GA 333 | The Five Skills for Effective Leadership with Hugh Alley

Again, comes back to this whole idea of a standard. The organization needs a certain level of performance and there's a gap. And what is it? Well, is it a gap because the person doesn't know what they should be doing or because they don't know how to do it or because they can't do it?

Today, I'm excited to welcome Hugh Alley to the show. Now, I was introduced to Hugh by my friend Tracy Defoe, and we had Tracy on a few weeks ago. And so Hugh has a industrial engineering background, but as you'll hear, he's really done a lot of work over the years developing frontline leaders. So like things like supervisors and teaching people how to, how to lead people. And so today we, we walk through five core skills, I guess you could call it, that might be needed to ensure that, you know, you can effectively lead people. Another way of saying it is how to prevent being a bad boss. And these skills are how to instruct people, how to deal with underperformers, how to make improvements, how to set priorities, and how to listen. And so we walk through each of those five in more detail and as you'll hear, there's a strong link back to TWI or training within industry. So we spent some time talking about the 3J program, so job instruction, job relation, and job methods. And so he was very knowledgeable on these topics and he's done a lot of work over the years with them. So there's some really, really important tips in there. Even if you are a practitioner of twi, I definitely encourage you to listen to this one because, well, we're always learning. In fact, Hugh gave me a really good way to look at an important aspect of ji, which is, you know, what we would sometimes call the one best way to do a job. And Hugh actually has a slightly different take on that. And you'll have to listen to hear what that is. But really, really enjoyed our conversation. Now, show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com this is episode 333. So again, gembapodcast.com look for episode 333. Also, I want to make sure you know that if you are interested in learning more about ji, JR and jm, there's many different ways to go about that you can do in person training. There's some great organizations out there doing that. GEMBA Academy. I'm a little biase, maybe with Beginba Academy, but we have a really strong TWI training aspect of our, of our website now. In fact, we have, we partnered with Roger Bilas a few years ago. Roger is one of the. One of the. Really, I would say, one of the best TWI thinkers in the world. And we actually recorded Roger doing training with a live workshop. So we actually did a JI Job instruction JR and JM workshops with live audiences, and we recorded those and we. We put them into video modules. So if you want to learn more about J.I. jr. And J.M. from one of the best TWI trainers in the world, definitely head over to gembaacademy.com and. And check that out, that all of our TWI material is in our school of lean. So for that, obviously, just go to gembaacademy.com and we will help you out. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Hugh, welcome to the show. How are you?

I am very well and delighted to be here, Ron.

Well, thank you for coming on. So where are you calling in from, Hugh?

I live in a suburb of Vancouver called Burnaby.

Nice.

This is West Coast.

Nice. Well, it's a beautiful part of the country. We were talking before. My sister lives out there in British Columbia, and, boy, it's a beautiful part of the world. So you're very fortunate to live there.

I am indeed. It would be very hard to imagine moving.

Yeah, I bet. I bet. All right, well, hey, I'm really excited for our topic today. I think we're going to title this one Preventing Bad Bosses. Core Skills for Frontline Leaders. So bad bosses. Nobody wants a bad boss. So I think this will be a great one. Maybe people will be. I guess you have to be careful, right? If you like, forward this one to your boss. Hey, you should listen to this one. But no, I'm really excited for this topic, Hugh, but as you know, we like to begin all of our episodes with our guests sharing a quote. So do you have one?

Yeah, I do. Ron, one of my favorite quotes is mostly attributed to Taiichi Ono. I've seen variations, but Taiichi Ono is who gets the most credit. And he says without standards, there can be no improvement.

Yeah. What's that one mean to you?

Well, what it tells me is that if you don't understand where you are, how can you understand the gap between where you are and where you need to be? It gives you a reference. It gives you a place to begin. And one of the things that I like about it is that it. You often find people cringing a little bit when you talk about wanting to establish standards. They say, oh, you're gonna. You're gonna beat the workers with it or, you know, you're just gonna use it to ramp up the speed. But the way oh no talks about it is it's a yardstick to understand whether your current processes are capable of doing what you need. So they're not about whether you or I are performing your job well. It's about is the system actually able to produce what you. What you're after.

