A 6-part series focusing on impactful practices for developmental coaching conversations. 

Today’s manufacturing leaders are savvy firefighters – addressing and solving complex fires (situations) one after another. But what if there was a different approach? One that allows the employee to address and solve the complexity with their leader instead of being dependent on their leader to solve or fix the challenge at hand?  What might it be like if the leader paused, recalibrated, and approached the situation as a coaching conversation opportunity?

This is an original article from the NIST Baldrige blog.

Broadway legend André De Shields (YouTube) once shared his three cardinal rules of sustainability and longevity:

1. Surround yourself with people whose eyes light up when they see you coming. 
2. Slowly is the fastest way to get to where you want to be.
3. The top of one mountain is the bottom of the next, so keep climbing!

This article first appeared in Industry Week.

Words can mean different things at different times. It is easily confusing to understand the words diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and their relevance to manufacturing. So, let’s clarify some of the common words. But first, the reality is that manufacturing has been introducing diversity into the workplace for decades, Rosie the Riveter exemplifies how six million women joined manufacturing in World War II. Jump forward to 2022 and the workforce is ever more diverse as demographic shifts reshape the workplace.

It’s probably never happened to you, but have you ever found that you don’t get good and useful feedback from your staff, teammates, leadership, and maybe even family or friends? You ask, then… crickets? It may be that you’ve trained them that way.

IMEC’s Board of Directors is comprised of professionals across various industries, including food manufacturing, medical device manufacturing, advertising, law, academia, and now aerospace.

As one of the newest members to the board, Dr. David Carroll, Co-Founder and President of CU Aerospace in Champaign, IL, sat down with IMEC to discuss how CU Aerospace was formed and why it is a gamechanger in the aerospace industry.

In part one of this series, we discussed the importance of the Gemba walk and how well executed and thought out Gemba Walks can drive sustained Continuous Improvement. Great Gemba Walks become a focused process whereby leadership engages with various parts of the organization to observe, learn, and provide support to meet organizational goals and objectives and more importantly, the needs of its customers. Leadership is observing, learning, and engaging where value is being created, and teaching the team members to be problem solvers to achieve continuous improvement.

Part 1 to this blog discussed the importance of incorporating ESG into your business strategy for stakeholders including customers, employees, and investors. In this follow up, you will learn how and why ESG evolved from its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) origins, transcending the latter’s internal perspective with an outward-facing regimen of objective, measurable, stipulated standards to validate and verify reductions in impacts such as carbon footprint/output.

Many organizations are experiencing the full force of change. This new speed of change is creating a shift in what employee’s value and what they are looking for in an organization. And because of this, organizations are now reflecting more on their culture and considering ways to enhance employee engagement and retention. Now is the ideal time for organizations to reflect on their legacy learning approaches and ask themselves: “will our existing learning approaches to enhance employee engagement, leadership development, change management, and problem solving help us transform our culture to best meet the future demands of our customers and stakeholders?” Perhaps, if the focus is on developing the team and not just the individual learner.