Are Your Best Workers Becoming Your Worst Bosses? Preparing Manufacturing Leaders for Success

Technical excellence is undeniably important, but it is a mistake to equate it with future management excellence. In order to create a robust leadership pipeline, leaders need to understand how to identify and cultivate talent to fulfill these roles. 

Much of what industry leaders value in line workers—self-reliance, task ownership, commitment to technical proficiency, and compliance—doesn’t always directly translate to management positions. In management roles, priorities change to providing guidance through influence, delegation and resource management, people and process thinking and achievement through collaboration. 

As learning and development continues to be a top priority, let’s explore best practices and recommendations to identify those skilled workers who could excel in management positions and create growth opportunities outside management. 

The key is to know what skills your organization needs and create the structure to propagate those capabilities. 

A Cautionary Tale

Consider a manufacturing company with a talented and experienced factory floor worker who possesses all the best traits for maximizing output and operational excellence: task independence, a focus on minimizing defects and waste, discipline for controlled adherence to safety protocols, and a preference for objective decision-making regarding machine status and quality checks.These traits made them a standout employee in the role.

As a reward for their great performance, the company promoted them to shift supervisor. However, that new role requires very different skills for success: collaboration with HR and maintenance to resolve persistent issues, effective conflict resolution between team members struggling to meet quotas, information and knowledge-sharing about complex process changes, relationship-building (e.g., mentoring new hires), and more nuanced decision-making when handling employee disciplinary issues. The result was they removed a high performer from a place of adding great value to a position that under-utilized her hands-on technical skills and demanded a completely different set of communication and leadership skills they didn’t possess.

Identifying and Overcoming Common Pitfalls

Many businesses fail to build strong leadership benches by making a few common mistakes.

Lacking clear standards: Be sure to establish and communicate the skills, abilities and performance standards required for satisfactory and high performance in every role

Relying on “check the box” performance appraisals: Avoid generic and ineffective tools that don’t provide meaningful feedback or guidance

Promoting for the wrong reasons: Avoid defaulting to technical expertise (or in some cases, tenure) as the primary selection tool for promotions to people-management roles

Offering a single track for growth: Having only one path from individual contributor to supervisor or manager can force talented individuals into unsuitable leadership roles

Underestimating leadership training: Having an in-house leadership development structure with mentorship, curriculum and opportunities for certification helps prospective leaders realize their potential and see the career path ahead of them. 

Supporting High-Performers

It’s understandable when manufacturing leaders struggle with building their bench. With the tremendous need for hands-on workers, it’s essential to support high performers in technical roles—but  leadership roles aren’t for everyone. To support high performers in a way that allows them to contribute the most to your organization, here are some points to consider:

Non-supervisory skills: Include degrees of cooperation, skill agility and team orientation as a means to distinguish among job levels. High performers are the ideal source of true job knowledge, proven skill and job modeling.

Measure the what and how: Discretionary effort is that huge well of extra value that employees choose (or choose not) to deliver every day simply by the way they go about their work. Consider two machine operators who routinely achieve the target production goals. But when there’s a new sound or vibration in the equipment, one operator takes the next step and mentions it to the supervisor, potentially preventing an expensive breakdown. Be sure your organization puts as much value on that contribution as to work outputs. It can be simple, like acknowledgement from another leader – “I heard you were the one to report the issue – that was a great catch and I appreciate you bringing it to our attention.” Few things will drop a high potential to an average performer faster than when we ignore the performance differences.

Concrete Steps for Building a Strong Leadership Culture

To build a more successful leadership-development culture, start with these actionable steps:

Bring your stakeholders together: Talk openly about what’s working and what isn’t in terms of managerial practices. Where do you see strong and unified teams? Where is there high turnover or low engagement? Where is activity most smooth and efficient? Look for shared behaviors among the influential parties that you can reinforce or address.

Redefine leadership success: Leadership effectiveness doesn’t come from being tough or well-liked, or feared, or functioning as a technical superhero. Instead, great bosses positively influence the work of others with job knowledge, visible commitment, strong ethics, a positive attitude and a concern for the team. Start there when selecting individuals for promotions.

Build leadership development into your day-to-day culture: Find the individuals who demonstrate potential and invest in them with job shadowing, informal mentoring and exposure to higher-responsibility tasks. No one becomes a great leader without having experience-building opportunities first.

Keep rewards rewarding: Avoid making the reward for great performance just more work. A promotion to a position of additional responsibility and authority should be a decision that gives a talented individual the chance to have influence with wider impact. Be sure that’s the case by avoiding assigning all the worst tasks or lowest performers to the greatest supervisor, hoping they can bring salvation.

Start the conversation now: Ensure alignment among leaders about the knowledge and skills needed for your business’s market distinction and success in the future. Now is the time to plan for those days with intentional hiring, meaningful performance management, and targeted leadership education.

Ultimately, the first step toward building strong leadership is to start thinking differently about your workforce. The best products come from high quality materials, intentional processes and the right environment. It’s time to start viewing your talent management through the same lens.