Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Chris and Fred discuss the changing ideas of leadership … and how people lament newer generations and their approaches to (and expectations of) leadership. There are challenges … so what does this mean?
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Carl and Fred discussing what it means to be a leader, and how the principles of leadership go beyond the traditional roles of management.
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Welcome Rob back to the Podcast. You were the founder of Rob’s Reliability Project and later started working as a co-host of the Leadership Launchpad Podcast and Dismantling the High Performance Narrative. Although, tell us more about yourself.
Rob- Having worked in reliability for ten years- transitioning across manufacturing, mining, and presently in an oil pipeline, it is clear that the biggest gap in the industry is in leadership. This became apparent after the observation of shop floor teams in different sites. Some leadership teams rarely listened to them and that drove a lack of psychological safety.
In this episode we covered:
Chris and Fred discuss how reliability starts at the top of every organization. And by that, we mean … leadership. What does that mean? How can the CEO be more important for reliability performance than the reliability engineer with decades of experience and post-graduate qualifications?
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Chris and Fred discuss ‘why’ leadership. Not why leadership is important (we know it is). But the sort of leadership that focuses on the ‘why’ of an organization or group of people. ‘Why’ people who work at these organizations get out of bed in the morning. ‘Why’ customers purchase products or services from an organization. And if we get the ‘why’ right … everything becomes a lot easier. Especially reliability.
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Chris discusses … what you want. Pretty broad I know. But there are things we really want – things we dedicate our time, effort and attention to. And then there are things we say we want. And the human brain is actually specifically structure to pick up on different cues to work out if you are really interested in something (or not). So we can pretty easily work out if you say you want something – but don’t really want it to the extent you want other things. Why does this relate to reliability engineering? Click here to learn more.
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Chris and Fred discuss reliability leadership. What is reliability leadership? Writing a book? Putting together a few slides? The first thing to know is that there is a difference between a reliability manager and a reliability leader. A reliability manager will tend to oversee practices and processes that others have identified or put together. Reliability leaders come up with the rationale, the motivation, the linking with business outcomes and everything else that creates or sustains organizational change. You can have the ‘best’ reliability engineers – but without reliability leadership, you won’t make reliable products. Want to learn more? Listen to this podcast.
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Chris and Fred discuss ‘Leaders that Don’t Understand.’ And by ‘Don’t Understand’ … we mean they don’t understand what their organization sells or does. Sometimes this can work (within reason). Leaders who are not experts in their product or services can still be effective if they know that they need to listen to those around them. But this can go too far – if all decisions need to be collectively agreed by a large cadre of people before the leader in question agrees to make a decision. This isn’t leadership at all. The concept of having ‘everyone on board’ can decimate decision making speed, innovation and a focus on customers. Have you had a similar experience?
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Leadership is the key to achieving your goals in an organization. Without leadership, every process is destined to fall apart with time. That’s why it is so important to know what does it mean to be a true leader and how to improve your leadership skills as you move along. The first thing a leader needs to have is a code or principle that he never breaks no matter what. That means he needs to follow the rules first before he starts making any. He should be a good follower in as much as he is a good leader.
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Leadership is a very strong concept. It is unique to everyone. So how do you understand leadership? Well, different people have a different understanding of the word ‘leadership’. This is because we have our own unique perspectives. Every person has his own skills and is working in different fields of everyday life. These people can be leaders in their own way. It doesn’t matter if you are working in the office or just leading a teenage life. Once you realize that you are a leader, then you start showing abilities of one. But there are some laws that you can use to govern better leadership.
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If there are a couple of things that pops to mind when talking about leadership is that leaders are made not born and that all leaders shared the same set of qualities that make them as such (think about John C. Maxwell’s book “The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader”). These two statements seem to complement each other and reflect the general tone of today’s podcast episode.
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Carl and Fred discuss the broad subject of leadership, and how it applies to reliability engineering and management.
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There are many things going on in organizations concurrently and they can’t decide everything on an immediate basis. This is something that leads to a lot of clashes and similar problems. Sometimes, you want to do something and you can’t find the necessary resources that you need to do it successfully—even though you know it’s the right thing to do. But you can just take unplanned initiatives because they are always a disaster. Don’t start anything that you have to struggle with later on. Make sure your business processes are in place and make your systems work based on those.
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This episode is about the leadership that is the very backbone of the successful organizations that perform exceptionally every year and get better and better with time under the experience of the leadership they have. But was it the same from the beginning? No, it wasn’t. Not every leadership is perfect right from the start. There are a lot of phases through which they get and they fail sometimes too but what they don’t do is look weak in front of the people whose entire lives depend on them. The successful leaders get wiser by the time by learning from their mistakes. But is there some sort of special criteria for being a leader? Technically yes but in general terms, every other person can be a leader if he believes so. He just needs to understand what the true meaning of leadership is.
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In this episode, the guest Paul Crocker tells his inspiring Maintenance and Reliability Engineering journey. He is an Uptime award holder in the innovative use of photography for maintenance in the Kansas City. He has been taking pictures of every equipment in the workshops, in the field, and everywhere he can. These pictures have worked like a living notebook for him—just a much better to look at, kind of. He suggests it to his coworkers and trains people to do the same as pictures of issues that an engineer faces in routine, failure data and equipment information can be pretty useful sometimes.
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