Increasing Industrial Productivity
Randy Wolken, President & CEO

Over the years, technologies promise to transform industrial production, especially including AI most recently. However, organizations must still figure out how to grow and maintain high productivity over the long term. One crucial and related goal is to shift how managers work—from process supervisors to engineers who redesign how tech-enabled processes improve work. A glaring example is that, according to a recent study, supervisors at many manufacturers spend only 31 percent of their time on leadership tasks. However, to build organizational capabilities in the long run, they likely need to double the time spent on leadership tasks such as process confirmation and team building. Why? Teams must become increasingly self-managed, where leadership training and development are critical.

What is changing? The mass production of a standard product was the archetype for the modern enterprise. Standardization of products supported the standardization of processes, culminating in management systems such as lean, which rely on elaborate codification of “standard work.”

Today, the context is changing. As automation and AI take over more and more tasks, human work increasingly centers on the sorts of “special projects” that once accounted for only a small share—perhaps 20 percent—of day-to-day work. The unusual is becoming business as usual. However, management often consists of heavy layers of (functional) processes on top of project management, yielding uncertain, frequently slow, and resource-intensive decision-making. The coming challenge for business leaders is to flip the ratio that dominates their current business approach. Instead of deploying 80 percent of people in processes and 20 percent in projects, they should begin to aim for a much more significant percentage of human effort in projects.

Crucially, future work will balance stability and agility by ensuring that every employee has a home unit centered around their skills, even when working within dynamic project teams whose composition is tailored to specific skill needs.

Within this structure, three factors prove critical:

• Build internal talent pools. Leaders can’t assemble effective teams unless they know who in the organization has the required skills. That means building a skills profile for each employee and making it widely available within the organization.
• Set clear boundaries. Clear boundaries are set up within company priorities, product strategy, project team mission, and short-term team goals. It is also crucial for senior management to provide rigorous oversight; in this way, they could find opportunities for teams to share resources or join forces.
• Develop achievement-oriented leadership. Company executives must recognize that effective project team leadership needs different skills from those traditionally encouraged in line leadership roles. Rather than directing the work of people with similar training but varying levels of experience, project leaders would need to coordinate individuals with deep expertise across many fields. Therefore, the leader’s role changes to emphasize what the project looks to achieve—the problems to be solved—along with why and when. The role of the team centers on collaboration to find the best solutions.

I encourage you to read this study to see what is starting to happen with the advent of increasing levels of technology and the deployment of AI. Please share your insights with me and my team at MACNY.

Also, contact us to learn how we can help you train the next generation of leaders and skill up current team members.  Also learn about our credentialing approaches, such as pre-apprenticeship and registered apprenticeship.The future looks exciting in manufacturing, but it will require on-going development and change.