t segregate you from the workers. I once had a multi-millionaire owner of the company say to me once, “Andy, there’s no difference between you, me or the person cleaning the restrooms. The only difference is our responsibilities!” I’ve lived by those words to this day.

We all work in our own little functional cylinders with competing KPI’s throughout the organization which causes internal conflict.  The challenge for most organizations is to break those vertical drivers to more horizontal goals across the organizations so we work together as a team not by titles.