Leadership in Manufacturing: The Criticality of Purpose, Systems & Ideal Behaviors

Transcript

[00:01:02] Josh Santo: Hey everyone. We’ve got a great episode coming up for you. Our next guest is a seasoned leader with more than 25 years of experience in manufacturing, driving operational excellence, sustainability, and large scale transformation For one of the most recognized names in manufacturing three. Over the course of her career, she’s led global manufacturing and supply chain operations spanning dozens of sites and billions in annual revenue.

[00:01:28] Josh Santo: She’s guided three M’s. Enterprise Lean Six Sigma and Operations Strategy, and helped design and roll out the 3M execution system, which is a framework developed in collaboration with more than 200 facilities worldwide to connect strategy to execution. She’s also a leader in three M’S efforts to reduce its environmental footprint while expanding the positive impact of its products and partnerships.

[00:01:54] Josh Santo: She’s a passionate advocate, known for servant leadership and continuous improvement, and she’s also known for empowering teams to achieve excellence through people. Process and purpose. Currently serving the teams at 3M as Senior Vice President of Business Supply Chain, and president of 3M Chemical Operations.

[00:02:14] Josh Santo: Please welcome to the show Dr. Rebecca Teeters.

[00:02:17] Josh Santo: Becca, thanks for being here.

[00:02:19] Rebecca Teeters: Thanks, Josh. Happy to be here.

[00:02:21] Josh Santo: Yeah. Happy to have you here. And I’m just getting my radio voice tuned up to get ready to go.

[00:02:26] Rebecca Teeters: Mine’s not ready, but you go for it.

[00:02:28] Josh Santo: Uh, yeah. I’ll get us started here ’cause we’re talking about a lot today. A number of different topics. Really excited to get into them. We’re covering leadership in manufacturing.

[00:02:37] Josh Santo: We’re talking about the role of management systems, and what I’m really excited to dig in with you about is what it takes to get ideal results. But before we get into any of that, we’d like to level set, understand your point of view and where you’re coming from. You are. in manufacturing, you’re the senior Vice President of Business Supply Chain and president of 3M Chemical Operations.

[00:03:01] Josh Santo: So you are a leader within a global manufacturing segment of a multi-billion dollar company. What does a typical day look like for you?

[00:03:13] Rebecca Teeters: Yeah, so for me, most of my time is spent with a team that’s split between the US and Europe. So I’m a very early riser just because Europe tends to be ahead of me. so I’m usually up and on the phone by about six 30 in the morning. And I tend to start my day with kind of standard work meetings with my team.

[00:03:35] Rebecca Teeters: So a 15 minute overview with my team where we talk about, you know, did we win the day yesterday? If we won the day, what did we learn so we can win the day tomorrow if we didn’t win the day. what do we learn to improve our systems so we don’t have the same issues again? And then a series of standard meetings around.

[00:03:52] Rebecca Teeters: What we call, you know, moving the business forward. So critical projects that are underway that are gonna help us move our business forward. So that’s usually how I start my day, is those critical, standard work meetings with my team. Did we win the day and are we moving the business forward at pace?

[00:04:10] Rebecca Teeters: And then the rest of the day can take many forms. It’s often, meetings with the enterprise supply chain leadership team on very strategic activities at an enterprise level. Could be big project meetings, could be site visits, which are my favorite thing to do, to be out in the sites and spend time with the team.

[00:04:29] Rebecca Teeters: But it’s usually very, comprised of a variety of, different meetings or different site visits or activities to just check in with the team and make certain that we’re moving forward. I tend then to, make my way home around, I don’t know, around five o’clock in the evening and I, I try very diligently to take a few hours in the evening to just really decompress and.

[00:04:53] Rebecca Teeters: Spend some time working on, the standard work for my own humanity, if you will, to, try to find as much, peace and balance as I can with the type of career that we’re dealing with. But that’s a typical day for me. yeah, that’s a typical day for me.

[00:05:08] Josh Santo: There’s, some good things in there that I would love to ask a couple of follow up questions on. You started out with, the idea of standard work meetings, and really what you’re looking to evaluate with your team is did you win the day? And I would love if you could define for us what your perspective is on winning the day.

[00:05:26] Josh Santo: What does that mean?

[00:05:28] Rebecca Teeters: Yeah, so it’s absolutely important by the way, that any organization. Understand what it looks like to win the day, win the week, win the month, win the quarter, win the year, right? You have to know that. And it’s typically around the safety, quality service cost, cash categories. Did we have, so we ask ourselves a question we have identified, this is an in, you know, what we call thermostatic metrics.

[00:05:56] Rebecca Teeters: and by that, you want to be able to have a metric that will give you guidance on how to make changes. So you want it to be more like a thermostat than a thermometer. Right? Thermometer tells me the temperature of the room. That’s great, but really what I want, our thermostatic metrics, metrics that I can actually use to adjust the temperature in the room.

[00:06:17] Rebecca Teeters: So we define what those metrics are that help guide us. Did we win the day? If we won the day, if we had a great day and everything turned out the way we wanted it to, we ask ourselves the question. Did we learn something from that? That helps us increase the probability? We’ll have the same day tomorrow or the same week next week if we didn’t win the day, if someone was injured on the job or we had a major piece of equipment that experienced extensive downtime or whatever it might be, then we have the quick systemic discussion, which system failed us.

