The Dirt about Paint

By David M M Gable

This book provides the reader with a better understanding of running an automotive paint facility in a manufacturing setting. However, it also covers several chapters that will be useful in any job market. From managing people, managing time, working with unions, implementing disciplines of 5-S, lean manufacturing, building teams, and the breakdown of each paint production process. This book will not only help the countless managers and supervisors currently working within the paint automotive industry, but it will also be a guide to help the present and future managers on how to properly manage the business and become successful by implementing these proven techniques. This book was derived from twenty-seven years of experience that should be shared as a testament of how managers can avoid the common mistakes of managing people and processes and rise to the top of their careers by implementing the proven successes mentioned in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647016104

Book preview

Chapter 1

Management: How Not to Get Painted into a Corner

I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

—Herbert Bayard Swope

Ask yourself this very important question: Am I a good manager? Most of you will say, Yes, I think I’m a good manager. It is good to be confident. I am. Although I confess that many times I really questioned myself on this question. I have met many managers and supervisors who said, I think I am a good manager. But how do you know? What litmus test do you have to ensure you are on the right track? How do you determine how well you manage your employees, and how well do you keep your boss and your customers happy with your overall performance? There is no single answer to this question, not to mention the ambiguity associated with this question. There are several ways to gauge how well you are accomplishing the mystique of being an effective leader. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, for instance, will give you an idea of what type of personality traits you have. Do the results of this simple test align with management’s expectations of your job? I have seen both successful introverts and successful extraverts. I have also seen failure from both traits as well. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a great tool to evaluate what type of personality trait you are and how do you react to people and issues in a management position. I highly recommend taking this test to see how well you agree with the findings. You may be amazed. I was skeptical when I took the test, but it was right on the mark with my management style. However, this still does not answer the question of how good of a manager you are.

Visual Management

Let us look at visual management and determine if it can measure your skills and successes to see if it aligns with the departmental goals that you are responsible for. What do you know about SPC information? Statistical process control is a scientific method used for visual monitoring, process control, and a means to set a baseline to improve processes by reducing variation from manufacturing, financial, and service processes. This is the tool you will use to measure your hourly, daily, weekly, yearly successes by visually displaying your continuous improvements or your weaknesses in obtaining your goals.

In most plants, you will be required to measure goals for safety, quality, cost, environmental initiatives, 5-S, and other categories. Do you have a designated area to measure and track your departmental goals? What are your documented solutions to your successes and failures? Different plants have different matrices, but this is a good way to show your boss or customer(s) how effective you are meeting your goals. Visual goals are a snapshot on how well your department is performing, but it is also a direct reflection on you as a manager. For example, I used to hold a five-minute meeting with my employees at several facilities. These short meetings took place after breaks and lunches. It was a great opportunity to discuss safety near misses, quality issues, and production throughput to determine if we were behind or at our targeted goals. If we were not meeting our goals, we would discuss what we needed to do to meet those goals and come up with a quick action plan to prevent reoccurrence of the issue. Most times, it was related to quality issues or absenteeism. But we all shared a common goal, and that was to succeed.

When I worked for Freightliner (DTNA), we had a similar format, but it was not as effective. Two times per day, every department head and supervisor had to stand in front of their production board and give account if you were green (all goals met) or red (did not meet goals) for the first half of your shift and then repeat the process at the end of the shift. It was effective to show your problems or issues to the entire plant so you could determine what your plan was to hit your goals. This system was adapted from the Toyota Production System, but after working with Toyota Canada, I can say they would shake their heads in disbelief that a company would waste an hour to an hour and a half of management’s time talking over things like, What did you learn today? What did you teach today? You had to be very creative in order to come up with something to say twice daily. I like the idea in theory, but the duration of taking a supervisor off the floor in order to appease upper management is nothing more than a violation of lean manufacturing and a swing and a miss at common sense management. Supervisors need to be on the floor managing the people. A more effective way to do this would be for the departmental heads to get together to discuss departmental issues and let the supervisors manage the people and processes. The supervisors could report to the department head, and they could relay the information to upper management. This would take about ten minutes instead of ninety minutes. It is impossible to make up for the time that you have lost. Not to mention that every one of your employees know you are tied up in an hour-long meeting. It does not make sense. Ask yourself this question: Is this value added? The answer to this situation is clearly no. In addition to wasting valuable time, if you stated the wrong words like I think or I’m not sure, you were greeted with derogatory comments from the plant manager. You were belittled in front of your peers, human resources, safety department, and all the departmental heads in attendance of these meetings. Do not ever be like this. Upper management should be supportive and helpful. If you have a supervisor who is struggling, you should always have a documented discussion behind closed doors to discuss the issues and then find a solution together and target the root cause of the issue.

