All organizations are made up of individuals. Invariably they reflect each other – the organization reflects the choices of its people, and vice versa. For any organization to thrive and achieve, so too must its people. Without them you’re dead.
When you choose excellence you are choosing to make changes – excellence is a journey, not a destination and you don’t know all the twists and turns that will appear. Leading change will be critical to your success. Managing implies that all will remain steady. With excellence however, you need to lead. The change and leading it must become an integral part of all you do.
In our field, the purely technical solutions, long time favorites of engineers and technical people, will no longer work well on their own. The effective manager of today is unlikely to be a purely technical person who’s risen through the ranks on the basis of technical merit alone. He or she needs a balance of technical, managerial and human skills to improve operations. Your managers, superintendents and supervisors will be most effective if they are true “people persons”.
Organizational designs continue to evolve. We’ve seen centralized, military-style organizations, give way to more responsive de-centralized structures. To deliver maximum business benefits today, traditional maintenance, engineering, and operations departments must be working together, not in separate silos. Our companies need to singularly focused delivery organizations. Traditional departmental boundaries need to be blurred and focus must shift to the delivery of business results, and away from achieving purely departmental results.
The “self-organizing team” that combines disciplines is emerging as a highly successful model. We seeing it on small scales fairly often. The model will grow as its merits become fully appreciated. It requires less management and supervision than conventional “industrial age” command and control style designs. Command and control have long stifled initiative and improvements, holding you back from excellence. Although self-organizing teams outperform other structures and deliver high levels of employee and team productivity, they require managers to give up control – something that many find difficult to do. At heart, many of us love to be in control and achievement in a team environment, which requires less control and more trust.
Multi-skilling continues to grow in popularity as a means of developing workforce flexibility and enabling the more efficient deployment of maintenance resources. Learning, training, and development are critical to companies that strive to excellence. Our educational systems are no longer geared towards industrial careers and the onus is shifting to companies to foster their own talent. Without a focus on developing people, companies will become victims of the demographic realities of our times. Of course attracting, retaining and rewarding talent is equally critical. There’s no point spending a great deal on recruiting and developing people in-house if you don’t retain them through a competitive and attractive compensation program that recognizes their individual contributions as well as team success.
We begin our Uptime improvement programs with education. This helps you make informed choices about what to do or not to do, based on your existing knowledge of your current practices when compared with proven successful practices.
Our Uptime Training is now On-Line
