Leadership Styles

July 15th, 2010 by Joanne Law

One of the most consistent things to come out of research on why employees leave a business is that they don’t leave organisations they leave leaders.

Developing a leadership style that can get the best out of your people is vital for any leader along with the flexibility to vary your leadership style as the external situation demands.

According to Daniel Goleman in his book “Primal Leadership” there are six leadership styles.

Visionary
Coaching
Affiliative
Democratic
Pacesetting
Commanding

What’s your leadership style? Read more

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Why manufacturing management fails to be strategic

June 7th, 2010 by geoff.green

One of the beauties of manufacturing is that everyday offers you the chance to do what you did yesterday only a little better. It is about refining systems, paying close attention to the detail, looking for the one percenters. And generally you get to see how your daily endeavors pay off with some sort of performance scoreboard. In short, there is a very strong focus on the day to day, the here and now.

Kaizen to innovation

Marketing / Sales on the other hand can be very strategic, analyzing the market for trends and opportunities, developing brand recognition, launching new products, running promotional campaigns, improving distribution channels, etc. While it is not all big picture thinking it tends to be more strategic than manufacturing.

If you are having trouble following my argument – when was the last time you, as a manufacturing manager, selected a new factory site, introduced an entirely new manufacturing process or radically changed the way the factory operated? The simple truth is that senior general management make decisions to build a new factory, engineering are given the task of equipping and commissioning it and then factory management take over the day to day running of the factory in accordance with a blueprint developed by others. Hence we are back to factory management taking care of the detail with the focus on the short term horizon.

Factory management are often asked to meet objectives and produce things the factory was never really designed for due to the changing requirements of the marketplace. And are often under pressure to make these changes with minimal resources. Whilst there may be some grumbling about the unfairness of it all, manufacturing managers do the necessary “work arounds” to get it to happen. Often with high levels of personal intervention, expediting and fire fighting. Again this draws manufacturing management back into the detail.

It is true that the budget process can provide an opportunity to think strategically but often it can degenerate into making small adjustments to last year’s budget numbers. Another opportunity lost. As manufacturing is seen as a cost centre by senior management and the focus is to minimize that cost by doing the existing processes more efficiently.

There is often little focus in thinking strategically and being more effective in using manufacturing to help the business deliver its competitive goals. So the message here is for manufacturing managers to spend time thinking strategically so the factory can be an aid to help the business meet it objectives to become more competitive in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

An excellent tool to help manufacturing managers to bring their attention up out of the detail is to develop a site compass.  A compass not only requires that you think about what manufacturing can contribute to helping the business be more competitive it allows you to communicate that to the rest of the business.

Next Post:  Setting up a Manufacturing Compass

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Setting strategy in Manufacturing that gives you a competitive advantage

April 1st, 2010 by geoff.green
setting strategy in manufacturing

Establishing strategic direction

Very few businesses operate in a competitive vacuum, they are exposed to competition in the various market segments in which they compete. Each market segment determines if a manufacturer’s product qualifies to even be considered based on the value proposition offered by the company.  Then customers look at the elements of the value proposition and decide on one or two elements that become the order winning elements.

Manufacturers, or any provider of a product or service, must know their markets well enough to identify the order qualifying and order winning elements or characteristics. Firstly to ensure their product or service will be considered but secondly to ensure they excel at delivering the order winning characteristics. Knowing what your order qualifying and order winning elements are is vital in developing manufacturing strategy.

From my experience very few plants have explicit manufacturing strategies. Many adopt the fad of the moment without putting in the intellectual effort to understand what is required to support the business in its markets segments.

Deploying Strategy

The global strategy of manufacturing is then broken down to department level strategies, both operational and support. These strategies are executed via a portfolio of projects. It is here that the rubber hits the road and it is critical good project management practices are used.

The product and service characteristics that manufacturing influences are generally based around cost, quality and delivery performance. Manufacturing strategy must provide levels of acceptable performance for order qualifying characteristics and superior performance for order winning characteristics. This can help define the priorities for strategies.

For example, a business that provides a customized product may have researched their markets to find that having an acceptable level of product quality and price (impacted by cost) are order qualifying characteristics. The order winning characteristic is a short delivery time. So where there may be a conflict between delivering these characteristics then the priority is to focus on short delivery time perhaps at the expense of cost, for example.

It is easy for manufacturing to work in isolation from the market so senior management must interpret the market for manufacturing. This can be done by using a Compass or Directions that sets the objectives for manufacturing in 4 to 6 objectives over the next 12 months.

These objectives must be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) and relevant to the order qualifying and winning characteristics that manufacturing can influence. Also there will be regulatory requirements manufacturing must meet – safety and environment.

The strategies and the execution of the projects to deliver on those strategies can now be monitored against the Compass Objectives. We have a destination and a road map to get there.

Next Article:Why manufacturing management fails to be strategic

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