It is also a good idea to hold daily or weekly meetings with your hourly and salary employees to review all the information that you track. This allows you to show your employees how their daily work efforts affect the organization as a whole. This will also lead to your employees being accountable for their work, and it will ultimately increase their work performance because they know you are tracking their progress and openly discussing their performance. If someone is not doing a good job, this daily exposure will apply pressure for everyone to perform well. You want to measure incremental improvements in all that you and your team are held accountable. At Harley-Davidson, for example, we had stretch goals. It is always a good idea to look beyond your production goals and move the goalpost farther. I worked at several plants where this was effective.

Proactively Discussing Safety Goals

To help prevent safety incidents, we would stretch (different kind of stretch goal) after lunch, for example, and then go over safety topics: Did anyone witness or have a near miss? You would be surprised at how many employees saw a near miss, and unless you ask them, they would not say anything. This gave employees and management the opportunity to call out the near miss, and everyone would learn from it and, hopefully, avoid a safety incident. This information would be communicated to the rest of the teams on other shifts.

We would then look at our hour-by-hour board to see if we were green and hitting our goals or if we were red and not meeting our goals. I always liked to get the leads or other employees to tell me what they thought we could do to hit our goals. This made sense because they were doing the job. I also jumped in (nonunion plant) occasionally to help them out on the production line or grab the end of a 40K power washer to show we are all in this together and the importance of hitting our departmental goals. Communication is very important to your success. You cannot fix the issues if you do not know what they are. Encourage all employees to speak up and be part of the solutions. I had a safety success rate at many plants with zero safety incidents because I had weekly safety town hall meetings. I asked employees questions, and I would get responses. I highly recommend this practice if you are not already committed to other means of effective safety discussions.

What Does the Boss Say?

Quarterly performance reviews also give you feedback on your performance. If your boss is not providing feedback, ask him or her to give you a review. Whether they give you a review or they do not, document it. Of course, going to weekly or daily donkey barbecues are also a good indicator on how well you are not doing. If you are getting your proverbial behind chewed, chances are you are not doing as well as you thought you were. If this is the case, do not sweat it too much. I have worked for many people who impersonated a manager, who thought they were doing a good job, only to see they were fired, usually for being incompetent in a managerial role. Some of these managers did not know what they were doing. Many managers are thrown into positions that they are not qualified to do. Sometimes, I will go back over my evaluations over the years. I retained most of them. Most of my evaluations were outstanding. I had one manager give me a review that I was very pleased. My vice president then reviewed the evaluation with me. He looks up after reading it and says, Jeez, David, did you fill this out yourself? I laughed. I knew the company thought a lot about me and respected my work. My validation for this was they gave me several hundred shares of company stock at two different times in my career with this company. I performed my job very well. I always hated filling out my own evaluations. I am too critical of myself. I also do not take much stock in evaluations filled out by people who were not knowledgeable enough in the first place to work for me, let alone be my boss. It is sometimes a difficult pill to swallow. Spoiler alert…my next book, I am naming names.

But My Employees Won’t Like Me

Think on this question: Do you think you are a good leader because your employees like you? Most of you probably think this is a true measurement about your relationship with your employees and how effective you are as a manager. However, could it be because they do what they want and you allow them to operate with total autonomy? Do they take care of you? In some manufacturing settings, such as High-Performance Work Organizations or Team Concept programs, this is how you should lead; allow employees to be accountable regarding their work and achieving their goals. Some work cultures work very well in this realm of autonomy, but some prefer to be told what to do every step of the way. In the autonomous culture, you become more of a coach instead of a traditional supervisor. It does work, but you have to have everyone from the top on down be supportive and believe in the concept. You also have to have clear rules and be able to measure the results of the team.

Over my twenty-seven-year career in the automotive industry, I had worked for five different General Motors facilities. The first plant was a foundry, and they were in the beginning stages of team concept. The main idea is that the employee working the job for twenty-plus years had more experience on how to perform their job. This was a great idea, and I bought into it right away. When I started in this business, I was twenty-seven years old and my least senior employee had twenty-six years on the job at the time. Some of my employees started working at this plant years before I was born. Who am I to tell them how to do their job? Apparently, I had to tell most of them. I did not say this concept was easy. The interesting point I want to make is, the other four General Motors plants I worked at were not trained in Team Concept. All these years later, I still do not understand why. GM Mexico—yes, I can see why they would not or could not. GM Mexico is a story for another chapter or another book. However, you will have a difficult time trying to convince me that changing a culture is a bad thing. The change must come from the top and be enforced on every management level. Communications, such as regular town hall meetings, are effective ways to provide information and receive feedback from employees. The biggest issue you will encounter is disgruntled employees using your time to grieve about whatever they believe is important. I would tell the employee to see me after the meeting to discuss their grievances. There is no value in having all your employees sit through a disgruntled employee’s disappointments in life. Do not let this happen. Discuss their personal issues behind closed doors. Always be professional and also have active listening skills. Put yourself in their shoes; treating others as you want to be treated is always the best course of action.