[00:06:54] Rebecca Teeters: And who has accountability for the after action review and solving this problem and improving the system. These aren’t problem solving meetings. At least we try not to make them problem solving meetings because we’re not reaching down into the organization, telling the organization how to solve problems.

[00:07:10] Rebecca Teeters: But we are ensuring that the problems have been, I’ve identified someone is, has been assigned accountability, and then we have an action register for when we expect to have an answer to, you know. What escalation was brought forward that day?

[00:07:25] Josh Santo: So in that case, you, you’re really just looking for visibility, right? What happened? I need to know, especially if there’s any obstacles or anything that you have to do to make sure your team is back to winning the day.

[00:07:36] Rebecca Teeters: Yeah, it’s a fundamental accountability meeting. What was it? The Oz Principle. see it, own it, solve it, do it. Right. So in any one of these meetings, we have to be able to see that we have an issue. So we have a dynamic dashboard of some nature. We assign ownership, that person has responsibility and we go get it done.

[00:07:53] Rebecca Teeters: And that is what, how we drive accountability rather than, kind of the legacy punitive accountability. we will follow up with you if you don’t hit your numbers at the end of the month and we will, hold you accountable. We try to drive accountability through daily standard work and, a management system that instills accountability in the organization.

[00:08:12] Josh Santo: Interesting. Accountability is such an interesting topic. I was speaking with a former plant manager not too long ago. He had a very strong perspective on the topic of accountability. It was her, it was his perspective that you cannot hold someone accountable. Instead, you have to inspire them to be accountable.

[00:08:33] Josh Santo: I, I see you shaking your head. Does that resonate with you in, in your approach?

[00:08:37] Rebecca Teeters: right? you can’t for True accountability is when every individual in the organization chooses to take accountability for doing what needs to be done. And you do that by, again, see it, own it, solve it, do it. If people have visibility to the important thermostatic metrics so they can see if they’re winning or they’re losing, then they can choose to take ownership.

[00:09:04] Rebecca Teeters: They can solve problems, and they can get work done. Holding someone accountable is a very antiquated idea of, well, I’ll punish you later if you don’t hit a number. I don’t think that’s what leaders today really mean. They want an organization. That naturally takes accountability, but it’s really important that your management system enables them to do so.

[00:09:30] Rebecca Teeters: Otherwise you put them in a situation where they can’t effectively take accountability. and obviously that demotivates them to do the type of, accountability work that we ultimately want them to do.

[00:09:43] Josh Santo: It seems like in, in talking with him, one of his perspectives on. What it takes to inspire people, enable people to take accountability, was showing that, it matters. Whatever the action is, the action matters, and that it matters that they are the ones to do the action. It sounds to me like this, the, the standard work meetings in which you’re checking in with the team, did we win?

[00:10:05] Josh Santo: Did we lose? Regardless of the answer to that, what did we learn? What are we gonna do better? How are we gonna maintain it That. To me, it seems like you demonstrating this is important, we need to come together and prioritize this, and sometimes that’s what it takes, is just setting aside the time, the discipline, the early mornings to say, as a team, the goal that we need to accomplish, and we all have to be accountable for the individual actions that must come together to make that happen.

[00:10:37] Rebecca Teeters: Exactly well said.

[00:10:40] Josh Santo: Well, you mentioned some of this, but in part of understanding your role, I’m curious about which metrics or KPIs are you focused on managing or improving?

[00:10:54] Rebecca Teeters: So the categories we already mentioned, right? So environmental health and safety would be the primary category, quality service, cost, or productivity, depending on how you wanna categorize it. And then our inventory or cash position. to take it down, you know, we obviously have many leading and lagging indicators, and those metrics will change based off location in some degree, to make certain that we’re, again, creating that thermostatic, metric that’s gonna guide behavior and change versus just looking at a dashboard full of numbers.

[00:11:28] Rebecca Teeters: But it would be, from a lagging perspective, we’ll look at our incident rate, our incident count, The severity of our incidences. We monitor our air and water emissions and discharges to understand if we are living up to our environmental responsibilities. Uh, we look at our customer complaints and our cost of quality.

[00:11:50] Rebecca Teeters: We look at our. On time in full, but also our lines not late From more of a leading indicator perspective. From a cost perspective, we will tend to look at the OEE of our major assets and then the ratio of our, shipments to, or our production rate, to our labor hours. And then we tend to look from an inventory per perspective at our terms, how quickly we’re turning the inventory across our.

[00:12:18] Rebecca Teeters: Or at a given factory or at across a specific supply chain. And then again, based on the type of manufacturing, the leading indicators might be a little bit different. Rather, we’re looking at yield, or we’re looking at machine rate, or we’re looking at a variety of different things. So we tailor that and in many cases, we allow the team to tailor the metrics. That they believe will give them the guidance they need to be most successful versus me dictating metrics, for them because it’s imperative, again, for them to have accountability. They need to believe that they are playing a winnable game. They need a metric, they have control over that they can change and improve themselves.

[00:13:04] Rebecca Teeters: And sometimes if you’re too far removed from the process, you can assign metrics that aren’t meaningful to them.

[00:13:12] Josh Santo: And I, I would imagine then that au autonomy that you described of, of them identifying the metrics. That’s, that’s the kind of a secret to buy-in, right? That’s that autonomy. You get to decide, you know, what the goals are. You help us achieve those goals in the way that you see the best way to pursue that.