Yeah. I love it. I love it. All right, well, very good. So, Hugh, let's jump right in and maybe just talk about yourself first of all. Maybe tell us about your background, how you first got into continuous improvement, and then what you're up to these days.

Sure. Thanks, Ron. I started life as an industrial engineer, I guess is the easiest way to describe it. Did my engineering studies and then got into industry and found myself very quickly with the job of making things run better. And it didn't matter whether it was figuring out how to make yachts more efficiently, which was one of my first jobs, or helping figure out mine layouts, which was another. It was always about, how do you make this process work better? And over time, that just became increasingly fascinating for me. And I've been doing it pretty much ever since and have been doing consulting and have run three different factories with their associated distribution hubs and. And so on. And for the last 10 years, I guess I've been doing consulting and contract work and done a lot of teaching of frontline leaders in core skills. Nice.

I like it. I like it. Very good. All right, well, speaking of core skills, let's just kind of just jump into that. And in this whole idea of. Of preventing what we're calling bad bosses. Right. Like, talk about some of these. These skills.

Sure. Well, Ron, I see that there are really five skills that if. If a person in a frontline leadership role has these skills at a plausibly competent level, like, they don't have to be a master, but if they can do these things, you know, competently, journeyman level, they can be very effective as supervisors or frontline leaders. So here they are. They need to be able to instruct people. They need to be able to deal with someone who isn't performing the way the organization needs them to. They need to be able to make improvements in the work in their area.

Mm.

They need to be able to set priorities, and they need to be able to listen.

Mm. So I'm. I'm type. I'm typing notes because I love learning as I do these as well. And listen. That's a hard one. Listen. Right. So. So instruct people Deal with underperformers. I didn't know how to word that one. So shorthanding, make improvements, set priorities and listen.

Yep.

So do you want to like. Let's walk through those ones. It's easy to say, but so when we talk about instructing people. So are you a proponent, I believe, of TWI and job instruction, things like that.

I am a massive fan of the training within industry job instruction process.

Yes.

And we've probably all had the experience of somebody telling us to do something and being so vague about what's wanted that you're left scratching your head. And the job instruction model just gives such clarity that when a boss can express what they're after well, then people tend to do things right. And when they don't, then you wind up with mistakes during production.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm so happy to see that TWI has just, over the last few years, really is really making a. I feel like a comeback. It's still not being talked about as much as it should be, but it really is. People are really starting to open their eyes to job instruction, job relations, job methods. But ji, obviously, I feel, feel like is for good or bad. You know, that's the most popular. I believe personally that JR is probably the most important job in relations. But. Yeah, but, but JI finding that one best way, right, to do a job well.

And it's not the one best way, it's the current best way. Because the part of the whole model is that it's going to be better.

I like that. The current best way meaning Right back to your quote, really. Because you could. You could take that without standards, there'd be no Kaizen, a slightly different way. Some people would even would think about standardized work and things like that. You know, Mr. Ono was big proponent of that as well. Right. And, and, but standards are meant to be improved. Right. So the one best way might be that. The one best way today, but tomorrow we might find another slightly better way.

Exactly.

I like it. I like it.

Yeah.

Good. So what about this underperformers? That's an interesting one. How to deal with folks who maybe aren't performing up to their potential. How do you go about that?

Well, this is the TWI job relations piece and I've started talking about it in terms of dealing with people who aren't performing the way the organization needs. Because for people who aren't familiar with TWI job relations. What does that mean? It's a good shorthand for those of us who are in the know, so to speak. But for somebody who's new to the area, or you're talking to a business owner or manager who's never heard of training within industry. And you say job relationship. They tend to think about it, okay, this is labor bargaining or something.

Unions and.

