Improving Maintenance and Reliability Through Cultural Change. Stephen Thomas G.
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When I was 29 years old, I was promoted to the position of Zone Supervisor. A zone supervisor was responsible for all of the maintenance work within a portion of the plant. In this job I had responsibility for approximately eight foremen and one hundred mechanics. I was the youngest person the company had ever promoted to a position of this nature. There were many reasons why. First, I had been successful in all of my previous positions and, second, I was part of an aging workforce. Two others and I were the first management employees hired into the maintenance organization in 20 years; everyone I worked with was over 50. The organization was trying to develop younger managers who could take over when the current managers retired.
I was very aware in this new role that I wasn’t clear what I was to do. Although my organization was older and far more experienced than I was, I was expected to lead them and manage their work. My predecessor had been very successful and was highly respected by the entire organization. He had the ability to motivate people and get things done regardless of the circumstances. He had not been moved to another position. He had been given several special projects, one of which was to teach me the ropes. At the time, our organization was based on a reactive work culture. When things broke down, it was maintenance’s job to fix them as quickly as possible and return the operation back to normal.
Being young and inexperienced, I copied the former supervisor. On many occasions, I asked for his opinion, help, and support in different circumstances. Over the next year, we had a very good relationship and he taught me what he thought I needed to be successful in my new position. In short, he was my role model. He had shown me how to be one of the best reactive maintenance professionals in our organization and shortly thereafter I was again promoted.
Several years later, the plant was sold to a private owner. At the time, I was in charge of all maintenance work in the plant. I reported directly to a maintenance manager brought in by the new owner to implement a reliability-based work culture. My specialty was reactive repair, not reliability. However, I quickly took on a new role model and learned that there was more to work than fixing broken equipment. My new role model taught me about the concepts of reliability, good planning, and scheduling techniques as well as how to implement programs that (with production’s help) avoided equipment failure. The manager was successful in his conversion of the business and, as a key part of his team, so was I.
In both of these instances I emulated someone who I believed would provide the best maintenance services to the plant in the existing culture. Although my role models exhibited different traits and behaviors, they were correct for the culture in which they operated and were successful in their careers.
The remainder of this chapter will examine role models, why they are or are not successful, and how and why people emulate their behavior. We will also examine how and why people’s behaviors, and frequently their beliefs about how to operate the business, can be altered by these models.
Role models are people within organization who exhibit traits that appeal to us and which we can apply to how we conduct our business. These role models are usually at or near the top of the organization; they have been successful within the organizational culture. They demonstrate a successful behavior style within the business culture, one that we feel comfortable adopting as our own.
Let us discuss further the three key components of a role model.
Top of the organization
Most people who are used as role models are at or near the top of the organization’s hierarchy. These are the people we view as the most successful. They are the managers of our departments, the leaders, the ones who set the direction for the business. The key word here is success. Because those at the top are perceived as successful, we tend to use them as role models.
There is another reason why we often choose our leaders as role models. They set the expectations of what we are to accomplish at work. In most cases, these expectations are in line with their expectations for themselves. As a result, we emulate and assume their style because we are all working towards the same end. In addition, failure to achieve these expectations usually has severe negative outcomes. Therefore, modeling the manager to achieve the desired results makes sense.
Successful within the organization’s culture
The second component is that role models are not just successful, but they are successful within the existing culture. This is very important. Think about how I used my former managers as role models. In each case, they were successful in their respective cultures and, therefore, were good models for me. But what if the situations were reversed? Suppose the manager who was reliability-focused was placed in a reactive maintenance work culture. How well do you think he would have succeeded? Who would have wanted him as a role model?
A style we can identify with and adopt
Even those some people are successful within the culture, there still may be reasons why we would not choose them as role models. If we truly want to use people as role models, we need not only to view them as successful, but also to feel comfortable adopting their style of management.
Suppose you are the type of person who firmly believes that all people within the workforce have unique value and should be treated with dignity and respect. Further suppose that your manager (who is a successful part of the organization) has achieved this position by acting and behaving in exactly the opposite fashion. Could you accept this person as a role model? Your answer would probably be no. Although you want to behave in a manner that will provide you a successful career, the behavior of your manager could never fit your personal beliefs and manner of conducting business.
5.3 Strategic or Tactical Alignment
From my previous examples, you can see that role models are aligned with the culture in which they exist. Reactive role models succeed in reactive cultures as do proactive role models in proactive cultures.
Role models are also strategically or tactically focused regarding how they conduct their work and how they support change within the work place. Furthermore, their work is often either short term or long term. This comparison can be best viewed in the quad diagram shown in Figure 5-1.
Figure 5-1 Role model – type of work vs. work focus
In this figure the type of role models (strategically or tactically focused) is depicted on the y-axis. Their focus – short or long term – is shown on the x-axis. In this way, we can represent the different components and discuss the role each plays in changing an organization’s work culture.
Let us review this quad diagram from the perspective that we want to change from a reactive to a proactive, reliability-focused culture.
Short Term – Tactical (Quadrant 1)
Role models who fit Quadrant 1 work on the front line; they are viewed by their peers as the best at what they do. They typically have a day-to-day tactical focus and know how to get things done no matter what problems confront them. In most plants, these role models are the best at firefighting and reactive repair. However, we want to change to a more reliability-based model, and they need to change their focus. This can be accomplished, but not without difficulty. As you learned in Chapter 4, the organization’s values must be reliability centered. You will also see in Chapters 6 and 7