[00:13:31] Rebecca Teeters: Right. I mean, each factory, each major asset in my factories has also a, a warning standard work meeting, right? So, but they should decide for, to get safety, quality service, cost, cash on your asset. What are the critical variables you need to control and you need to improve? We would let them design that.

[00:13:54] Rebecca Teeters: Connecting it back to what are the overarching, higher level business metrics that we’re trying to impact, but it gives them that autonomy and that ownership to define what they’re trying to control in order to drive improvement.

[00:14:09] Josh Santo: and you know, like we talked about that, autonomy and ownership being critical to that accountability, which we described before as being essential to winning the day.

[00:14:20] Rebecca Teeters: Right. There’s one thing that I see in daily standard work meetings that you need to track what you talk about and talk about what you track. Okay? So your crew supervisors, they know what to talk about in order to know if their line is running well, right? They know whether it was, you know, unplanned downtime or.

[00:14:45] Rebecca Teeters: Equipment, reliability or lack of labor. They know what’s important to optimizing the vulnerability of their asset. So they need to track what they talk about and talk about what they track. If we force them to track things that they wouldn’t naturally talk about to improve their process, that’s not adding value to a daily standard work meeting.

[00:15:08] Rebecca Teeters: So we need them to be very thoughtful and think through what is it that we really need to talk about every day to know if we’re winning or losing, driving the business forward. And then they decide what metrics they track and how they go about that.

[00:15:22] Josh Santo: Got it. Okay. But, you know, it’s, it’s interesting, uh, I mentally, I’m kind of torn between concepts and I’m hoping you can maybe straighten out of perspective for me the idea of autonomy and ownership. I love it. You come forth, you bring the ideas, track what you talk about and talk about what you track.

[00:15:43] Josh Santo: But I love those ideas. But on the flip side, I have to imagine that there is a need for some pretty consistent, this is the way that we track it and have that be consistent across, you know, different lines, facilities. Regions, et cetera, et cetera. So how do you balance, how do you balance this approach of autonomy and ownership for accountability and standardization of this is how we do things, and it needs to be this way because ultimately it does make things more, more accurate, more, I don’t wanna say easier to manage, but just more consistent.

[00:16:24] Rebecca Teeters: Yeah. I mean, this is kind of the paradox of standard work, right? Standard work in general. So we would say, listen, you need to measure OEE for every asset. You’re gonna measure your OEE, and we have a standard way to measure OEE, and we can then track across multiple factories and compare like equipment and so on and so forth.

[00:16:49] Rebecca Teeters: But then when we get down to the actual asset level and we say, but you need to improve your OEE by five points, 10 points, whatever that number might be, they can then decide, well, what’s most relevant for me is availability, performance, or quality. So what leading indicators are they gonna have the autonomy to choose and track to drive improvement?

[00:17:12] Rebecca Teeters: But ultimately that lagging indicator of OEE, everybody’s measuring OEE and everybody’s measuring it in a very similar way. But I wouldn’t say to, factory a, for example, you need to improve your quality by 10 points when they’re already at 99% quality, you know, first pass rate. It’s their availability where they, you know, they have 50% unplanned downtime that they’re really struggling with, so they get to decide.

[00:17:39] Rebecca Teeters: What’s the leading indicator that is going to connect to the standardized lagging indicator that we all measure and that we’re driving improvement with that leading indicator, and then it’s informing the actions that the team needs to take. Right? We don’t, I don’t want to give them metrics that they don’t need to talk about in order to learn and to get better every day.

[00:18:08] Josh Santo: Okay. Interesting. I think that’s a interesting thing to explore. You’ve got the standards, you’ve got the standardization, but you’re still allowing for that autonomy, which another way that I interpret that is variability, which does go a little bit against the idea of, of standard. I, I guess the difference is, within an acceptable bucket of sorts, right?

[00:18:33] Josh Santo: Like, here’s your options on the menu. You choose which option?

[00:18:37] Rebecca Teeters: Right, and we, asked them to demonstrate the connectivity, right? So if you’re gonna choose to track your first pass quality rate because you think that’s the most relevant leading indicator to your overall OEE. Demonstrate that connectivity for me, and if you can demonstrate that connectivity, this is why we think this is most important to us.

[00:18:59] Rebecca Teeters: All right, giddy up. Let’s do that. Let you know. Show me how that works. If they can’t demonstrate the connectivity and they’re simply defaulting to a metric that they feel comfortable with or that they think is easy, then of course we would challenge that and say, that’s not going to drive the business forward.

[00:19:15] Rebecca Teeters: the way we would like to, but it’s really important that they have the autonomy to design their own daily standard work around asking themselves, did we win or lose? and part of it is the process of designing that management meeting. Educates them on what winning and losing looks like and how to drive improvement and how to drive change.

[00:19:42] Josh Santo: It reminds me of a quote I read somewhere where, if you give a man an answer. Then he has a fact. But if you give him a question, then he learns to think kind of thing. I’m butchering the quote, but it, that’s

[00:19:56] Rebecca Teeters: Oh, it’s absolutely that way, right? I mean, the value of. Building a strategic plan is the process of building the strategic plan, right? The question of what is your strategy to drive growth by some percentage or this, that, or the other? It’s asking that question, and then the process of researching the answer and formulating a plan that adds value.

