Leader to Leader: Stop Micromanaging and Lead

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us here at JLC Media. This is a continuation of a few conversations with my friend and someone I really respect deeply about his leadership background. And I think you're going to really like this one a lot. We ended the last one telling you what this one was going to be about. It's about how do you get beyond micromanaging? And please those of you that are listening understand in the first years as a leader you don't have much else to offer because your leadership practical knowledge sometimes isn't ready to shift from the knowledge person. Because you got the job because you were good at it, right? You were good at something and somebody said, wow, you're really good at this. How about we bring you up to department head or manager or team lead? Well, you go, thank you. I'm so excited. Thank you. I even get a little more money. Thank you. And all of a sudden now I am in charge of something and I'm in charge of what I knew how to do, not necessarily what it really means to lead. So today Colleen and Jim and I are going to talk about and we're going to take gems, phrases and stories and move from those into potential takeaways so you know who we are. So I need to introduce us again so they can introduce as they follow this up. So we're going to develop a common understanding about a couple of things. Take it easy on yourself. If you find yourself micromanaging, it's probably because that's what you know to do right now. You knew how to do this job before you got the leadership position. So you're helping people learn how to do the job you used to do at least as well as you, if not a little better. It's kind of normal for that to happen. So that's an understanding that's going to get there. The second understanding is what do I need to do understand in order to take action to step into a leadership role as opposed to the manager, micromanager, first time leader role. Some of you and I have to make sure I cover the whole basis, all the bases here. Some of you stepped into that role and already had some leadership capabilities. So this is not everybody. This is not a broad brush that everybody that steps into leadership position ends up micromanaging. The literature says it's near 90% that in their first year, first two years, they tend to micromanage those that are in their charge, their subordinates, so to speak. And eventually that shifts into something else at the end of this chat that we're going to have. I have every intention that you will find something to take away to put into your own practice as a leader. Again, it's a leader to leader conversation and I think you guys are going to really, really enjoy this one a lot. Not something Colleen and I haven't talked about before, regularly and often. Colleen, what did you hear me say? What that mean to you? And welcome Colleen Jorgensen from jlc. She is the chief operating officer at jlc.

Yeah. Well, it's a pleasure always to be in this conversation with you, Ray, and with Jim. I always learn a tremendous amount from him. And what I heard you say, really in focusing our conversation is you're going to be kind of looking at three, three things of how can leaders, whether they're brand new, their position, whether they're in their position. But what are, what are three specific things? And you mentioned those and taking it, taking it easy on yourself and really shifting from that content focused I've got this job to how can I lead my people and develop their capabilities? So you're going to be kind of sharing some. Jim will share some stories of how he successfully navigated through that shift. And we're really encouraging people to think about, as you know, where they are in their leadership journey and what are some key takeaways that they can use at the end of this podcast really to shift themselves also from being the doer. Right. And helping people lead them in a different way. So how can we really develop their capabilities where we're not telling them what to do, but we're really helping lead and develop our people effectively?

Yeah. So that's really, really good. The sense of lead and develop is interesting because it's all about learning and not just content, not just a bunch of knowledge and a bunch of concepts. It's about turning that knowledge, that those concepts into personal, practical leadership knowledge. So I really love the way you set that up. Jim, what'd you hear us say about what we're working on today?

Well, we're talking about starting out doing something and then trans, you know, getting to a point where you're going to get something done that you didn't necessarily do yourself. And that comes with responsibility, it comes with education, it comes with experience. And you really have to make that transition or you're going to be that micromanager that everybody likes because they don't have to do anything.

It's really well said. And they can go all the way to retirement doing that, right?

Oh, yeah.

We can hang in for a very, very long time and as everyone's talking about change and transformation and all this kind of stuff, you won't be one of the change or transformation leaders. You'll be the person that's keeping the game going in the way it has always been done to the best of your understanding. So this is, this is kind of a fun thing for us to talk about today. And at some level, it's a holiday gift to get you thinking about what will I actually know and be able to do differently as I step past micromanaging on my journey and into a different space. And again, this is. In no way does this denigrate the person that is successfully micromanaging a team and the team is producing desired result. Not at all, not at all. This is about going beyond those productivities to something very different. So thank you. Great setup from both of you. And so Jim, this whole game is about stories. So when did you finally realize that micromanaging was not the thing I need to be doing all the time?

