“Level 5 Leadership at Work” by Winston P Ledet, Michelle Ledet Henley, Sherri M Abshire”
Who should read this book?
The content of this book would mostly appeal to COOs, plant managers and consultants who deal with maintenance strategies.
Why you should read this book (or not)?
Having thoroughly enjoyed the first part of this series Don’t just fix it, improve it! , I eagerly anticipated delving into the sequel. As someone who prefers the tangible feel of a paperback and enjoys making notes with a pencil, I went to great lengths to acquire a copy and have it delivered to Belgium. However, my excitement waned as I progressed through the book.
The central message of the book revolves around the acknowledgment that there is no ‘cookie-cutter’ approach to maintenance strategies. The authors explore this concept through the lens of 16 diverse sites attempting to implement the ‘Don’t Just Fix It’ approach. Each site operates in a distinct context, presenting unique challenges. For instance, one site was engaged in a Six Sigma initiative, sparking my interest in how this would unfold. Unfortunately, the book failed to deliver a compelling conclusion, instead generalizing and narrowing down Six Sigma projects to resource-intensive endeavors, which contradicts my own experiences.
Similar to the first book, the narrative is centered around the character James Emery, who rises from a plant manager to a program manager. Regrettably, the story lacks intrigue, is excessively wordy, and fails to strike a balance with the technical insights. The text feels like a dense collection of information with minimal ‘Aha!’ moments, making it a challenging read. The final two chapters are essentially an extensive summary, distilling the key points into less than 30 pages.
Interesting extracts
“After going over the numbers, James was astounded. In Atlanta, operating costs had been a little over fifteen percent of the total production revenues and the maintenance costs had been a little more than thirty percent of those costs. As a result, the cost reduction he had achieved had been worth a great deal. However, in Corpus the numbers were completely different. The volumes were much lower, but the margins were so much higher that operating costs were just five percent of the total production revenue and maintenance costs were just about 1.5 percent of the total revenue. Even if they were wildly successful, the total impact would be small.”
“ Rico looked dumbfounded, as a few people in the room nodded in agreement. Rico paused a moment before responding with what James considered a brilliant response. “First,” he said, “I don’t think any of you should do this because it’s my initiative or because you’re required to do it, or even because James, here from Corporate, has asked you to do it. If you want to participate and work hard to eliminate defects, you should do it for any number of better reasons. You should do it because you believe you can make this a better place to work. We can improve safety, eliminate those annoying call outs in the middle of the night, have more meaningful work than just fixing the same old problems over and over and also eliminate hassles.
“Which one of you wants to suit up in a hazmat suit and clean out the pressure vessel next time it fouls?” Rico paused meeting the gaze of many in the room. “You should do it because this plant matters to all of us. We’re proud of it, and we want to see it on top again. That gives us job security, and it gives our community stable employment. “
“ “You see, there’s this book by Jim Collins called Good to Great. It’s all about why some companies make the leap…and others don’t. You know, the leap from good to great. Collins states in his book that there are five levels of leaders. Highly capable, a contributing team member, a competent manager, an effective leader, and then there’s the top of the hierarchy, an executive leader or Level 5 leader. Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. On the contrary, actually; they are incredibly ambitious, but their ambition is first and foremost for the company, not for themselves. “So you see…a Level 5 leader is the perfect leader to lead a change effort. No matter the reason behind how or why he got to be a Level 5 leader, either he’s seasoned enough to know that it’s important, or, in Dwayne’s case, he’s not seasoned enough to take control of everything, and this is the important part, he is able to let go of his ego and trust his employees. That includes the managers, the supervisors, even the front line workers. He trusts them to take responsibility for their own areas or jobs. When that happens, and everyone feels empowered, and they feel that they themselves can make a difference and are contributing to the overall good of the company, well, that’s when you see big changes starting to happen. You know, the really good kind of change only a Level 5 leader can make happen.” “
“ “Focusing on the bottom line or the money has always been a failure of mine. I know I need to focus more on what’s important. I need to recognize that thousands of our employees are doing the everyday work and that there would be no profits at all if we didn’t have knowledgeable employees doing their work well. I’m willing to bet that we have a very high percentage of Level 5 leaders working at Modern Products Manufacturing. The numbers tell us there are. So we shouldn’t let our egos get in the way by taking credit for our individual plant numbers. I really need each of you to honor the freedom we’ve worked to create in issuing the non-negotiables and trust that workers, all the workers, will make the results happen. “
“ Reese, who had been silent up to that point, said, “You know, I noticed in Atlanta that there was a lot of learning that took place in the action teams. Maybe we should say something in our process about always having a cross-functional team lead the improvement on a piece of equipment. That way, people can learn from each other, and we can get multiple leaders from different points of view.” “
“ “Wow! This shows that the reliability initiative has improved by one and a half billion dollars since I left MPM. Interestingly enough, only four hundred million was attributed to cost cuts and just over one billion was extra sales. So the number of action teams must have been really huge,” James said in awe.
“Well, we’ve averaged two action teams per employee per year over the last five-year period. So that adds up to twenty thousand action teams with an average savings of thirty thousand dollars per team per year. That gives us six hundred million dollars per year for two and a half years. That’s one and a half billion dollars.”
“Is it really possible to conduct that many action teams every year?”
“Yeah, you bet it is. We’re doing it easily. It’s only 1,3% of the work orders that are completed in a year.” “Wow! This shows that the reliability initiative has improved by one and a half billion dollars since I left MPM. Interestingly enough, only four hundred million was attributed to cost cuts and just over one billion was extra sales. So the number of action teams must have been really huge,” James said in awe.
“Well, we’ve averaged two action teams per employee per year over the last five-year period. So that adds up to twenty thousand action teams with an average savings of thirty thousand dollars per team per year. That gives us six hundred million dollars per year for two and a half years. That’s one and a half billion dollars.”
“Is it really possible to conduct that many action teams every year?”
“Yeah, you bet it is. We’re doing it easily. It’s only 1,3% of the work orders that are completed in a year.” “
“ The main thing they learned from the study was that the CMMS was implemented before the Atlanta plant was ready to use it. They had too many random breakdowns, which created unscheduled work. This unscheduled work could not be planned or scheduled because the failure occurred so soon after the introduction of the defect. They concluded that defect elimination had to be implemented before the CMMS could be effective. However, they discovered a more inter- esting aspect to the work. In experimenting with the model, they accidentally set a parameter in the model on the amount of time it took to implement a defect elimination improvement down to just two hours. This accelerated the rate of improvement in the model to twice as fast as the actual time it took in Atlanta. At first they thought it was just a bad run. However, as they investigated the results, they realized that the model was telling them that there were many two- hour openings in the schedule, even though the organization was overwhelmed with work. When they changed the parameter in the model to eight hours to do an improvement, the rate of improve- ment slowed down to match the Atlanta experience. This led them to creating a Don’t Just Fix It, Improve It work order where each person assigned to fix a piece of equipment was allowed to spend an extra two hours to make whatever improvement they could to eliminate future defects. This discovery was shared and used at all the other plants to accelerate their transformation. Of course, Denver was the first to implement it because they were the least likely plant to take a “not invented here” attitude. They were eager to accept any useful tips from other plants. “