[00:20:18] Rebecca Teeters: The final document is often of not that much value. It’s the process of deriving it that is of the greatest value.

[00:20:26] Josh Santo: Yeah, it reminds me the, the last guest that we had on, he described a scenario, he got promoted out of his peers to be in charge, of this group. And at the time he was newer, so they knew a lot more than he did. And he, by nature had to take the, this position where if they came to him with a problem, he would then.

[00:20:46] Josh Santo: So what do you think we should do to solve it? and I asked him about, you know, ’cause he is reflecting on his career. He’s close to retirement now. And one of these things he mentioned was that over time he lost that approach. He started giving answers as opposed to asking people to go through that process that you described.

[00:21:02] Josh Santo: And, he mentioned that was the one thing that he would, would’ve changed. and it’s, I think it’s just interesting that I just learned. That lesson from someone, and here it is kind of coming up again of you may know the answers, they may be able to go and say, Becca, we’re struggling with this problem.

[00:21:17] Josh Santo: What should we do? But to get them in a point where they’re able to sustainably tackle these types of problems and other problems that may pop up. Forcing them to come with that pro or go through that process of figuring it out, to develop them. Interesting.

[00:21:34] Rebecca Teeters: Yeah. I mean, let’s be real. There’s a time and place for both, right? There are a time and place when you’re gonna say, this is the answer. Here we go. And there’s a place when it’s the, the process of discovery that adds the greatest value.

[00:21:45] Josh Santo: Yeah, that’s fair. You gotta know when to pull one out versus the other. For sure.

[00:21:50] Speaker 3: It is time for an ad break. Now, unlike other shows, our ads aren’t advertisements. Our ads are advice, quick tips and insights from your fellow manufacturing pros in the shop floor top floor community. Here’s the one now.

[00:22:07] Speaker 4: Hello everyone. Ed Rocha here and the customer quality director for Sheer in North America.

[00:22:14] Speaker 4: And I was challenged to come up with an advice for the listeners. So I’m gonna steal a quote from a Brazilian philosopher. And yes, there is such a thing as a Brazilian philosopher. Stop laughing about it. It’s true. It’s real. The guy says the following, do the best you can with the resources you have while you don’t have more resources to do even better.

[00:22:42] Speaker 4: And again, I’ll repeat that so we can absorb. Do the best you can. With the resources you have until you have more resources to do even better. I think that hopefully stops us from crying that, well, I can’t get anything done. I don’t have the resource, I don’t have the, the power, the authority to get things done.

[00:23:05] Speaker 4: Do the best you can with what you have today, and that will most likely, naturally lead you to. Being given more resource to accomplish even higher goals. So do the best you can with the resource you have until you have more resource to do even better. Thank you.

[00:23:23] Josh Santo: I wanna talk, we’re already kind of getting into this. I wanna talk about leadership in depth, and I wanna start with. Your perspective on leadership in manufacturing, what do you think is needed from a manufacturing leader and how does that factor into how you lead your organization?

[00:23:43] Rebecca Teeters: So putting aside the. We can come back to this if we want to, but putting aside the kind of general IQ and EQ that are really important to any great leader, right? You have to be smart. You have to be able to relate to yourself and relate to people in order to have leadership influence. I think one of the, and one of the pieces that’s really missing in, in manufacturing these days is good.

[00:24:09] Rebecca Teeters: systemic principle based. Systemic design capability. Now, let me, try to describe what I mean by that. So, the CEO of, Pal’s, sudden Service, his name is Tom Crosby. brilliant individual who’s the best I’ve ever seen I, I’ve ever met in this space. And he had a brilliant mind for. Systemic design and he defined excellence as getting the work a hundred percent right?

[00:24:40] Rebecca Teeters: A hundred percent of the time. Even at a hundred percent demand on the organization’s time. Right. so in so doing, you know, his logic was okay, that’s the ideal result. A hundred percent right? A hundred percent of the time, even at a hundred percent demand on your time Amid, again, Powell’s Sudden Service is a quick service restaurant.

[00:25:01] Rebecca Teeters: You know, it’s like a McDonald’s or a, you know, they’re, they’re a quick service restaurant, so you can imagine what it looks like for them to get the work. A hundred percent right. And then he said, okay, that’s the ideal result. And that ideal result requires ideal behaviors. So every associate on the shop floor.

[00:25:19] Rebecca Teeters: Needs to be able to demonstrate ideal behaviors at all time, purpose and systems or systemic design drive behaviors and principles, informed behaviors. So he was a genius at designing systems, tools, processes, practices, so on and so forth. A combination of all these elements. To get the ideal behavior out of every associate, every time to get the ideal result. And he understood the principles of operational excellence and there’s 10 of them. But things like creating value for the customer, focus on the process, embrace scientific thinking, flow and pull value, assure quality at the source, seek perfection. There’s 10 fundamental. Principles of operational excellence that told him this is what ideal behavior looks like.

[00:26:13] Rebecca Teeters: And he was great at building systems to get the ideal behavior out of every associate a hundred percent of the time. And by doing so, was the best performing, has been the best performing quick service restaurant in the world in history. So what’s the trick here that most leaders don’t understand is how to build great systems.

[00:26:37] Rebecca Teeters: So they might be really intelligent, whatever their education is in whatever physical science or business or whatever, and they’re extremely emotionally intelligent and connect well with people. But how do you design a manufacturing system to scale ideal behaviors? hundred percent of the time is a skill set that most manufacturing leaders don’t have.