There's not a moment that the light trips on or anything like that, but I think you almost can define it by responsibility. And when the scope of the job gets a lot bigger than what you are really comfortable with, you've got to do something. And I think there's two paths that you can take. Then you can be a high level micromanager. And so let's just say my background's manufacturing. So I pretty much know how to put cars and trucks and engines and transmissions together. So that's no big deal. So you could just operate at a higher level. And when doing so, you avoid out some of the small details. And then you go into the. I'm a manager, so I'm going to keep track of the finance, I'm going to keep track of the number of this and so on and so forth. And you become a numbers cruncher instead of the other path which says, and this is the whole lean manufacturing philosophy thing, there's people who know a lot more about what they do than I do. And so the people that are really knowledgeable are the people who are closest to the actual work. And so why can't I then learn myself to be a teacher to teach them to learn and continue on that path where I'm managing the things that get them to perform better rather than being able to report that, yeah, I made my budget or I cut 2% of my cost or blah, blah, blah, the things that make other people who don't know anything about your business feel comfortable and focus on how your business gets Better and the results flow even though you didn't do it yourself. And that's kind of how you blend. Being a non micromanager and working in lean manufacturing is getting someone else and enabling them to be the expert. And you're just teaching, guiding, providing education to them about how to be better, asking questions, responding to them. And then if you go back to the organization chart, people at the top are supposed to know everything well, because they know everything, allegedly. Perhaps you can reverse that chart, turn it 180 degrees and say, because I'm now at the still at the peak of that chart. But it happens to be at the bottom. All the workers are at the top, they're touching the product, they're doing the work, whatever that work happens to be. And my job is to give them the resources. So how do I get them reliable, safe work? Then you get the end of the HR thing, policy deployment, which is really aligning your goals. And you get into leadership behaviors. So you don't really get into a work unit and start to tell them what to do. You ask them what they're doing and how they could do it better. And you get an honest, decent response that over time is going to show you what you need to do. And so the learning comes with them knowing how to do a better job, but it also comes from you listening to provide them the resources they need to do even better.

Great. So outstanding. Absolutely outstanding. Colleen. A lot in there, right? What kind of popped out you as biggest takeaway from what you just heard Jim talk about?

I really like when you said that you really want to tap into the people who are doing the work, right. And ask them. And so really coming from that space of, you know, asking them how, what do you need to be more effective in your job? And so in asking these types of questions to learn what you can do as the leader, to broker the necessary resources to clear whatever obstacles are in their way to make it so they can be more productive. So I love this sense of asking these types of questions instead of assuming, you know, right, oh, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. I love this sense of going to the workers themselves and inquiring to find out and brokering the resources to help them be more productive.

What you really need to watch out for though, when you do that is you're asking them what they need and the answer is going to be, well, I need a gazillion dollars, I need a brand new machine, I need this, I need 15 more people to do the work and so on and so forth. And you need to make it interactive with the scope of what they're responsible for. And that doesn't mean it won't lead to something bigger or better in the future. But you're talking about an intellectual exchange and also you're trying to exhibit leadership behaviors that this person can emulate. So it's a first line supervisor or superintendent on the line or an area manager or whatever. How do you get them to realize that they need to move off of some form or level of their micromanagement to get the most from their team?

So you have me thinking a lot about drama, about transactional analysis, which I love that work. It came out in the 60s and 70s and. And it has been rebirthed again now in the digital age and has so much to do with modeling. She said, what am I going to do to enable people to do some of the things I'm doing? Well, you model it. So you said something. It just resonated deeply with me. There are some managers who ask judger questions. It didn't hit your numbers this month. What's the matter with you? What's going on? You know, as opposed to you didn't hit your numbers this month. Help me understand what's going on. Is there something happening that surprised you or are you okay? There's all kinds of possibilities here. When we shift away from the judger question, which typically has us focused on a metric of some kind, as opposed to I'm noticing something going on in your shop. Help me understand what's happening. What do we need to learn together so that we can take care of whatever's there. And Jim, I think you have epitomized that methodology and I agree with you that it wasn't like some epiphany happened. It was a slow grow into a really an effective leadership position and as an effective leader. So how did that land on you, Jim, what I just said.

It'S kind of how. It's not a click, it's a process. And as I said earlier, suddenly you realize that you're responsible for a hell of a lot more than you really know. And what do you do to respond to that? And so you can go back into a grandiose micromanagement and just play the numbers and dictate and how. The problem with that in my mind is how do you get your organization to grow so you're responsible for people who are not you don't you know, I had lots of plants and things like that. So you don't See them all the time. You can't monitor their day to day performance other than schedule, you know, schedule quality, cost and delivery, and you get those numbers regularly. And so how do you get that quality cost delivery mindset all the way down to the guy that affects the product, whatever that product is, and that works in manufacturing or any kind of a business environment where you have transactions and interactions and so on and so forth. How do you get someone else to assume your micromanaging skill and knowledge and then make them better for it, make them better than you were?

