How a tough day on the plant floor reshaped my understanding of leadership, focus, and trust.
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How asking a better question and slowing things down unlocked a stubborn reliability problem.
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How visible discipline and consistency helped reset culture in a struggling manufacturing plant.
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What a four-day asbestos audit taught me about discipline, resilience, and what safety really means.
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During our benchmarking tour of our European plants, we met hourly operators who were so engaged in their work that they had process understanding that rivaled one of our highest level scientists. And, they wanted to know more!
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I often meet people who are interested in the work I do, and sometimes, these conversations turn into future business opportunities. One statement I hear quite frequently goes something like this: “I see you’ve made great strides working with manufacturers in [insert industry here]. But we’re different, so I want to know what experience you have in my industry.”
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I’m passionate about helping teams improve the reliability of their processes, using basic yet effective techniques to immediately boost the performance of their manufacturing lines. The best part is that the team can see and feel the results, and the techniques I teach are easy to learn and transferable to other lines and processes within the facility.
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I was in Florida, working with a residential building products manufacturer on our second Kaizen event together. This time, we focused on improving materials delivery to the production lines. The tasks were challenging, physically demanding, and slow, leading to high turnover in the material handling position.
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Armstrong World Industries has a strong safety culture and is relentless in driving to zero injuries globally. Early on in the journey to zero, our factories focused on compliance, holding people accountable to wear their safety glasses, safety shoes, and follow various protocols. That took safety to a certain level, but the company performance plateaued. How could we get to the next level of leadership?
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I was promoted to business unit manager in a union facility for Armstrong World Industries. The relationship between management and the hourly employees had been strained for many years. It was so bad that on my first day on the job, there was a sign that said, “the plant will be closing in two months.” I wondered why they had so little faith in me. The shop steward told me, “Adam, even if we could trust you, we didn’t trust the person before you and won’t trust the person after you.” It was like they had given up on any form of leadership and stability.
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Armstrong World Industries is the global leader in suspended ceilings. That might not seem like much to you, but when you sell over a billion square feet of ceiling tile and the grid to suspend it every year, you’re making a big impact in the construction and housing market.
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For part of my career, I worked for Dal-Tile in Dallas Texas. I was the environmental, safety, health, and mining liaison for our twelve manufacturing plants. My job was to help each plant stay compliant and safe, providing training and reporting support. We had a number of factories in Texas, and I visited each one and get to the know the employees and leadership. That way, I could develop a support plan that was mutually beneficial.
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In my early corporate days at Thomasville Furniture, I was given the opportunity to try many things to improve the performance and quality of the operation. This story isn’t about me, but another engineer, who came up with something so creative, he saved the company millions of dollars and improved quality of the product for our customers.
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I took a site visit to a new client that runs a paper mill in Oklahoma. After a solid day of meeting the leadership team and touring the site, we agreed on a series of Kaizen events, starting with two 5S events, one on the paper mill side of the plant, and the other one on the converting side. Talk about night and day! In Part I, we saw what happens when the area owner wasn’t aligned. This story is about an aligned area owner.
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Many of my early projects for Armstrong World Industries were at the Macon Georgia plant. This was and still is the largest ceiling plant in the world, with a capacity of over half a billion square feet of ceiling tiles produced annually.
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