Reactive maintenance leadership and culture: Atlas shrugging?

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

In my work, I have the privilege and honor to met and speak with many maintenance reliability leaders. 

During some of the conversation we might happen to get around to speaking about executive management and their relationship to improving reliability.  There are generally two types:

1. Enlightened management that has taken the time to learn about modern maintenance reliability approaches combined with an appreciation of the leadership and culture that must be sustained for long-term success.
2. Unenlightened management that thinks reliability is a maintenance improvement project and will have an end date.

I am always impressed when I see teams attending maintenance conferences like IMC the International Maintenance Conference.  The teams include company executives and operations managers in addition to the maintenance managers, maintenance supervisors, maintenance planners and maintenance technicians. 

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The benefit comes from allowing the company executive and operations/production leadership to hear about the reliability journey from third party companies, sometimes companies that are direct competitors.

You can imagine the power and impact of a reliability performance improvement message delivered by a direct competitor or even just a third paty. 

I think that maintenance reliability leaders should assume the responsibility for ensuring that company executive and operations professionals understand the story of a high performance reliability journey.  Make a plan to begin telling that story to your executives and operations people today.

It does not do any good to be angry or resentful about “why” they do not currently understand.  It is not useful to insist they “should” already understand.  The most successful reliability leaders adopt an Atlas-like attitude and place the world on their shoulders and assume all responsibility to shape reality and reliability.

Like the successful entrepreneurs in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, you can burn down the place and leave them to their own fates or you can be a proactive leader and carry them to goal line in spite of themselves.