[00:27:05] Rebecca Teeters: And that’s something that we need to decide. we don’t need to decide. We need to action as the, you know, I would say the trailing, generation of, of manufacturing leaders. We need to help instill that capability in the next generation of manufacturing leaders.

[00:27:23] Josh Santo: building great systems. Now, I’m curious, does that have to be a single individual who. Is doing all of this is, identifying what those ideal results are, identifying the principles that are gonna drive those ideal behaviors. Manufacturing, operational excellence. Okay, we’ve got a set. What does that mean?

[00:27:41] Josh Santo: What does that actually mean for our organization? What’s that look like in practice? My question to you, Becca, does that have to be a single person?

[00:27:50] Rebecca Teeters: Ideally not, right? Ideally it would not be, using a sports analogy. which I’ll probably butcher, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. You know, that would be the equivalent of having only the quarterback understands the playbook and only the quarterback understands the principles behind every play and when to call the plays and when to call an honorable the quarterback, as the leader of the team needs to be extremely well versed in the principles of the game.

[00:28:22] Rebecca Teeters: Right. He or she, I guess it would be a, he mostly in this particular analogy, they need to be well versed in the principles of the game and they need to know how to turn that into a great system. But the rest of the team needs to know how to play the game, and they need to know the principles and the connection to their systems.

[00:28:40] Rebecca Teeters: different players, different positions will understand a different perspective, and that would be the case in, I think, manufacturing and supply chain as well. You’ll have different perspectives. Not everybody will deeply understand every principle and how that manifests into great systemic design, but supply chain leadership in general needs to understand these principles and know how to do good systemic design.

[00:29:04] Josh Santo: I’m struck by, a course that I took in college. This was, I was a political science major. I have no idea how I ended up in the tech world, but that’s how it goes. Poli sci, we were studying presidential leadership and we discussed different categories of presidents. There was a. at the end of the day, and this was too long ago, there was a facilitator and there was a director approach more or less that this, author argued.

[00:29:31] Josh Santo: And the facilitator was more so getting people to work together, but not really, not not driving the change. The director. Came in and said, this is the change that must happen. Right. And I bring that up because one of the things that was critical was having a VP who could help drive towards that vision.

[00:29:52] Josh Santo: And I, I bring that up ’cause that’s what I’m remembering here in this conversation in, in which I ask, does, does this. Have to be one individual or is there a strong combo in someone setting the vision, understanding that the ideal results require the ideal behaviors, but recognizing we need to bring in the talent that can really drive the systems there.

[00:30:14] Josh Santo: And it sounds like that’s exactly, the perspective, understand the systems, but bring in the right people to help you build the systems.

[00:30:22] Rebecca Teeters: exactly. Exactly.

[00:30:24] Josh Santo: So ideal results require ideal behaviors, purpose and systems drive behavior principles inform ideal behaviors. And I wanna connect this for the audience and myself as well. We talked about, principles there towards the end. Operational excellence is a. Principle that you can put there that then determines the type of ideal behaviors that we have to have, or like you said, informs them ideal results.

[00:30:50] Josh Santo: Well, you gave the example the ideal results being 100% right. 100% of the time, even if we are 100% tapped out in our bandwidth, capability, et cetera. basically zero mistakes, no mistakes whatsoever. So that’s the ideal. And the. Behaviors, there’s gonna be behaviors needed to support that. And beha those behaviors are informed by those principles.

[00:31:14] Josh Santo: Now, purpose and systems purpose, when we say purpose is that individual contributors purpose, is that teams’ purpose, is that organizational, you know, we are the company that’s gonna change blank about the world. Talk to me a little bit about that concept of purpose here.

[00:31:35] Rebecca Teeters: Let me use a non-manufacturing example, to try to demonstrate ideal results, purpose and systems, and then principles. So let’s talk about. Driving to work every morning. We all do this, right? ideal behavior, I mean, the ideal results are we get there in one piece, we get there in a predetermined period of time, efficiently and effectively as possible.

[00:32:02] Rebecca Teeters: So we’re able to drive to work safely and efficiently in a predictable period of time. So in that particular case, that’s the ideal result. The purpose there really is, to get from point A to point B. It’s the out, it’s the purpose of that transaction at that moment is, I’m trying to get from point A to point B.

[00:32:23] Rebecca Teeters: the system, there’s a, a pretty substantial system that’s been derived around driving, right? And there’s all kinds of tools and visual aids and signals and everything that you’re immersed in this system of information the entire way that you’re driving to work now. Yesterday I was driving home from work and I got in my car and I’m driving out of the parking garage and, my, my car starts doing the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

[00:32:50] Rebecca Teeters: ’cause I didn’t put my seatbelt on, right? So that’s a signal in my system that says you’re not performing an ideal behavior. Ideal behavior is you always wear your seatbelt, right? So in order to get there safely, which is one of the outcomes that would make it ideal. I have a system that tells me, wear your seatbelt.

[00:33:10] Rebecca Teeters: Why do I wear a seatbelt? Well, the principle is, objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Okay? So there is a universal, timeless, self-evident law at the very bottom of this, a principle. Those are universal, timeless, self-evident laws that govern the consequence of a system. Newton’s first law of motion is a very good example, right?