Okay, so let's just really cut to the chase. How did you get them to take ownership of quality, take ownership of safety, take ownership of productivity, hitting the expected numbers? How did you do that? What were some of the things that you personally chose to do to make that happen?

Well, number one, we had a plan, Surprise. And we are in a unionized environment. And so what is the thing that the organization called the union always complains about safety. If you can't hit your numbers, if it's cloudy today or so on and so forth, there is always some kind of a safety conversation that starts. And so in our management reviews, and I had to be at every plant every month to talk about quality and cost. A deep dive review with the whole management group and the union leadership. And so what we did is we started our standard manufacturing review format and every meeting started the same way. Every meeting started with a discussion of safety. What happened? Why did it happen? What can we do to fix it? And again, as you discussed, these weren't attacks on the circumstances. They were, how do we understand what happened? Have we mitigated it? Have we taken care of the concerns? Are we addressing it over time? Lots of the stuff isn't, isn't fixable in five minutes or immediately. And so that started our conversation. So it wasn't, I'm here to beat the crap out of you because the boss is showing up. It's how can I help?

Yeah. Unbelievable.

And so we shared that and the meetings then went on to talk about quality. And the quality wasn't my desire for quality, it was the customer's desire for quality. And so we use the corporation's input and help that meld with the quality standards that we had in the plant. And so there's a cascade, or even this HR term policy deployment thing about let's take the customer quality and break it down into your operation, your workstation. What do you do that affects customer quality? So if you're working in an engine block and you're assembling parts to an engine block and you happen to scratch the head in 20 to 30,000 miles, that guy is going to have a gasket leak that affects the performance of that engine. And so you have these things that you know, over time experience looking at customer data that says here's how I'm going to respond to this concern. I'm not going to scratch the head, I'm not going to scratch the meeting surface on the engine block, blah blah blah. And you involve the employees in that. So instead of me running in and say well that's stupid, you shouldn't do that, we have this concern and the customer complained about it. And how do we mitigate that? How do we stop that? How do we improve our quality? And we have resources, we can get the design people to help us, we can get machine tool people in, we can change our maintenance schedule if we think that's an issue. And so you throw everything out there and you try and analyze what the problems are.

I love it.

And you do the same with productivity, which we talked about. Which means, oh by the way, while I'm doing all this stuff, I have to stay in business. I've got it. Get the delivery to the customer. And part of my career I helped build vehicles. Another part I built components. Well, one of my rules to my component business things when I was in that part of it is we never shut down an assembly plant. If I lose a shift in a plant, I'm going to lose roughly $250,000 in salary in an eight hour shift or hourly wages. So how do you avoid that? Well, keep track of how you build, how much you got, your proper inventory, so on and so forth. And then we talked about cost and then we talked about the morale of the employees that gets into education and things like that. And then we closed our meetings with what about the environment? Are, you know, selfishly as a manager that affects my fuel costs and you're using the x Thousands of BTUs of natural gas or whatever you need to run your plants and produce your own power and heat and stuff like that. So we had a standardized thing that set up the expectations, those expectations set up a behavior pattern for the management. And you know, you're lucky if you, if you over time you staff people that think like that but your job is to affect their behavior around the business goals you want. And that's a long way of saying that gets you out of the micromanagement business and into the teaching, learning, emulating, focus on the total business so we can talk about scrap, because that comes up in productivity and cost. But does that scrap cause me to lose my ability to deliver my product to my customer? And so all of these things are tied back to doing good business and not isolated in and among themselves. Because you get people who. They really get turned on by Six Sigma statistics. They can lose themselves in those and then not be productive to the team in terms of telling them what are the biggest problems and how can we. You know, how. Here are ways to solve them or control variability. So it's not easy to get out of micromanagement, but you switch your focus from micromanagement of things to micromanagement of outputs and people, and those solutions are less definitive, wider in scope, and really force you to behave differently. Or you're back into micromanagement, and then you just got a big staff that's helping you do the same thing every day.

