The Manufacturing Academy Article Series

One of the most important skill sets you could master to prepare you for business leadership is sales and negotiation. Some of you may be thinking, “Gosh, I’m not going into sales or marketing. I can skip this blog post!”

But I want to assure you, regardless of your field, sales and negotiation are part of it. 

If you’re working in operations and want to expand your department, you need to sell that idea to your executive staff. If you’re a designer with a bright idea for a new line, you’re going to have to sell that idea to the people you work with … to the other managers, engineers and stakeholders in your organization.

Regardless of your technical background, the higher you move within an organization, the more you need to understand about the organization’s finances.

Accounting is often referred to as the language of business. And I believe it. Before I studied corporate finance and accounting, I often felt lost. I didn’t speak the language. I remember sitting in a board meeting where other managers and board members were reviewing the financials for the organization. And I simply didn’t understand what all the numbers meant. By the time I starting making some simple two connections, the meeting had moved onto the next topic.

No discussion about managerial skills would be complete without talking about time management. Effective managers are excellent at utilizing their time. More than just their time, successful managers proficiently steward the range resources under their control … the people, the equipment, and the finances. But time is the most valuable of them all.

The first and most important aptitude needed to move from a maker mentality to a management or leadership mentality is that of a lifelong learner.

Now, I’ve heard plenty of people say, “I learn something new every day.” And it’s a cute adage. But watching the History Channel or scrolling mindlessly through YouTube videos won’t likely produce a leadership mindset.

Instead, lifelong learning is an ongoing, self-motivated journey of acquiring new, particularly in-demand skills. Lifelong learners develop and employ strategies and plans to acquire new career skills. These plans may involve returning to university to acquire a new degree, but they certainly don’t have to.

Most successful engineers, analysts, programmers, and other types of makers of products and services will, at some point in their career, encounter a crossroads where they can either continue making, engineering, and programming, or they can begin managing those who do.

Many corporate professionals feel the frustration of wanting to move up the ladder, but never getting a crack at their boss’s role. In many companies, large and small alike, navigating into a managerial role feels like stumbling around a dark room looking for the exit. Some people find their way; most don’t.

“Everything’s computerized now. The backyard mechanic is a thing of the past!”, I recall my father declaring more than 20 years ago while leaning over the open hood of my mother’s Ford Windstar. He was referring to the relative simplicity of repairing the largely mechanical systems in automobiles from the 1950’s and 60’s versus those of the early 2000’s that were equipped with digital sensors and a central processor. Of course, today’s plug-in EV’s, advanced driver assist systems, 360-degree cameras, and “guardians” like General Motors’ OnStar make my mom’s old minivan look like an Anglia in comparison.

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Manufacturing companies are struggling with the persistent and growing problem of finding employees with the skills needed to sustain and grow their businesses. This problem is commonly called the “skills gap.” Other sectors like construction are also affected by this skills gap. But at the macroeconomic level, the skills gap in manufacturing is particularly profound because of the growth in other sectors that manufacturing influences.

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Imagine riding your motor scooter one sunny afternoon to your auntie’s home who lives near the sea, 20 miles from your home. On your trip there, the wind is at your back and the terrain slopes downward, resulting in an average speed of 25 mph. On the way home however, you’re motoring on a slight upward slope and into the wind, resulting in an average speed of 15 mph.

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Imagine you were a rancher with a herd of cattle and a small field in which to graze them. One of your primary concerns include determining how many cattle the field could support. With too few cattle, you give up potential earnings that the field could readily sustain. But too many cattle consume the grass faster than the field could replenish it, resulting in malnourished cattle and degraded land quality.

Therefore, as a rancher with long-term prospects, inspecting and maintaining the field, planting new grass, and limiting the number of new cattle in the field all become a cornerstone of your business model. [Read more…]

This strange word andragogy was popularized in the early 1970’s by educational researcher, Malcolm Knowles. It is etymologically rooted in the Greek language from two words “aner”, which means “man” and “agogos”, which means “to lead”. Fused together, andragogy means “leading men”, or to paraphrase, leading or educating adults. Andragogy is often contrasted with pedagogy, typically referring to the education of children. [Read more…]

Aside from meeting specific requirements within quality standards such as ISO 9001 and ISO 13485, well-designed quality system metrics can also serve as meaningful indicators of the strengths and weaknesses of your organization’s processes. As a quality manager, I often consider how precisely our quality system objectives and other metrics describe the effectiveness of our quality processes. Certain metrics such as customer-reported DPPM and customer survey results usually serve to indicate your customers’ satisfaction related to quality. As metrics such as these are tracked over time, managers get a general sense of improvement or decline. Composite measures such as these, however, do not discriminate between quality assurance (preventive) and quality control activities. [Read more…]

Researchers in psychology and other social sciences have long been aware of the observer effect—a phenomenon that occurs when the subject of a study alters their behavior because they are aware of the observer’s presence. Researchers typically design their experiments to reduce or eliminate this effect to avoid skewing the results of the study. Beyond the realm of research, though, an understanding of the observer effect and its applications is valuable wherever people’s actions are being evaluated. [Read more…]

Abraham Lincoln taught the value of adequate preparation when he said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” By nature and training, quality inspectors are focused on verifying the correctness of a product. A traditional inspector at the Lincoln Timber Company might have dutifully marked in her audit log the date and time, the type and size of tree, followed by the comment, “Cut down.”

But Honest Abe would have advised her to take a closer look at the tools and process used to complete the job. [Read more…]

Manufacturing companies are struggling with the persistent and growing problem of finding employees with the skills needed to sustain and grow their businesses. This problem is commonly called the “skills gap.” Experts estimate that this skills gap may leave 2.4 million manufacturing positions unfilled through 2028, with a potential economic impact of $2.5 trillion (Deloitte 2018).

One of the key drivers of this gap is the rapid influx of technology into every aspect of manufacturing. New technology of course, requires new skills. In a 2019 article published by McKinsey, analysts identified six emerging trends in facilities management, each requiring new skills and each offering opportunities for career growth. (Adhikari, 2019) [Read more…]