New AICC Chairman (CONT’D FROM PAGE 22)
When you find that person, don't wait for them to be fully ready. No one ever is. I wasn't. The job is deciding early, signaling your confidence, and building the support around them. See it before it's obvious. Value Two: Teach To Lead I want to tell you about Mike Reese. We call him the Tiny Viking — yes, he's tiny, and yes, he looks like a Viking. Mike had been written off by more than a few supervisors. Good enough to show up, not considered a candidate for anything more. Then we lost our lead operator on the three-color RDC, and we needed a replacement. We made Mike Reese the lead. Here's the part I want to be precise about, because it matters: we didn't try him out. We didn't give him a shot in that hedging way that tells everyone watching you're not really sure. We committed first — publicly, in front of his peers. Because when you hedge on someone, they feel it, and so does the team around them. A provisional promo- tion is a vote of no-confidence dressed up as opportunity. After we committed, we gave him direct supervision, coaching, training, and accountability — but only after we defined the standard. We organized the work of his de- velopment. And then we watched the goal posts move, because he kept hitting them. That's the second idea: teaching, not just assigning.
And the hardest part of teaching on a production floor is that nobody thinks they have time for it. The machine's running, the order's late, the customer's calling. I've lived it. But teaching isn't a luxury. It's the job. Every hard con- versation you avoid today is a bigger problem tomorrow. I'd rather have an uncomfortable conversation on a Tuesday than a crisis on a Friday. We owe our people real transparency — not the com- fortable silence that passes for politeness in too many plants. Telling the truth early, clearly and respectfully, is not the opposite of loyalty. It is loyalty. And when you build that with your front-line leaders, they start doing it with the people they supervise. That's the multiplier — not a memo, not an all-hands meeting, but how a supervisor talks to an operator at six in the morning after something went wrong. Teach to lead. Then watch your supervisors teach the people below them. Terri-Lynn Levesque passes the gavel to Mike Schaefer.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 26
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