Reliability Leadership and Maintenance Culture

Leadership and Culture
by Terrence O'Hanlon, Publisher and CEO Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime Magazine

I happened on a great interview about how important company culture and leadership is from the NY Times today with Mike Sheehan (whom I had never heard of before today).

It caught my eye because Reliability Leadership and Culture is the theme for IMC-2012 the 27^th International Maintenance Conference being held December 4-7, 2012 at the beautiful Hyatt Regency Coconut Point Resort on Bonita Springs Florida.

Find out more about IMC-2012 here

Join the LinkedIn Group for IMC-2012

You can read the article titled Yes, You’re Smart, but What About Your Topspin? here but these are 2 excepts I found very useful

Sheehan on leadership:

I saw leaders who were good role models, too. I liked the leaders who pushed very hard, and they could get the best out of you without being overly tough. They corrected you, but there was just a positiveness to how they approached everything that attracted me to them as leaders.

I’ll never forget that. They’d be very tough on you, but they knew when to take a little bit of a break and maybe whisper something or just let you know that they were empathetic. They knew when they’d pushed too far and they knew how to pull back.

They were a great example of a saying that I use all the time: “You treat people well, they will return the favor. And if you treat them poorly, they will return the favor.”

Sheehan on culture:

I think there are two kinds of cultures, and then you can subdivide them after that. One is based on a foundation of insecurity, fear and chaos, and one is based on a firm platform where people come to work and they’re worried about the work itself. They’re not worried about things that surround the work and are not important. I’ve tried to make Hill Holliday that kind of environment, where people come to work and they’re not worried about their peers shooting them. If leadership doesn’t provide a forum for that kind of behavior, it dies quickly. People forget about it and they just focus on doing their job.

You don’t want a conflict-free zone, but you want the conflicts to be about the work itself. Sometimes you have to dig a little bit and talk to people, but if you find out the conflict is about the work, then that’s good, because it’s healthy. I think that in a lot of workplaces it’s the opposite — people have to come to a consensus on the work, and so all the conflicts are political.

That’s one thing that the founder, Jack, instilled in the culture. It’s not a democracy. You’ve got to make tough decisions and then you’ve got to move on. “The enemy’s out there,” he would say. “The enemy’s not in these four walls.”

I hope you find this as interesting and valuable as I did

~Terry O