One of the latest unfortunate trends in maintenance and reliability is to take shortcuts. This approach, which rarely succeeds, is often determined at the senior leadership level without all the knowledge necessary to make an educated decision. Eventually, these leaders will be faced with a hard choice: remain victims of their bad decisions or take ownership and repair the damage.

This article will outline what maintenance and reliability professionals can do to educate their organizations to prevent these failed initiatives. By learning why all reliability efforts must start with informed and qualified leaders, as well as what it takes to embody an owner mindset, those responsible can build reliability wins across the company.

What Leaders Should Start and Stop Doing

With increasing pressure to do more with less, leaders are bombarded by the need to change how they think. To lead organizational change, leaders must identify what habits and practices to eliminate. The difficulty lies in this process often being more complex than it appears. 

Many leaders must manage both up and down the chain of command. They may find themselves in an organization unprepared for a communication approach that is vastly different from anything they have seen before. When senior leaders lack leadership skills, properly educating them may be necessary before implementing the following recommendations.

What to Stop Doing

There are four things all leaders should stop doing to become more effective:

Stop Blindly Relying on Best Practices

Sometimes best practices can defend the status quo and limit innovation by ensuring people and processes follow the same practices without considering the individual needs of a specific machine or facility. By simply adopting the same practices as others, a particular facility’s operations cannot be distinguished as being ‘better.’

Visionary leaders take best practices and work to innovate beyond them, constantly seeking the next level of best practices. If a leader chooses to do something simply because others are doing it the same way, they concede advantages and opportunities to competitors who opt for creativity and innovation over complacency. Authentic leadership is not about copying – it's about creating.

Stop Cutting Costs Rather than Making Quality Investments

It is often impractical to beat the competition to the future by spending less than they do; instead, getting ahead requires making more strategic investments. Companies that surpass the competition focus less on risk and more on opportunity. They are less concerned with controlling expenditure and more about finding new ways to create greater returns on investment.

To achieve this, a leader’s duty is not only to leverage their people but also to establish more leverage for them. This includes resisting corporate pressures that expect team members to do more with less and instead finding ways to provide them with resource advantages. There is a big difference between haphazard cost-cutting and reducing expenditures by improving reliability. Sometimes, a lack of resources boils down to a lack of resourcefulness.

Stop Glorifying the Few

Leadership is not just a position or title. Often, the most successful organizations are those where all team members view themselves as leaders; it is not a job reserved only for a select few who preside over the masses. Leadership that cannot be transferred, scaled, repeated, or sustained is not leadership.

Keep in mind that if team members are told often enough that they are not leaders, they may begin to believe it and act accordingly. A leader’s job is not to repress others from becoming leaders themselves but to establish and foster ubiquitous leadership. This requires developing an organizational foundation that defines leadership fundamentals in all team members, regardless of their position on the organizational chart.

Stop Being Unwilling to Change

Leaders are facing an unprecedented time of exponential change, and the rate of change is beginning to overtake most leaders’ ability to learn new skills and unlearn habits that no longer serve them. Most leaders strive to stay current, and if they dwell in the past, their organizations will be forced to navigate an uncertain and challenging path to the future.

To overcome this, leadership training must involve development. Do not just train leaders – mentor, coach, and develop them. While training instills a strong base of knowledge and best practices, development moves beyond this to individualize the experience to specific facilities and problems. While training is a more standardized necessity, development takes the information and adds a contextual, collaborative, and fluid element necessary for successful implementation.

What to Start Doing: Taking Ownership

By stopping practices that do not add value, leaders free up time to implement positive actions that benefit the entire facility. The key to adding value is abandoning a victim mindset and opting for one of ownership.

Start Taking Ownership

The ability to lead successfully is dependent upon taking ownership. Leaders must make many decisions throughout the day, and they constantly stand at either a conscious or unconscious nexus of choice; they must respond as either a victim or an owner.

The critical nature of these decisions cannot be overemphasized. Even seemingly immaterial choices represent pivotal moments where choosing to adopt a victim or owner mentality can have rippling effects. An owner takes charge of the issue and its outcomes by taking intentional action rather than being complacently influenced.

Reliability leadership is all about making decisions. The only way to accomplish this is to have the relevant experience to draw upon when making these decisions. Acquiring the necessary knowledge and experience requires a carefully curated mix of training, development, and hands-on experience. There are no shortcuts to becoming a quality leader; it will take time, hard work, and dedication.

Organizations that do not provide these learning opportunities are setting up their team members for failure. They must have the proper knowledge in order to develop the confidence needed to take ownership of any given situation.

Start Developing an Owner Mentality

“Owner” and “victim” are not characteristics but represent contrasting mental approaches; they are different ways of looking at the world, and each delivers dramatically different results. When adopting a victim mentality, leaders relinquish their power and become ineffective in their positions. As owners, leaders retain their power and create compounding benefits for the entire facility.

Often, the difference between these mentalities is how a problem is tackled. For instance, when confronted with an issue surrounding insufficient time or money for accomplishing a task, a victim might respond, “How do they expect us to accomplish this?” while owners might respond, “Here is what we can do given these constraints.” Instead of focusing solely on the problems, owners find solutions that work toward accomplishing the task and mitigate the existing constraints.

A significant milestone in developing an ownership mentality is recognizing when victim thinking is occurring. It is not natural to be in an ownership state all the time; the victim mentality will occasionally slip out. The key to overcoming this is to be aware of when the victim mentality is happening and to shift into a state of ownership.

In addition, leaders with ownership mindsets do not wait for situations to arise before reacting—they approach each moment in life as an opportunity to continue strengthening their ownership. This allows them to not just react appropriately but also get ahead of any potential situations to mitigate their effects.

While owner and victim mentalities are not identities, they can define a leader’s identity for better or worse. When leaders respond as victims, they feel that situations are overwhelming and cannot be influenced or changed. This can lead to a lack of accountability for any consequences due to missed opportunities to take proactive action. This mentality can also put leaders in a state where they fail to actively work on problems, goals, and challenges because they adopt an internal monologue that tells them they cannot make a difference and that there are no opportunities for success through innovation.

Start Thinking Like an Owner

Everyone has the capacity for both victim and owner mindsets, and it’s rarely a one-or-the-other situation but a combination of both. The important aspect to remember is that no one is permanently forced into either; it is a daily decision on which mentality wins out. Developing the ownership muscle allows leaders to act calmly and effectively in the face of adversity.

Leaders who take ownership are constantly looking for opportunities to take action. They know that the right thing is usually not easy, and they do not look for it to be. When faced with an obstacle, they figure it out and overcome it. Owners focus on values that drive success and learn from past lessons to expand their knowledge and expertise. Often, the enjoyment of overcoming obstacles is greater than the difficulties encountered.

However, due to increasing organizational focus on the bottom line, less emphasis is placed on supporting leadership development, thereby allowing victim mentalities to grow unfettered. It is not uncommon to see organizations undervalue maintenance while striving for increased reliability. However, true reliability leaders are critical in helping organizations achieve increased reliability. These leaders must think like owners to help change the facility’s course and create a win-win situation for everyone.  

This paper was provided as supporting materials for Dr. Wright's speaking session at the Reliable Plant Conference. To learn more about attending Reliable Plant Conference, click here.