Yeah, exactly, all that stuff. And so by talking about people who aren't performing the way the organization needs, again comes back to this whole idea of a standard. The organization needs a certain level of performance and there's a gap. And what is it? Well, is it a gap because the person doesn't know what they should be doing or because they don't know how to do it or because they can't do it? And the amusing thing, one of my mentors many years ago observed that the number of people who either don't know what's wanted or don't know how to do what's wanted far outweighs the number of people who don't really want to do it. And yet that's what so many managers. You talk about bad bosses. The bad bosses start with the thing that's least likely to be true, which is that they don't want to do the work.

Yeah.

Whereas if you have a person who's trained in the job relations model or some other way of dealing with people who aren't performing, then they're more likely to run into the fact that, well, it's actually not clear what's wanted.

Yeah.

You know, I think of the story of Ralph, who was a supervisor, who talked about going by and talking to this machinist. I really need you to do this job. It's really urgent. And the guy says, sure, got it. And Ralph comes back two hours later and the guy's still working on the same job. What's going on? You know, I haven't just started on this thing. Well, I know yours is next in the list. Got it. Well, sort of. Three hours went by and still more of the same. And the guy said, finally said to John, or to Ralph, he said, look, you know the rule in the plant. We don't take something off the machine once it started, we finish the job and then we do what's next? What you've been asking for is next. And Ralph said, oh, that's not what I meant. Yeah, I really wanted you to take it off the machine and put this new one on. Oh, that's not what you said.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the thing that I, that I find so intriguing about job relationship, but also so hard, and you just see it in the world today more than ever, really. Is the step one, get the facts. Right. And like, really deal with facts. And you know what? Deeply understand the problem. Right. And it's so hard to do that, you know, especially when things are going poorly and something bad is going on. And so we want to rush to countermeasures. Right. Or rush to improvement to fix, but we just don't deeply understand the facts what's really going on. And having that discipline is so. It's so hard. You.

It is hard. And yet this is a. You've probably seen it. The absolute delight of job relations is that the discipline of going through the four steps pushes that pause in for people and gives them a moment to reflect and say, well, wait a minute, what else is there that I should know? And that makes all the difference. I remember actually seeing one of my team leads at one point. He'd got up out of his chair, he was half running across the shop, and he stopped in his tracks because he'd realized, wait a minute, I don't know what the facts are. And then he walked. Everybody who saw it was just waiting for the conflagration to happen. Right. But he stopped himself and walked over and asked and discovered that it was a real problem that he could help his guy solve.

Nice.

And it was wonderful.

That was probably a proud moment for you, right?

It was, yes. I love it.

Okay, so far we've instructed people we're dealing with underperformers. So Jijr. Wonderful. Wonder if what's next on make improvements.

Well, guess what there. Now we're at job methods. Yes. And I think the hardest thing for folks to get their heads around with this is how. How much you can get done within your area. Closing the door on the rest of the organization without affecting how you touch the rest of the organization. All the comings and goings and supply chain issues and all that. There's still the opportunities to make improvement within a frontline leader's area, sphere of influence, or if you're a division manager within your division, whatever it is, there's ton of opportunity. And we're very quick to say, well, if only, you know, the other part of the plant would do it right. We could do our job well. Yeah, that's true. But go fix what's in your own backyard first.

Yeah, yeah. What did they say? We have found the problem. And he is. I.

That was Pogo.

It was Pogo.

Yeah. Well, Kelly, God bless him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wonderful. Okay. So the fourth one was the ability to set priorities.

Exactly. Yes. One of the interesting things about as I've pondered this, why the training within industry programs didn't have a priority segment or module. And it. I think it comes to the fact that the folks who were working on the training within industry programs were looking at large companies building, you know, with big production facilities, and they had central planning offices. But the reality is that most companies are small. Most of us work for companies with less than 100 people, and they can't afford to have big central planning operations. And indeed, if they're using theory of constraints for their scheduling, they don't need it. I was running a plant, my plant of 100, 120 people. We had one guy who spent a third of his time and he scheduled the whole plant because we just scheduled the constraint. And that was easy. But if you've got a centralized planning office, which was. If you're a shipyard, you've got a centralized planning office, you're making aircraft or tanks as they were during the Second World War when TWI was being developed. You didn't need that priority question because that was handed to the supervisor. But there's a huge need for it in today's small business. Small enterprise.