There's something you just did there that you gave us a structure of a meeting, which was your way of when you showed up, this is what I'm going to do. And you began each meeting by connecting to the barding unit, by talking immediately about safety. It was almost as if this structure that you designed recognized what will the union most be worried about at any moment. So safety of the employees, and what do they argue on when they're making a new contractor? It's like the first thing that seems to come up and what you did is almost disarmed that worry that might have stayed in the room all through the other sections of the meeting that you created if you hadn't taken it on first. So those of you that are listening that are working in places where bargaining units are prevalent, and it's most places, right. Even if we act like we don't have one, you have one. It's like it's a secret one. It's out there. Employees, they talk to one another. And what you did there, I thought was magnificent to begin with. What is probably most important to the working person, and it is leadership is a people business. You said people and outputs. Absolutely. And this people to people game that you have taught us about in these conversations, it's been absolutely magnificent. Colleen, what are you thinking?

Yeah, well, I really like. The other thing that resonated with me was when he started the meeting, right. And he ensured that he led with what was top of mind. And it sounds like consistently you did that. The other thing that I heard you say, Jim, was you made it personal for each person. You connected their daily work to what it is they were trying to accomplish as a team by level setting those expectations as well. So people knew what was expected of them. So those two other things that you did in these conversations that you had really helped people understand what's the output? How is this connected to what it is I'm currently doing? How is this connected to the customer experience? So the more those types of conversations, I think it helps those individuals once again shift to thinking about the team and the output. Not just hunkered down doing their personal job, but understanding how they fit in and help the team succeed.

How did we do understanding you today, Jim?

Pretty good. And I just want to add a couple of things. So we had this structure of monthly cost and quality reviews at the plants, and inside of those probably two hours at least, each time we visited, there was a floor walk. So we went to an area that had achieved better results and we recognized the team personally, or we went to an area that wasn't getting results and we talked on the floor about what could be changed and things like that. So it's not just, I'm going to sit here at a desk and be wonderful on the screen. In the zoom world, I'm glad I didn't have to live through that. But you had a lot of personal conversations. And again, it's to promote and emulate the kind of behavior that drives people to participate in the results. And then each week, and this is my operating plan, so Monday and Friday I was in the office Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I was visiting plants. And on Monday, I think it was late on Thursday afternoon. On Fridays, we would have a recap of the prior week's results with each plan on a phone call. And we had the same kind of listing of micromanaging results. And then we talked about the results, and then we talked about a forecast for the next week. Would we need overtime? Would we have to increase production? Would we have to catch up with what we lost last week due to some problem? So there was a constant focus on results with a focus on how we worked on this together. So that very quickly takes you out of the micromanagement business because there's too much stuff to watch.

Yeah, you can't watch it all. So that was really interesting. So you can listen to any podcast on leading teams and you'll get some semblance of this. But I'm going to point it out now because it's beyond important as a takeaway, if you're listening to this.

Each.

Week, people make promises, commitments to achieving something, and from a performance standpoint Right, that's fine. And it doesn't have the same impact if they just make the promise and nobody stops by later on to say, how did you do with your promise? Not from a how did you do with your promise? I'm going to get you. How did your commitment or your promise work out? And you did that every week. And we live in a, in the practical world of meetings and we watch people have meetings and people say things in meetings. No one ever writes anything down about promises. The meeting just ends. And you just did the complete opposite of that, which is what Colleen teaches people all the time. If you don't end your meeting and even your agenda item with committed actions, you're missing the vote. And the next meeting should start with, we had a bunch of committed actions last time we were together. Let's see, how did we do? And if you didn't get where you wanted to, let us understand what you, you need. Is there some resource you need or did something just go south that you didn't expect? How can we be supportive and helpful to make sure that the next time you make that same kind of promise that you'll be able to deliver it and feel good about the promise that you made? Colleen, did that resonate with you also?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it all connects to the aspects that Jim was talking about. Safety, right? Productivity. And when, when something is surfaced, if we don't close the loop on it to make sure whatever was safety issue was surfaced, was addressed, you know, let's make sure that we get those things done and completed. And it helps all of the different aspects that Jim talked about. So I like that piece because many times we surface, we don't pause to surface the committed actions, or we do. And then we don't close the loop on him in the next meeting. And then, you know, our clients, they go, well, can you help us with productivity? Can you help us? You know, we're really focused on becoming an hro, right? We want to focus on being highly reliable. And then I always ask, well, let me see your meeting minutes and agendas. And most of the time they either don't have them or they're very, very, how can we say, lackluster. They're not very robust, and they don't have those types of data and metrics that Jim was talking about pulled forward. They don't kind of close out and close the loop on promises.

