Podcast: One expert’s insights on coaching, reliability culture, and overcoming maintenance challenges

Anna Townsend: We like to talk about what went wrong. We like fails, I guess, around here. And I mean that half joking and half serious. When I think of fails, I think of those internet videos, funny videos of people falling and hurting themselves, and I do think those definitely have a place in our society.

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But for us, we're talking about fails are all the things that can go wrong in operations and maintenance. And Joe, you offer your own fails up for critique. And we anonymously talk about your clients and people that you work with, but you offer failure points as a means of learning. But everybody loves a fail, and sometimes I think you learn more that way.

Joe Kuhn: You definitely remember them longer.

AT: Joe, one of your articles this summer addresses some important management tactics for times of failure. It's easy to be a manager when things are going great, but what about when things aren't going so well? How do you respond? And you laid out a specific example in this article, and you got a call from a maintenance manager who had an equipment failure at his plant, terrible event.

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So, it was a misdiagnosis by the maintenance tech that caused the failure, a bearing issue on a conveyor was misdiagnosed as a problem with the chain, and it caused eight hours of unplanned downtime. No good. So, this maintenance manager wanted to know, you know, should he discipline this tech? How should he discipline the tech? You know, how should he react as a manager in the event, at the moment and after the fact. Joe, what do you think?

JK: I think most of this audience, if you're in a maintenance leadership role, you've been there, you've seen this experience, and this call that I've got hit a nerve with me, because I've done it wrong so many times. As a manager, something fails and you disappointed the team, the production team, the plant management team, vice president team, you've disappointed everybody. You want to react to that, and a common reaction is, ‘Hey, I'm going to bring in that person and discipline, and that'll make me feel better.’ We’ve put the blame on that person for doing a poor job, and we'll move forward from there.

And that's what I did for years, I may say, decades. Probably not decades, but here's a question that changed how I manage these situations, and it's a question I asked myself, what would I do differently? If I assumed this person wanted to come to work today and do a good job, they wanted to do a good job, what would I do differently if I assumed the greatest of intentions?

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And that was very impactful, like I said, and the thing I realized is everybody that became a technician, they want to do a good job. They want to use their skills. They want the equipment to run well. But for some reason, on that particular day, something went wrong.

OK, so what's the right way to treat that individual, to lead toward the culture I was trying to create. The culture I was trying to create. I used the term a reliability culture. What that means is people do work efficiently. They do problem-solving. We’re structured in how we do work. There are work orders. We execute work; we plan.

Everybody has a good understanding of how equipment fails, how to install a bearing, how to lubricate it. Just as an example, there's just alignment in the whole organization and giving discipline to an individual really has a much higher percent chance of taking a big leap away from reliability culture.

So, once I ask that question of, ‘Hey, what would I do if I assume this person wanted to do a great job today. I start thinking about other options, like, well, why don't I sit down with this individual and find out, what they learned? 99% chance they're going to feel horrible about this. OK, so you don't need to discipline somebody if they already feel horrible. You can ask them to share that with the team. Say you have 20 technicians at your plant. What did they learn? What did they do? What are you going to do differently in the future?

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Maybe you can ask them to be an equipment owner. ‘Hey, I want you to own conveyors. I want you to own motors. I want you to own pump rebuilds because you learned this lesson. You have a great opportunity of advancing the culture instead of setting it back.’

And that took me a lot of years to figure that out. If you do go down the discipline path, play that out a little bit. You may feel better in the moment. You've fixed blame on that, but guess what the technicians are going to do going forward?

They're all going to not make less decisions. They're going to make less decisions because they want to run it up the flagpole. ‘Hey, I'm going to ask my supervisor this. I'm going to ask for the engineer. I'm going to ask for management. You tell me what to do so I don't get in trouble.’ And that's exactly the wrong direction.