Yeah, yeah.

But how many times have you seen somebody not clear about what they should do next and they lose 10 minutes or 15 minutes wandering around trying to find their supervisor to know what to do next? I know one guy who saved started. He saved $10,000 a year for his company just by making sure that his people always knew what the next thing they needed to do was because overtime went away.

Wow. Nice. Very good. Okay, so the fifth skill, I don't know if we're calling them skills or things that we want them to be able to do is to listen.

Yep. And it's such a core skill for everything, you know, job instruction. If you're doing job instruction and you're trying to find the best. The current best way, what do you have to do? Go and listen to the current operators. If you've got multiple ways of doing things, you have to listen to the operators to say to hear why they're doing it. What's the advantage of getting it one way or the other? If you're doing job relations, what's one of the key points in step one? Have you talked to the individual? Have you talked to the. What do the others think? In job methods, going and talking to the operators is core. So it's just such a central skill. And it's like, how can you work with people and help them if you don't listen to them first?

You know, the person I think that I've learned the most from as it relates to this particular skill is someone I'm sure you know. Brandon Brown.

Yes. Brandon's excellent.

Oh, my gosh. I just marvel at the way he told me one time, he said, Ron. I don't know if it was on a podcast or we was just he and I talking. Said, Ron, sometimes you just have to. You have to be okay embracing silence. Right. And really listening. So when someone says something, it's okay to not respond right away. You know, it might be awkward because you're like, we don't like silence. You know, for some reason, in. At least in our. Our culture, we don't seem to like silence. But having that. That discipline, maybe that's the word, to really consider what you're about to say and really. Yeah. And listen. Not to necessarily respond, but listen. To hear. You know, there's a big difference.

Yep. And not everybody is quick on their feet. So for them, if you're willing to ask a question and then be quiet and give them a bit of time, then they can come back to you with something really intelligent.

Yeah.

But if you're going to talk over the space, they will just let you talk as long as they're willing. As long as you're willing to.

Yeah. How did you learn about twi. What. What. What. What. What's your. What's your. And you're obviously very passionate about it and very knowledgeable. How did. How did you learn about it?

I first heard about it in the early 2000s, and then in 2007, a friend of mine asked me to come and be his operations manager. He had a company with three plants and a couple of warehouses. And when I walked into the main plant, it was very clear to me very quickly that the supervisors didn't have the skills they needed or that I needed them to have in order for the company to thrive. And so, you know, I did the normal kinds of things, looked around for training companies in the area, and the results were just so disappointing, you know, but I. I'd spent money, I'd sent, lost the time of these people. I sent them away, and they came back, and there was no change in behavior. Which is. Which is so much training.

Yeah.

And so I was chatting to my boss about this, and he said, have you ever talked to Tracy Defoe, who I know you chatted with a few episodes ago on Kata in Secret? Well, Tracy is a really, absolutely wonderful human being, and her life started as, you know, as an educator. And so she came in and she had been working with another client of hers using TWI tools and said, are you aware of this? And I said, well, I have heard about it, but that's about it. She said, okay, let's go. And we did. And the results were nothing short of amazing. You made the comment earlier that you think you should start with jr, and that's what we needed to do because the atmosphere was pretty toxic. But the results were remarkable. You know, we had people being more inventive, creating better solutions. The tone changed. We had people who heard about the change in culture and came back to the company that had left all of that. And our measured performance went up dramatically as well. We were seeing 10% a year labor productivity gains.

Nice.

Which is fabulous. So I watched what it did and then left that company to start my own business, training frontline supervisors and managers. And so since then, I've run two other companies on a short term basis and trained close to 900 supervisors and frontline leaders. And I just, every time I do it and see people's face light up, I just, I get excited about it.

That's a great feeling.

It is. And I've still got lots to learn about it, but that's how I got to where I am.

So I understand you've written a book.

I have.

Tell us about it.