Yeah, well said. And that, that it's actually an artifact of a culture that is not interested in learning. That is a culture that's interested in meeting goes back to. Anybody can run a meeting, but not everybody can have a meeting that has embedded in it those committed actions and promises to enable the areas and make sure that the areas that we care about are being taken care of. Jim, this was just magnificent. Something I watch I know you now, so I know you were thinking something as Colleen was talking. What were you thinking?

Well, the, the ability to follow up is really, really important. And one of the huge things difficulties we had manufacturing is typical 8 hour shift work. All those minutes stop, leave, new shift comes in, so on and so forth. We were trying to push the culture change to lean manufacturing where we were going to talk to the employees who again know more than we do about their individual jobs and the whole traditional manufacturing thing. If you go back to moving assembly lines and all that is the line starts, the line stops, you're off duty. And we had to really have a philosophical battle with the finance wing of the company because part of this I'm going to ask you to do better happens at every level. And so team meetings have to happen in the smallest work groups that you have in a plant and those are on the line. And so we had to shut down the line for 15 minutes to provide for an exchange of the team to talk about their issues and what they could do, because I can't solve as an individual all of their problems once a month. And this was a huge blow to the finance geeks who said, well, you can't stop the line. We're going to lose 15 minutes of production off an eight hour shift. And that means X thousands of units of whatever we're producing every year. But unless you integrate this behavior change, the ability to listen, the ability to respond at almost every level in your organization, it's a waste of time.

Okay, so the ability to listen is constant. And I don't know, you haven't been in all of the leader to leader things, Jim, that we've done. Every leader keeps telling us over and over again I need to do better at listening to understand. And that's one of their disciplines, is to keep getting better at that. So. Beautiful. Well, before we end our podcast for today, thank you. Went slightly longer than usual, but boy, it was good stuff. I'd like you each to say here's one thing that I hope you took away from this conversation today that you can put in your back pocket and use almost immediately. Jim, you want to start us off?

Yeah. I think that the whole message here is it's not about you, it's about what your business is supposed to do for the customer and how do you get the customer to benefit from all the busy work changes, this new budgets, new outside influences, all this other stuff? How do you get it into your business to benefit the customer?

I love it. I love it. That's great. So, and Colleen, what would you say is the biggest takeaway that you would invite our listeners to take from this conversation today?

Well, as a recovering micromanager myself, I would just say, you know, honestly, I love that it's focus on the people. So my invitation is to pause and just take a moment to reflect and to think about when you're in your meetings, when you're walking around, when you are hoping to lead your team to produce a desired result, what are you focused on? Are you focused on the metric without addressing the people part? Are you modeling the way? How are you showing up in those conversations?

That's really good. So Jim has set the stage for our next podcast, so I'm going to ask him to talk to us about Lean, Six Sigma. And the reason I want to bring that up, ladies and gentlemen, is we get queries all the time about it and the query tends to lump Lean and Six Sigma in together. They conflate the two and make them one word. They're not one word, they're two. Two different things that are highly integrated. So I'm going to ask Jim to do that. And those of you that are listening that want to hear that next one, I'm going to invite you to look at a very interesting little piece by a gentleman who won a quality award for a short video that he did. It's very short and you can get it online. It's called Kaizen Toast. Now, kaizen is one of those cool Japanese words that means, you know, let's just do this better kind of thing. But Kaizen toast is really interesting where he is asked to make toast for his wife and he's in the kitchen and he does it and he demonstrates the distinctions between a Lean and non lean product production. So I think you would enjoy that. And I'm going to get Jim to give us good examples of the of Lean and Six Sigma as we go forward. Thank you so much for joining us today. This is JLC Media and this is leader to leader conversation. We're so grateful that you took some time to be with us today and we wish you well. Want to learn more about us or anything you want to know about this gentleman. Jim, hop on gojlc.com, send us a little query and we'll hook you eyes up and let you visit about what he might do to help you think about how to get out of that micromanagement mindset into the mindset of truly leading. Thank you for listening. And if you're on YouTube, thank you for watching. Take care everybody. And if it's still the holiday season for you, happy Holidays.

Sincerest thanks for listening to this episode of the Everyday Leadership Conversations podcast. The Jorgensen Learning center offers a variety of programs for individuals and organizations to enhance their communication and leadership skills. To find out more about programs and upcoming webinars, check out our Events page at gojlc. Com.