Fleet Maintenance - 36

MANAGEMENT
»To have a successful maintenance
department, you must give the supervisor
the tools, authority, and support they need.
Photo courtesy of Transervice

Roles in the
maintenance world

Do you sabotage
success?
Direction must come from the top
of the company hierarchy in order
to allow supervisors to thrive
as managers, and as leaders.

Do we cripple our supervisors by imagining
their role to be leaders and managers? Could
it be there are expectations placed on supervisors to fill the "leader" role in the absence of
leadership and management from the company
hierarchy? Let's examine the role and responsibilities for successful supervision, and if our
companies sabotage success.
To have successful maintenance, you must
have a realistic view of supervision. To have
successful maintenance, you must give the
supervisor the tools, authority, and support they
need. To have successful maintenance, you must
have respect for what the supervisor contributes.
In the maintenance field, the supervisor
is the critical player running the team. At a

By Joel Levitt

PRESIDENT, SPRINGFIELD RESOURCES
Springfield Resources (maintenancetraining.com) is a
management consulting firm that services a variety of
clients on a wide range of maintenance issues. Levitt is
the president of the company and has trained more than
17,000 maintenance leaders from more than 3,000 organizations in 38 countries. He is also the creator of LaserFocused Training, a flexible training program that provides
specific, targeted training on your schedule, online for one
to 250 people in maintenance management, asset management, and reliability.

36 Fleet Maintenance | April 2020

basic level, the supervisor is accountable for
the quality, safety, security, and productivity
of the maintenance effort. If you read articles about modern supervision, you will see
quite a bit of discussion on the supervisor as
a leader and the supervisor as a manager. If
you read between the lines, you understand
that supervisors should be great leaders, efficient managers, and focused on getting the
work done.
This expectation is nothing new. The supervisor will play multiple roles for the good of the
company and of their group.

Defining the roles

So are supervisors leaders, managers, or just
supervisors? What exactly do we hire supervisors to do? I think there is some confusion
about what we want from supervisors; perhaps
we are seeking a miracle worker or magician to
make up for the lack of our company's leadership and management. Before we can discuss
this, let's define these terms.
Leader: A leader is a person who leads or
commands a group, organization, or country.
A leader will provide a roadmap and set goals for
the team to achieve, as well as monitor progress
to ensure those goals are met. According to online
career development platform Mindtools.com,
"Leadership is about mapping out where you
need to go to 'win' as a team or an organization,
and it is dynamic, exciting, and inspiring."
Manager: A manager is responsible for
controlling or administering all or part of a
company or similar organization. A manager
organizes and facilitates business activities in
order to achieve defined objectives.

Much of our impression of leadership is from
war movies and TV shows. We ask for leadership to take the next mountain, the next
bridge. In that kind of leadership, is it okay to
sacrifice the leader and their "troops" to take
that hill or bridge? That is an idealized version
of leadership.
In maintenance, the "supervisor leader" calls
forth the best work from their team members.
The leader looks out for their people, tries to
protect them from bad decisions of upper
management, gets them training, provides
recognition, and takes the heat when there are
mistakes. Leaders also protect the employees
from their tendencies to take shortcuts, be
unsafe, or compromise when it comes to environmental or health issues.
The company can either support or undermine the supervisor's leadership through the
allocating of funds for training, tools, and
support systems, as well as purchasing the
right equipment.
In the same way, the idea of management
comes from images of a relentless cost-cutter, efficiency expert, or strictly a "numbers"
person. The idealized manager has no time
for soft skills, soft people, or for anything that
doesn't directly impact the value stream.
Good supervisor managers start early to
ensure, as far as possible, technicians have
everything they need to do their jobs. The
maintenance manager makes sure the other
groups are ready so that the task can proceed
smoothly. They chase after their team members
to ensure all work has work orders and technicians record all hours, all parts, and all other
elements of the job.
The company will support or undermine
the supervisor's management by allocating
adequate funds for maintenance management
software, proper planning, and scheduling
(including the issuance of permits and cleaning of equipment before the work is to start).
The company supports their management by
insisting that everyone adhere to the schedule.
The company agrees to the importance of the
predictive maintenance (PM) efforts and the
adherence to the PM schedule. The company
also provides adequate support in the form
of parts, staffed warehousing, reliability, and
maintenance engineering.
I visit organizations all the time that stand
behind their supervisors as managers and
promote supervisors' leadership.
Unfortunately, I also visit organizations
that give lip service to leadership and proper
management. I think that attitude costs them
real money by increasing turnover, increasing
mistakes, lowering morale, and having leaders
who do not lead, managers who do not manage,
and supervisors who do not supervise.

http://www.Mindtools.com http://www.maintenancetraining.com

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