It's called Becoming the Supervisor. Okay. I've been looking for something for a while that I could give to frontline leaders to read. Just here, get a feel for what it could be. And my first thought about it was, let me write a field guide. So if you're in this problem, then do this. But that becomes an impossible task. There are too many variations. And actually, when I started reading what I'd been writing, it really wasn't fun to read. And so I had to go back and say, well, how else could I do this? And I thought about the things that have left an impact on me. And most of them are stories, right? And even in our conversations, the things that grab people are the stories about Ralph or John or whoever it is. And so I thought, could I write a story that would convey the skills that people need to master in a way that's engaging, that might catch somebody who's not necessarily thrilled about reading something, but that would draw them into a set of experiences that they could say, oh, yeah, that's mine, I've been there, and show them what's up. And so the story flowed out of that. And so it's the story of how a general manager teaches a new Supervisor to master these skills. And it's presented from the supervisor's point of view. So it's the learner's point of view. And there's just this string of business problems that everyone will recognize. You know, the shipment goes. Goes wrong. There's a bad shipment, the product arrives at the customer, and it's wrong. Now what do we do? Or, you know, somebody quits and I was counting on them. Well, that's. We've all had that happen.

Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. I haven't read it, but it looks interesting. Yeah, I was going to say, is it like we're recording this, obviously in early, early part of June, but is it available now?

Yes, it is.

Okay, great. Yeah, I'm going to pick it up. It looks interesting. I love kind of to the whole goal idea, you know, which is Alex Rogo, right?

That's right. So Trevor, is. Is Alex the Alex in this book?

I like it. I like it.

And Julie is the. What's the guy's name? Jonah. Is Jonah.

Jonah, yeah. Got it, Got it. I like it. All right. Yeah. So becoming the supervisor, achieving your company's mission and what is it? And building your team.

Building your team. Yeah.

There you go. Got it. All right, well, we'll link to that in the show notes for sure. Thank you. So maybe to wrap things up, Hugh, why don't you maybe leave some folks with some. Maybe some final words of wisdom as it relates to all the things that we've talked about. Maybe someone wants to learn more, go a little bit deeper. What tips do you have for them?

I'm going to come back to the question that you pointed at early on is where do you start? Is it job instruction or job relations? And in my experience, I needed to start with job relations because my workplace was toxic or trending that way. But I have come to the. The view that you need to assess the relationship between the existing frontline leaders and their teams, their crews. And if there's a good personal relationship there, if people are getting along, if there's not a lot of enmity or rancor or anything like that, that then job instruction is the place to start and work on the standardization. And the other thing that I would point at is go back to Mazaki Imai's work, and he sets out the sequence that you should work on things. And number one for him is rework. He says, before you do anything else, fix the rework. Because rework hides. Is everything right? It turns into scheduling problems and expediting problems and information problems and parts problems. And it just, it's everything. So you start with looking at where is the rework in your, in your organization? Where is that happening? And so now you use the job instruction to address that big ugly rework problem. And so from a where do you start? Perspective, look at the, at the relationships and if they're decent, focus on the job. Getting that standard in place that Taichi Ono talked about. Without standards, there can be no improvement. So we come back to where we started.

I like it. I like it. Very good. Hugh, what's the best way for folks to connect with you?

Best route is my email, which is hughrallymail.com okay. And my cell phone is 604-866-1502. Okay. And both of those, I'm pretty good about getting back to people within 24 hours and happy to talk to anybody who has some questions about what I was. What I've been talking about.

Yeah.

Or about the book or.

Yep. And. And the book's available on Amazon and it's on Amazon.

Available on Amazon. And I'm sure there are other places. I have not looked everywhere at all the bookstores, but pretty much any bookseller will order it for you.

Yeah, got it, got it. Very good. All right. Well, this has been fun. Hugh, thank you for coming on and enjoy the summer out there in beautiful Vancouver.

Thank you so much, Ron. And thank you so much for the opportunity. Join you. It's been fun.

You're welcome. Okay. You take care.

All right, thanks. Bye.

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