[00:33:33] Rebecca Teeters: If you’re moving down the road and you stop quickly and you’re not wearing your seatbelt, you’re gonna keep moving. Right. Well, the Shingo Institute has de defined over basically almost a hundred years now of research that there are 10 fundamental principles, universal timeless, self-evident laws when you study organizations that achieve operational excellence.

[00:33:59] Rebecca Teeters: Now. Most companies don’t achieve perfection, but they operate at the top tier of their peer groups, right? So they’re considered operationally excellent. They demonstrate that consistently. When you study those companies, you find that there are 10 core principles they never violate, and they’ve designed their systems to inform ideal behavior in every associate every day in order to try to achieve that ideal result.

[00:34:26] Rebecca Teeters: So things like, quality at the source, quality at the source, companies that are operational operationally excellent are focused on creating quality at the source versus inspecting quality in at the end, right? And so their systems do not allow them to pass defects downstream. The system is designed.

[00:34:46] Rebecca Teeters: I’m not gonna let you pass it downstream ’cause I don’t wanna inspect it out at the end. We find it here, we’re gonna fix it. so that’s just an example of a principle rel related to a systemic design and a purpose, and ultimately to an ideal result.

[00:35:03] Josh Santo: Got it. Okay. Well, I appreciate that breakdown, but recap for the audience one more time. Ideal results require ideal behaviors, purpose and systems drive behavior principles inform ideal behaviors. Now, Becca, I’m curious, how do you take that concept and factor it into how you lead your teams?

[00:35:24] Rebecca Teeters: Yeah, so this is where I think, so I’ll tell you how I factor it in. In the role that I’m in now, and then I’ll talk, maybe describe how as a plant manager, my thought process might have been a little bit different, so I need to do better at this, which is why I am stammering a bit. It’s important that we ask systemic questions and that we’re coaching good systemic design as we’re leading and managing.

[00:35:55] Rebecca Teeters: So, for example, we spoke earlier about, you know, we ask ourselves the question every day, did we win the day yesterday? And so when you find out that you didn’t, let’s say you had a piece of equipment that was down for 24 hours, so that we need that equipment to be running, instead of saying, you know, what are we gonna do about it?

[00:36:20] Rebecca Teeters: Who owns it? What went wrong? Fix it, fix it, fix it. It’s more about what? What is it about our system that didn’t allow us to run successfully yesterday? Force people into the conversation of what system failed us. Was this a TPM system failure? Was this a labor system failure? We didn’t have labor to run the equipment.

[00:36:43] Rebecca Teeters: Tell me what about my, which system failed me or failed us? And then. There’s something about our systemic design that’s not driving the ideal behavior. What was that? And how do we fix it? So having the systemic conversation is very, very important. And you coach the systemic design logic while you’re having the troubleshooting and the problem solving conversation.

[00:37:17] Rebecca Teeters: Yes. It’s no different than, again, another sports analogy. If you coach ideal behaviors, real time in the game, chastising your players is of very little value to you in the middle of a game coaching, Hey, what happened? What can we do differently next time? And then guiding them, you know, if you were a little bit to the left.

[00:37:39] Rebecca Teeters: that would’ve maybe allowed you to see that a little bit differently. So you bring it back to the principle of alignment or something of that nature. But it’s that active coaching and having systemic conversation versus just firefighting that I think is most critical in how I try to manage my team so that we’re focused on building better systems to scale and sustain ideal results.

[00:38:07] Rebecca Teeters: Versus just firefighting in such a way that ultimately we’re back solving the same issue a few weeks or a few months from now.

[00:38:15] Josh Santo: Yeah. I, I had a couple of questions pop in my mind based on that, and I’m hoping I don’t lose them ’cause I can’t write ’em down fast enough. Well, I can’t help but, think of this word as you’re describing this, which is discipline. This requires a significant amount of discipline on, on your part really as the starting source is to, catch yourself, check yourself and force yourself into, if you having to force yourself, I don’t know that you are, but.

[00:38:41] Josh Santo: To ask these questions to, to come back to that principle of like, in this moment, I need to coach in this moment. I need to find out where they are and help them get where we all need to go. how do you keep that up over time?

[00:38:56] Rebecca Teeters: great question and I don’t always keep it up. I, like anyone else, will sometimes fall into barking orders and giving direction and not effectively coaching. There’s two ways that I try to keep it up. one way is my team, and I have a very strong relationship, they will tell me. And I ask them, tell me when I’m not coaching feedback to me, you know, try to bring me back into the moment because they feel it, right?

[00:39:31] Rebecca Teeters: If I’m barking at them, they feel it, it’s emotional for them. So they know to feed that back to me immediately. Can we have, can we talk about the system? Or they will just say, Hey, the system that failed us was right. So that’s part of the way, is it my team? I’ve specifically asked them to draw me back into the right behavior.

[00:39:53] Rebecca Teeters: The other thing I do, and maybe I shouldn’t tell this story, I’ll try to be quick, but I, I learned a story about nurses at a, a hospital where, you know, nurses go from meeting to meeting, to meeting to meeting all day long, and the subject of the meeting may change dramatically. They may be in a meeting with a hospital administrator talking about something, and then the next meeting they have.

[00:40:18] Rebecca Teeters: Is with a family whose child is in the final stages of a chronic, of terminal illness. The next meeting might be with another nurse. The next meeting might be with somebody who’s going into remission and meeting to meeting can be very difficult for them to show up the right way because they’re so torn and the topics are so diverse.

