Leadership vs. Management in Manufacturing: Expert Insights from 30 Years on the Factory Floor
Ever promote your top performer… only to watch them struggle with their new team?
It happens all the time in manufacturing. The best process managers get promoted — and suddenly, nothing moves. The team avoids risk. Projects stall. Everything’s “checked off,” but nothing improves.
I talked to someone who’s lived and solved that exact challenge: Rich Nave, COO at Luminous Group. With 30+ years in manufacturing, from process engineer to overseeing three plants, Rich knows why great operators don’t always make great leaders.
Here’s what Rich taught me about the traps manufacturers fall into, the concrete difference between guiding people and governing processes, and his dead-simple rule for knowing which hat to wear.
We surveyed 1,000 manufacturing professionals to better understand how quality is perceived. See the results in our research report: Are Leaders and Frontline Teams Aligned?
The Difference Between Leadership and Management
Rich broke it down simply: “Leadership deals with guiding and inspiring individuals and teams to accomplish a goal. Managing involves overseeing and optimizing aspects of that process to reach that goal.”
What Leadership Actually Looks Like
That distinction clicked when Rich walked through how he onboarded a group of new hires tasked with tightening bolts. Not exactly a job that screams inspiration, right?
But instead of jumping straight into metrics, Rich framed the bigger picture: “Our company manufactures a really critical aspect of vehicles, and without our product being right, the vehicle will not stop. People could be injured because of this. We’re really counting on you as our employees to get this right so that everybody is safe,” Rich said.
When Management Takes Over
Management comes in with the process: tracking the task, looking at execution, monitoring inputs like the torque gun and bolts, measuring how many parts per hour, tracking good parts versus bad parts, and calculating all those labor-per-part ratios we live by.
The same mindset shift shows up with collaborative robotics — what Rich calls “Cobo.” A management approach asks, “How many people will this robot eliminate?” A leadership approach asks, “How will this robot make our people more efficient?” Same technology, completely different mindset.
Leadership and management are different levers. Leaders who view their role as serving the team build trust and create the space for real improvement.
The Hidden Costs Rich Sees Every Day
When you over-manage and under-lead, three critical things happen that hurt your operation:
- People stop taking risks because they feel like everything gets evaluated and measured, so they can’t afford any missteps.
- People start operating as individuals instead of working as a team.
- You lose what Rich calls a “culture of challenge” — people just do what they’re told without questioning whether there’s a better way.
Submit the form, swap the part number, call it done. It looks like work — but it masks inaction. Rich calls it “pencil whip,” and it’s precisely what happens when teams feel managed instead of led.
A Real-World Example: The Dusty 3D Printer
He shared a perfect example from a recent plant visit. Rich was touring the plant when he spotted something odd — sitting in the corner was a 3D printer with what had to be an inch of dust on it.
“I’m kind of a nerd about that stuff,” Rich told me, “so I asked the guy showing me around, ‘What do you do with that?’ And he just said, ‘Nothing.'”
Nothing? Rich pressed him on it. Turns out, the company had bought this equipment, but they didn’t buy the CAD software to go with it or the right material that matched what they actually process. When engineers did manage to produce parts, they couldn’t use them for real testing.
“Even when we did produce things, we couldn’t really use them for testing,” the employee explained to Rich.
The problem wasn’t the technology — it was leadership. No one inspired the team to solve the CAD software challenge or work through the material compatibility issues. A real leader would have said, “Okay, we’ve got some pushback here. Why do you need this material? Let’s identify what our real needs are and figure out how to get there.”
Rich says: “Do I want them to be calculated risks? Yes. Do I want them to be well-supported risks? Yes. But I need them to take risks. If you get 60% of the way there, you’re not criticized for that other 40%. You’re recognized for the 60% that you achieved and supported to get that other 40% accomplished.”
Framework for When to Lead vs. Manage
When I pressed Rich for something practical I could use immediately, he gave me the simplest rule I’ve ever heard for making this decision: “If you’re dealing with people, you need to be a leader. If you’re dealing with a process, you need to be a manager.”
Straightforward, but powerful — especially when you see how it plays out in real operations.
Rich shared a simple but great example: A plant manager walked into a work cell and asked an operator if his son was ready for the state wrestling championship. That’s leadership — showing someone they’re valued as a person, not just a production unit.
But that same plant manager also tracked production metrics, monitored quality numbers, and ensured the cell hit its targets. That’s management, and it’s equally important.
The key is knowing when to switch. Whether leading a kaizen event or managing throughput, the job is about moving people and processes in the right direction.
The Path Forward
Leadership versus management’s challenge lies in cultivating skill sets and understanding when each is most effective.
The manufacturing professionals who succeed can do both. They inspire teams to want to improve and track the metrics that prove improvement is happening.
Rich’s journey from a process engineer to a COO shows that both skills are completely learnable. You don’t have to be born with some special leadership gene. You just need to recognize that managing processes and leading people require different approaches, which are critical for manufacturing success.
If you want to hear Rich’s complete story, including the hockey fight that taught him about having his team’s back and how he turned around a failing APQP process by learning to lead instead of just manage, listen to the full episode here.
