All Business Problems Are People Problems

Audio transcription may not be 100% accurate:

Hey everyone. Jay veniard here with a ventech search group today, I wanted to talk to you about why plant managers get pulled in so many different directions and how you can maximize your time on the production floor. Now, as many of you know, I talk to plant managers in the phoenix area almost daily, and I get an inside look into what keeps them up at night. And the common theme seems to center around getting pulled in 100 different directions employee accountability and often times unreasonable kpi’s from the executive staff.

The plant managers I talked to tell me that they’re getting pressure from all sides and are always asked to cut costs while increasing production, which, as we all know often times, leads to cutting corners and putting band-aids on problems for quick fixes rather than root cause solutions. Because of this pressure from upper management on hitting key production metrics, the plant managers that i’ve had the pleasure of talking to say that often times they neglect their employees, which inevitably leads to low employee engagement on the job and high turnover, which not only puts a huge burden on the plant manager, but it also puts a huge burden on the support staff that has to pick up the slack and the extra hours required just to run at status quo. How do you combat these issues in a manufacturing environment? Well, I heard a quote from jack welch a few years ago. At least I think it was jack welch. Don’t quote me on that. But the quote said, all business problems are people problems. And i’ll tell you what, I 100% agree with that quote because as a recruiter in the manufacturing space for 16 years, I get to see first hand how having the wrong person in the wrong place, or even worse, not having anyone in place at all can be absolutely catastrophic. And as a plant manager, people problems always roll down. To you. I think we can all agree that your success is determined by the team that surrounds you. And rather than thinking about being everything to everyone, you should hire the best talent out there, not the best talent available.

And then you should let that top talent take care of the moving pieces while you handle the high level execution that will allow you to always find ways to cut costs and increase production. It’s imperative that you can trust these line leaders to get the job done. And if they don’t? Replace them. Now, I know that sounds harsh, but I also know at the end of the day it’s your ass on the line, not theirs and being everything to everyone is the reason you’re getting pulled in 100 different directions. And the reason why your plant is not running at 100% efficiency instead be everything to the line leaders that report up to you while also being available and sometimes more importantly, visible to everyone else in your organization. The role players on your team, meaning the ones who don’t report to you. They just want to know that you’re there. They want to know that you’re noticing their work and they want to know that if shit hits the fan that they can come to you. This level of delegation is so important for you to be able to do your job at the absolute highest level. You need to be able to trust that your line leaders can make tough decisions and stand by those decisions with full accountability and based on my conversations with plant managers in the phoenix area. Unfortunately, most line leaders lack the skill, confidence or ability to, make tough decisions and take those tasks off their plant managers plate why is that? Why do we tolerate mediocrity on our team? Well, a lot of plant managers stand by the old legacy thought that recruiting is handled by hr and they should leave the critical task of hiring their line leaders and production staff to hr or maybe they’re a total recruiting teams who do nothing more, most of the time, then post the job online and wait and see who comes in in recruiting. We call that posting and praying, and it’s a terrible strategy.

This strategy is like fishing in a backyard pond rather than the pacific ocean and expecting to catch a trophy marlin. Candidates that come from job boards are usually not the a players you need and can trust toe run with high level tasks and get them done with maximum efficiency and very little oversight. Job boards are just like the backyard pond, and yes, I know every once in a while you might land a good sized bass. But the problem is, you weren’t fishing for bass. You were fishing for the trophy. Marlin. You gotta stop letting yourself and your team fish from only, the backyard pond. The real talent. Those marlins they are out there. You just have to know where to find them because they’re not on the job boards. And they most certainly are not searching your career site…