leadership
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Building a Winning Team: Continuous Improvement and Development
- September 18, 2024
- Posted by: Nanette Gregory
- Category: Leadership, Manufacturing
No CommentsEvery manager dreams of building a winning team. Every boss dreams of having a winning department. Every sergeant dreams of commanding a winning squad. Members doing the high-quality work that needs to be done, fulfilling every function, completing every pass, every play, every task, every order, and functioning as a single unit with a single
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How Managers Can Keep Unions on Their Side
- September 1, 2024
- Posted by: Nanette Gregory
- Category: Business, Leadership, Manufacturing
I had a rule as a manager that I would never take union leadership by surprise. If anything, despite the traditional “management versus the union” conflict, I always believed they were an important part of my team. For example, if I was ever thinking of initiating a new process or major idea, I would share
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The Role of Safety Audits in Preventing Workplace Accidents
- August 21, 2024
- Posted by: Nanette Gregory
- Category: Manufacturing, Safety
I’m going to say something that’s going to upset some people. There should be no safety audits in a factory setting. Why is that? Because safety audits are like restaurant inspections. Everyone who has ever worked in a restaurant knows the dirty little secret: when you know a health inspector is showing up, everyone makes
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How to Develop Good Habits as a Leader
- June 24, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership
Good leaders are always open to new ideas about how to become better leaders. They don’t assume they know everything, especially as they ascend to higher and higher positions. They know their strengths and work to make them even stronger. They know their weaknesses and work to make them, well, stronger, too. You don’t have
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Perform an Annual ABC Analysis to Find New Profits
- May 19, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Manufacturing
According to the Pareto Principle (also called the 80/20 rule), you’re wasting a large portion of your time on items and customers that don’t actually have an ROI for you. That is, 20% of your customers bring in 80% of your results, and 20% of your inventory brings in 80% of your sales. Conversely, 80%
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How Managers Can Keep Unions on Their Side
- March 27, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
I had a rule as a manager that I would never take union leadership by surprise. If anything, despite the traditional “management versus the union” conflict, I always believed they were an important part of my team. For example, if I was ever thinking of initiating a new process or major idea, I would share
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How to Develop Good Habits as a Leader
- March 20, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership
Good leaders are always open to new ideas about how to become better leaders. They don’t assume they know everything, especially as they ascend to higher and higher positions. They know their strengths and work to make them even stronger. They know their weaknesses and work to make them, well, stronger, too. You don’t have
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How Can You Address the Skills Gap and Workforce Development?
- February 28, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing
It’s getting harder and harder to find skilled workers for the manufacturing segment. Too many recruiting strategies are based on hiring people away from other companies, keeping them for a couple of years, only to have someone else hire them away from you. If you want to address the skills gap and improve your workforce
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The Importance of Having a Mentor, No Matter Your Role
- December 27, 2023
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management
When you were coming up in your career, you no doubt had mentors, people who would help you in your job and prepare you for the next step in your career. These were people who were undoubtedly older, wiser, more experienced, and very knowledgeable. But does that stop once you reach the C-suite? Once you’ve
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The Importance of Being a Mentor
- December 20, 2023
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Measurement
Recently, I talked about the importance of coaching employees to help them become better. The other side of that same coin is the idea of mentoring. Mentoring is when you influence and guide someone who is less experienced and often younger than you are. In a professional setting, a mentor is someone who influences the