[00:40:37] Rebecca Teeters: And so they actually put a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer outside every room on the wall. So as a patient in this hospital, you would say, well, they’re just sanitizing their hands. But there’s three questions on the wall right above where they walk with this hand sanitizer. What is this meeting about?

[00:40:58] Rebecca Teeters: What is my purpose in the meeting and how do I need to show up? So they would put the hand sanitizer on their hands, and while they’re rubbing it into their hands, they read these three questions and they remind themselves that my role in this meeting. Is this, and this is how I need to show up. So I try before every morning meeting with my team to say, my role in this meeting is coaching. I need to show up in a way that’s teaching them the connectivity between the principles and the. Starts, and when I get in a hurry and I’m rushing and I’m grabbing my coffee and I’m running out the door and I’m taking the meeting from my car and I’m frustrated because I spilled coffee all over my pants and it’s just gonna be one of those days, sometimes I slip up and I don’t have that moment of reflection right before I go into the conversation.

[00:41:49] Rebecca Teeters: But I think if leaders can find their system that triggers the discipline, it’ll be easier.

[00:41:58] Josh Santo: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I love that I, and I appreciate the, the vulnerability in sharing some of those reflections. Uh, I think that was a great example that you shared about the nurses in which they take a moment. The word I wrote down was ritual or routine, right? Similar to right before a baseball game. You know, you see players going through their motions because that’s what’s getting them into the right mindset, the right frame of reference.

[00:42:25] Josh Santo: But I think something. Just as important that you called out, and you didn’t say it this way, but this is how I took it, is that you’ve made it safe for your team to call out when you may be. Departing from your own standard or, or your own ideal. in a sense, you’ve put in a tool for if there’s a miss, a way to bring you back.

[00:42:49] Josh Santo: And, and both of those are important. You’re looking for something to help yourself and something that your team who can also look out for you, can serve you in such a way in that moment, but you had to make it safe for them to do so.

[00:43:01] Rebecca Teeters: Absolutely. I think there’s nothing worse. We’ve all worked for a leader where that psychological safety doesn’t exist, where you can’t say, Hey dude, you know, let’s talk about this instead of that, or let’s, it’s, that’s not my definition of servant leadership, I think. I would feel, what’s the word? I would feel like I’m being disrespecting them if I don’t give them the safety and the right to call me out a bit.

[00:43:34] Rebecca Teeters: Now that doesn’t mean that I don’t occasionally, like I said, not respond in the ideal way even when they call me out. But we know that we can. We can talk about it and we’ll get through it. it’s just, just general fundamental respect for each other. We’re a team, not a, not a hierarchy.

[00:43:55] Josh Santo: Yeah, I think that’s a great way of, of thinking about it is, each person has a different role to play on the team, including. manager or the boss in this case, but I, I’m with you. The more that we can treat it as, this is a different role that’s responsible for X, Y, Z as opposed to your job is to do what I tell you to do.

[00:44:18] Josh Santo: End of story. we’re getting into a little bit of, of some of these topics, that I, I wanted to explore, which was where you’ve seen manufacturing leaders, Just things that they get wrong about leadership and manufacturing. so I want to, I wanna explore that with you. We’re getting into some, we haven’t explicitly said we think leaders are. Missing blank, but I think there’s been a few items, such as, you know, really, being able to build a great system or that, idea of inspiring accountability and, and making that possible for the individual as opposed to holding accountable, uh, holding people accountable. From your perspective, what do you think manufacturing leaders tend to get wrong about leadership and manufacturing?

[00:45:01] Rebecca Teeters: Yeah, I think the most, most typical thing that we tend to get wrong is we fall into the trap of short-term problem solving, or even in a worst case, short-term firefighting versus this long-term systemic improvement. And let’s be real, in today’s world, we have to do a little bit of both, right?

[00:45:23] Rebecca Teeters: There are short term pressures that have to be resolved. There are problems that occur that we have to solve, but always approaching the problem with a long-term strategic systemic intent is where we tend to get things wrong, right? We get into that rapid cycle problem solving, firefighting, and then we, by the way, our systems in most organizations heavily reward this behavior.

[00:45:54] Rebecca Teeters: If you can be the guy that wears the red cape and swoops in and solves the problem and you know, got those shipments out the door to the customer on time and we’re able to recognize revenue within the month and everybody’s happy, you get rewarded and you get recognized for that heroic behavior. Now, whether or not, and my rule is the job is never done until the system has been improved, so you can do that.

[00:46:19] Rebecca Teeters: But that heroic act isn’t finished unless you’ve identified the systemic gap that allowed it to occur in the first place, and those systemic gaps are being closed. Otherwise, you’re just fighting a fire and you’re not improving the business. And so I think that’s where most people fall into that trap of firefighting versus systemic improvement.

[00:46:44] Rebecca Teeters: And unfortunately, we tend to heavily reward that, not intentionally, but mistakenly.