Let’s take my first two and a half years at the foundry for an example. Employees were told to leave their brain at the door and to do whatever the supervisor tells them to do. I know I never liked to be micromanaged, but this was the culture at the time. Most of these employees came up from the South because they could not find gainful employment in the mid to late sixties. It was called the Great Migration. They came to places like automotive plants in the North to make decent money and start a new life they were denied living in the South. Most men and women would stand in line at the gate, and a foreman would handpick the employees out of a large group to work that day and maybe they would get a chance at a job if they proved they could perform the job. Usually, they worked the first day for free. If you worked hard and impressed the foreman, you would be offered a job. Pretty crazy when you think about it. In my opinion, changing the old culture was the right thing to do. I gave it my firm support. Some supervisors did not embrace the new change. I was standing behind a career GM supervisor on the way out of one of the Team Concept training sessions, who said, This is a bunch of crap. I am not changing. They will do what I tell them to do. I never saw him again. I will bet he thought he was doing a good job. Always keep this in mind: opinions do vary.

But I want you to look a little deeper into this question: Why do my employees like me? I’ve had supervisors that worked for me who had employees become their friends. They go fishing together, drink together, and spend time on the floor of the workplace talking for hours. This is not good for your career. Opinions also vary on this subject. Keep in mind, many of those opinions are formulated by people who do make a difference in your career. Perception is reality. I have terminated supervisors who state in their own words, I get along with my employees. Evidently, they got along all too well. Here is an example that I will remember for the rest of my life. I had a supervisor who I found out was drinking in the company parking lot with one of his employees on a regular basis. This infraction was on company time. My immediate recourse was to terminate the supervisor the next day. However, this supervisor was apparently very drunk when he left at the end of his shift. He went home, got in his boat, and went to a bar on the lake he lived on and closed down the bar. On his way back home, he hit a boat dock at forehead level. He passed away on the banks of the lake. This is one reason why you address bad behavior as soon as you find out about it and do not procrastinate on how to deal with a situation that could end up very badly.

Here is another example at a plant I worked: A supervisor received a call from an employee’s wife. The supervisor acknowledged that this employee worked for him. The wife of the employee asks, Why is it that when my husband leaves for work, he is sober. When he gets home at night, he is drunk, and he beats me. When the supervisor (who did not work for me) told me this, I could not believe it. From that day forward, I made sure I followed disciplinary action to the letter or shop rule, as the case may be, to ensure I never received a call like that. This poor wife is wondering, What are you doing to my husband at work? The sad and pathetic answer: not much, it seems.

I will give you some scenarios of good and bad leadership examples, and you decide which ones may make you feel a little uncomfortable because it maybe you or someone you work with. Please don’t shout the names of the guilty as you read these. And by the way, I did not make these up; they are all true events.

One of my best employees always has my back. No matter what I need done, they get it done for me and make me look good. I treat them differently because they have earned my respect. They take care of me and I take care of them.

The pitfall is that other employees see this. They ask questions. Why does John Doe get to do that, and I don’t? Why hasn’t he/she been fired a long time ago? They have missed so much time, but the supervisor covers for them. I can assure you, if you are allowing this to happen, eventually you will be explaining it in the human resource office—and probably on your last day of work.

The other downside to this scenario is an employee is going to come back on you and say, Why do I always have to do the dirty work? Why don’t you make other people work instead of giving me all the worse jobs? Why do I have to help them do their job because you won’t step up to them? This actually happened to me once early in my career. The employee was right. I had him help other employees get the job done because I wanted it done right and the employees assigned had difficulty. I never made that mistake again. Everyone is hired to perform a job. They need to do it, or you go through the process and find someone else to do it. Simple.

I don’t see any problem with going fishing, hunting, or hanging out with someone that works with me. We both share this passion, and it doesn’t interfere with work. We keep work and our relationship separate.

Again, favoritism becomes the main focal point of other employees. No matter how careful you are in your conversations, your shared ideas, your personal thoughts, your discontentment in your job, or any negativity in the workplace that you share with others will eventually be discussed among the employees. Once you inadvertently break away from being professional, you are now at the mercy of these employees who more than likely will discuss these private conversations with others. Maybe it is other employees, or maybe it is your boss or other members of management. Do not fall into this trap.

Keep your working relationship with employees just that—a working relationship. It is okay to be friendly and talk about similar interests, but try to do this during breaks and lunches or before work. Employees should be working any other time during the shift and not talking