Blue-Collar Basics in Management

By Thomas Rushin

Blue-Collar Basics in Management covers the basics of what a blue-collar manager, new or experienced, needs to know to maintain an efficient and competitive business, department, or team. Whether you work for a Fortune 500 or are starting off as a first time Lead in industry, this book offers the experiences you need to succeed - all from a guy who learned it the hard way in the recycling industry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781105015267

Book preview

Chapter Summary

Toxicity as a manager can easily be passed onto the next generation of managers.  Do not become a victim of this process.  Break the cycle by enabling your employees, and by focusing on processes and process optimization.  This is the cycle of success.

Foundation

You are only as strong as your foundation, and your foundation is your people.

It does not matter if you are a one-person business or a Fortune 500 company employing 2,500+ people. 

On August 11th, 2001, as he was campaigning for the Presidency, Mitt Romney responded to some hecklers shouting about corporations with the now infamous line of Corporations are people, my friend. This one line was latched onto and attacked relentlessly by his opponents and played its own small part in his losing his bid at the highest office in the land.  He was not entirely wrong, but a more apt description would be that corporations are made up of people.

How well a company does will depend on many factors, but its ability to survive tough market conditions, or to thrive under positive ones, comes down to its people.  We cannot control markets.  What we can influence from a leadership role is the strength of our foundation. 

Throughout human history one thing has been built on top of another.  We needed fire to be able to forge metal.  We needed metal to industrialize and use electricity.  We needed electricity for the information age and computers.  Just by typing this up on a computer there is a direct technological line that may be traced back to the first person that figured out how to start a fire.

In business you cannot jump to an extraordinarily complex, integrated operation without establishing a strong foundation.  You will need to build your foundation, piece by piece, and then work to maintain it.  We did not go from fire to the moon overnight, nor should you expect to accomplish the same with a business.  It takes time, effort, and a lot of trial and error.

What is your foundation?

The first time I was ever afforded the opportunity to work in a leadership position was as a graveyard shift supervisor in El Paso.  I had a terrible tendency to open my mouth and speak of issues of which I had no real knowledge.  Evaluating the metrics, I had been tasked with analyzing thus far and making my opinion on the numbers quite clearly known, my bosses decided the best place for me was as far away from them as possible.

Thus, I was banished to the night.

I was told to recruit a production shift from scratch and that I would be given one guy that no one else seemed to want to work with for a heavy equipment operator (front end loader).

My first shift was, shockingly, a complete and utter disaster.  Despite my youthful arrogance that I would have no problem whatsoever managing to navigate a new industry, role, production crew, city, state, life, et cetera, reality had some harsh lessons to teach.  Nothing went right – we could not even get the machinery to start, due to some technical glitches.

I was mortified.  My very first shift.  I was going to catch all kinds of hell come morning.  There was no way to rectify this.  I would just have to swallow my pride and accept that I had failed.  But I had been told earlier that in the event we were unable to run the equipment for production that we should take on another task.  A relatively simple on – tear down the old fencing so that it could be replaced.

As I meandered back from the office, attempting to troubleshoot the technical issues, I saw the guys tearing up the fencing.  I had only mentioned in passing what the alternative was, but they had taken it upon themselves to be as proactive as possible.  I was at a complete and utter loss for words.  They were turning a loss into a win.  They were finding a means by which to be productive, and all they had for a basis for that was their own initiative and something I had mentioned briefly earlier in the evening.

By the end of the shift, I was able to collect myself and relay the technical problems that we had faced, requesting assistance in troubleshooting, and resolving them, as well as passing on what we had accomplished.

My first night in a leadership position had nearly ended in disaster, and it was only thanks to the quick thinking and ambitious get-it-done mentality of my coworkers that I had been bailed out.  It was my first night that I learned how important your foundation is, and that your foundation is your people.  This experience helped drill into me the importance of the cycle of success.

The rest of this book will focus on how to break the cycle and build your foundation.  Consider each chapter from the standpoint of how the recommendations will help break the cycle of bad management and build a stronger employee foundation for you and your company.

Understanding the Mentality – Cog in the Machine

It is quite easy to slip into a mindset as a manager of being far more important than you are in the grand scheme of things.  You are (generally) paid more.  You have more authority.  People must do what you say, so on and so forth.  You matter!  These other people should just be better, like you!

To break the cycle, to build your foundation, you must first accept one ultimate truth.

You have remarkably little to do with your own success as a manager, and yet you have immense control over it at the same time.

Managers are just one cog in the business machine. 

To function properly, the machine requires that each cog turn.

When the cycle is managed at the top by toxic leadership then imagine the large Manager cog stalled.  The smaller Employee cogs will be trying to turn, but they will either be jammed, or have to work twice as hard to achieve the same results.  Now imagine that the Employee cogs have been worn down and are also not working properly due to poor leadership.  Now the entire machine is functioning far worse than it could, and should, be.

Many people think that the most important job of a manager is telling their subordinates what to do.  That is a mistake.  Your first, most important job as a manager is ensuring your people have everything they need to be successful.  You should be giving them the tools and resources to succeed.  If the employees have your support, then your cog will turn properly, as will theirs, working in tandem to produce the results you desire.

Effective leadership will work in tandem with all parts of the machine so that all cogs turn well.

And just like a machine, sometimes things break.  It requires constant vigilance and maintenance.  You must engage in proper upkeep.

If you do not change your oil for two years and your motor explodes on the highway then you will likely find few sympathetic ears.  Yet when it comes to management far too few managers bother to change the oil and then wonder why it all fell apart. 

Being referred to as a cog in a machine is usually associated with a negative interpretation.  I disagree.  Every cog in a machine, no matter how small, plays a critical role in its performance.  A $250,000 exotic sports car can be brought to a dead stop by a broken belt.  A broken sprocket can bring an entire operation to a halt.

I do not know the exotic sports car analogy firsthand, but I have lived the broken sprocket example.

Companies create jobs because those jobs have value and are important to the company’s success.  A cog is important to a machine’s functionality in much the same manner.

Every part in an engine performs an important function, or the engineer who designed the engine would not have allocated money to pay for it. Similarly, managers hire people to perform essential functions, or they would not spend the money to pay them.  Every part in an engine is essential, and every job, and every person performing those jobs is at least as important as you, the manager.  If you do not take care of the parts in your engine, it will eventually fail.  If you do not take care of your people, your enterprise will fail just as surely.

If you are going to succeed at any level of leadership then you need to maintain your machinery.  You must keep the cogs turning.

Developing & Strengthening Your Foundation

You are only as strong as your people.  You will never be stronger than your weakest link.  Period.

I have seen far too many businesses fail because the leadership built a shoddy foundation and refused to reinforce it.  This information is so that you, a blue collar manager, can learn from the mistakes of others and succeed.

Poor leadership is experiencing high turnover rates, managers or supervisors yelling at or berating employees, ignoring the needs of employees, and forgetting the human element that is key to success.  I once saw a boss of mine speaking to another boss at the highest levels of the company, and the highest boss said, when questioned about the importance of morale, stated that morale did not matter.

I have worked under many poor leaders over the years.  One common theme has been that they did not appreciate their