[00:46:51] Josh Santo: Yeah. Yeah. I, I’ve heard it referred to as, as hero syndrome, right? You’re coming in, you’re fixing the problem, you won the day from a certain perspective, right? But I like how you kind of qualified it, that the job has never done, you haven’t really won unless the system’s been improved. So if you’re coming in and you’re, you’re fighting the same arch nemesis over and over, we’re not really making progress

[00:47:17] Rebecca Teeters: We are not making progress. Right. I, I will say to my team a lot, especially in the factories, that we often design the standard work so that if you’re fully trained, you have five years experience and you’re having a good day, you can get it right. We need to design the standard that if you’re fully trained with minimal experience, and even on your worst day, you can’t get it.

[00:47:38] Rebecca Teeters: Wrong.

[00:47:39] Josh Santo: Yeah.

[00:47:40] Rebecca Teeters: And so when we make the mistake, we have to ask ourselves, have you designed the standard so that we cannot get it wrong? Have you learned from this mistake in such a way that this will never happen to us again? I see that in my organization. That is our biggest hurdle, is where that heroic mentality, that heroic behavior takes over and we forget to finish the job.

[00:48:07] Josh Santo: Yeah, you’re certainly not alone and I am certainly guilty of it myself, both in my professional and personal life. it’s rewarding. It’s that short term ego hit right there.

[00:48:17] Rebecca Teeters: right.

[00:48:18] Josh Santo: Now, you mentioned something even on your worst day, you can’t get it wrong. I can’t help but think of pokey yo. Right there.

[00:48:25] Josh Santo: Mistake proofing. I’m curious when we talk about what we’ve talked about with leadership and, essentially what does it take to effectively lead, how can we lead Right. Being the underlying question there. in thinking about what you just said about, mistake proofing, oke, from your perspective, how can we poke yoke leadership?

[00:48:49] Josh Santo: In manufacturing.

[00:48:50] Rebecca Teeters: Yeah, I think this is a complicated question and we could talk about it for a really long time, but let’s, let’s just. Maybe peel back the first layer of the onion. I think having a conversation of what are the ideal behaviors of leaders, right? So their first principles of great leadership. For example, you, or we just talked about this principle of vulnerability. That’s a great principle. Great leaders are willing to be vulnerable in really tough situations. because it helps the organization succeed. So then you say to yourself, and you as you’re designing your system for, you know, engaging and teaching fellow leaders, how do I scale that behavior? What’s my system for scaling vulnerability ability?

[00:49:44] Rebecca Teeters: How do I get the ideal behavior out of every leader every time? So here’s what I see a lot of companies do. They’ll identify what they believe to be the ideal behaviors. Often they’re not behaviors, they’re attributes. Vulnerability technically is an attribute, but we’ll talk about courage, vulnerability, sense of urgency, accountability.

[00:50:07] Rebecca Teeters: There’s a variety of things that will usually come up, but we don’t, and we’ll train. People on these terms. Well, this is what we mean by courage. This is what we mean by challenging the status quo. This is what we mean by, but behaviors are observable, right? Behaviors are observable. So beginning to talk to your leaders and hold them accountable or build in the accountability towards observable behaviors.

[00:50:42] Rebecca Teeters: So. What does it mean to coach in a meeting? So you train them on how to do, how to coach, you train them on how to coach people. You train them on how to demonstrate vulnerability. You train them on how does one properly challenge the status quo. But my point is you identify the ideal behaviors and then you build systems that.

[00:51:09] Rebecca Teeters: Teach leaders how to scale their behaviors, and you encourage leaders to create their own systems, such as the Purell moment. We talked about what can be your trigger system to get you in the right mindset. You explore leadership scenarios with them, where you go out on the floor. We’re gonna go coach people together.

[00:51:29] Rebecca Teeters: I’m gonna coach you on how to coach people about great systemic design. The famous gemba walk, right? Let’s go do a gemba walk. That’s a coaching exercise, but you’re teaching leaders how to demonstrate ideal behavior. So I think it’s about we need, in the most immediate near term, we need better coaches. We need our leaders to be better coaches, coaches of the principles, coaches of the ideal behaviors. Coaches of great systemic design and manufacturing. We have really smart leaders typically have pretty good emotional quotient, but they tend to use, they tend to go from that to hit the number and they can sometimes miss the coaching.

[00:52:20] Rebecca Teeters: Like that’s like saying to your quarterback, you know what, It is pretty clear. We need to win the game. Go win the game. But you don’t do that, right? You coach them during the game. You make decisions together. You’re actively coaching, you’re teaching them to be a better player. To be a better leader. I think, our traditional leadership development is around IQ and eq and we’re not teaching people how to coach and we’re not coaching, actively coaching systemic design.

[00:52:51] Rebecca Teeters: We’re correcting. Poor behavior.

[00:52:55] Josh Santo: Hmm, well, I can’t think of a better way to cap the episode is leaving on such a mic drop moment of not teaching how to coach, not coaching, to how to create that systemic design, and drive towards that ideal behavior. took a ton of notes. There’s a lot of of great takeaways and, and I really think that I could probably sit here and ask you a ton more questions and continue learning myself, let alone, with the audience that we have here.

[00:53:24] Josh Santo: but. Uh, what I wanna do right now, Becca, is I, I wanna say thank you. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day, your long days to share with, a group your perspective based on what you’ve learned and what you’ve experienced. Because it’s these types of conversations that we put it out there and we get other people to learn from and spark an idea and drive a new action, drive a change.

[00:53:47] Josh Santo: And little by little these things can help. Make that systemic change that we’re talking about. So Becca, thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:53:56] Rebecca Teeters: Well, thank you for asking. It was a pleasure.