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When George Pesansky begins working with a company to improve its performance, he likes to enter through the same door as the workers. Is it a drab, or inviting entrance? Do employees treat it well, or do they litter, tossing their earplugs on the floor upon departure, or otherwise display lack of caring?
He also likes to show up on the night shift and poke around. The day shift has too many rules and too much visibility for their work. People on the night shift have more independence. He can get them to bend the rules, let him operate the equipment and try other adjustments to understand the production situation better. He also wins their trust. The operators are now willing to talk with him because he is willing to walk in their boots.
As well as seeing things through the operator’s perspective, he recommends taking a factory tour and looking at it from the customer’s perspective. “This means starting at the end of the process – where the gold is – and working your way back to the straw. All along the way, you’ll ask questions: What are the things that we are doing? What are the ways we’re adding value? Is the machine or process I have in front of me really adding value? Am I reducing the friction or creating it?” the operational excellence consultant writes in Superperformance.
He’s a practical guy. But he also is driven by what many would consider an impractical obsession: The Golden Hour. That’s when we – as individuals and organizations – are at our best, in flow and achieving peak performance. It only happens from time to time but he believes leaders must stop accepting it as an occasional lucky moment and try to reach it more frequently. If you can do it once, why not more often?
“The key to superperformance is unlocking the potential within each one of us to achieve peak performance regularly and to extend those peaks for ever-longer periods of time. The potential is there in every organization and in every person,” he says.
That’s where he returns to the practical – the nuts and bolts. Are the employees engaged? (Enter through the back door of your factory, as they do, and see what you find.) Instead of focusing on tricks to goose your P&L statement, actually perform better. Make your products or services better, build better and manage better. Focus on techniques and habits that lead to actual skill performance.
He points out to team leaders that the person they consider a jerk goes home to a granddaughter who thinks they are the best person in the world and would like to try on their work boots and be like Grandpa. They have families, and people who depend upon them. “So go give the person something to let their family be more thankful for. Let them go home and brag about how they broke a record,” he says. Give them respect, allow them ownership, and help them to prolong the Golden Hour.
Another favourite technique is the magic wand. He asks the operators and managers if they were given a magic wand, what would they change in a production area. And, of course, how would they change it? Do they need a new piece of equipment – too often executives foolishly hold back on investing in tools that can dramatically change situations for the better – or do they need to come up with a different way of working? After they answer that question, he asks why they picked this problem, which adds to his understanding.
“The thing is, many managers really don’t want to know the answers to these questions, because it usually means there are things that they are going to have to take action on, and they don’t want to take action. They just want to keep the status quo,” he says.
He doesn’t believe how smart somebody is will necessarily correlate with how much success they are going to have. Instead, he believes there is a correlation between success and how open-minded someone is – their willingness to listen, understand and learn. That helps them achieve their full potential.
Too many executives and operators are prisoners of their own expectations. They are willing to be trapped in the Goldilocks zone of medium possibilities. He’ll ask about a changeover in manufacturing between shifts or retooling processes and be told it takes 20 minutes. But how often, he’ll ask, is it less than 20 minutes? What he gets is a lot of pushback, defending that standard, perhaps stressing at times the changeover is even longer. No excitement or interest in it being less.
“In reality, the crew that’s doing the 20-minute changeover would like to do it in just 10 minutes – sometimes. Maybe it’s a little bit easier on a particular day or everything just clicks. But they can’t necessarily do it that way consistently so they’re rightfully very careful about committing to the lower number,” he says.
It’s easy to accuse them of sandbagging. But he prefers to see them as solid people who want to do better but the way they are being managed and measured forces them into this protective prison of expectations rather than glided into the possibility of a Golden Hour approach.
Cannonballs
- What’s the best way to frame an anti-racism message for your workforce: Emphasize empathy for those targeted by racism; ask people to reflect on their own biases; call for social action to confront racism in society; or highlight social norms, such as “most people oppose racism?” A new study found that first approach, a message centred on empathy, was the most effective.
- Marketers are entering a new era where it’s becoming harder to distinguish between real consumer concerns and manufactured outrage, AdAge reports. A significant share of the social media outrage aimed at Cracker Barrel over its logo change was manufactured by bots and fake accounts also intensified the backlash against American Eagle’s Great Jeans campaign with Sydney Sweeney.
- Toronto consultant Donald Cooper has four rules corporations should follow on waiting: 1. Don’t make people wait; implement systems, processes, physical facilities and staffing levels that reduce or eliminate waiting, as he did with 50 change rooms in his fashion boutique. 2. If you must make them wait, give them something to do that they love more, as he did with electric reclining massage chairs for the men. 3. When customers are waiting, update them frequently and honestly so they know what’s going on, that they haven’t been forgotten, and so they can make the best use of their time. 4. If you make them wait longer than they think is reasonable, give them a treat, gift or perk along with an apology.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.