With the increasing pressure to do more with less, the need bombards us to change how we think. To lead organizational change, you need to figure out what you should stop doing. The difficulty is that this process is more challenging than it appears.

For many of us, we must manage both up and down the chain of command. You may find yourself in an organization that is not ready for a communication approach that is vastly different than anyone has seen.

With the preponderance of senior leaders lacking leadership skills, my recommendations below may create the need for you to educate the leaders of your organization before employing them.

There are five things I believe all leaders should stop relenting to become more effective:

Best Practices

There exists no better example of herd mentality than that of best practices. A so-called best practice stops the minute it is branded as such. Best practices defend the status quo and limit innovation by ensuring people/processes follow the same practices.

You cannot distinguish by accepting likeness. The idea of best practice is nothing more than mixing norms at your peril. Wise leaders innovate beyond best practices, always looking for the next practices.

If your choice to do something is because others are doing it the same way, you are doing nothing more than conceding advantage and opportunity to those competitors more creative than you.

Lean manufacturing and most other recent initiatives, embraced by senior leaders, are focused on driving the organization towards best practices. In our rush to shortcut challenging work, we have conceded a competitive advantage.

To regain this advantage, we need to realize this and stop doing it. Do not copy, create.

Cost Cutting

It is impractical to beat your opposition to the future by spending less than they do. You get there first by investing smarter than they do. Companies that surpass their competition focus less on risk and more on opportunity.

They are less concerned with controlling expenditure and more about finding new ways to create a more significant return on investment. I have often promoted that a leader’s duty is not to leverage their people but to establish more leverage for them.

Stop expecting your people to do more with less and find ways to provide them with a resource advantage.

There is an enormous difference between cost-cutting haphazardly and reducing the budget by improving reliability. Stop imposing hiring freezes and begin an uncompromising pursuit of creating a talent advantage.

Leaders complaining about a lack of resources are doing nothing more than demonstrating their lack of resourcefulness.

Political Correctness

The fact is that politically correct thinking is most often deceitful, if not altogether intellectually dishonest. Politically correct thinking replaces uniqueness and authentic opinions with socially acceptable rhetoric and diluted behavioral tendencies.

I miss the days when most conversations consisted of highly charged and stimulating discourse where people were urged to share their thoughts and opinions openly. The irony of politically correct thinking is that a society empty of individual thought creates the reverse of diversity.

Politically correct thinking results in a programmed flock of sheep who completely lack diversity because of the gentrification of thoughts and actions. The sinister secret behind politically correct thinking is that it gradually clouds your senses and sterilizes your inherent capability to be discerning.

If you are like me, you do not want your team to say what they think you want to hear or what they believe they should say, but you do want them to say what they think.

How many meetings have you sat in where everyone sits around the table like a bunch of deer in headlights trying to figure out how to wiggle around an issue rather than address it head-on?

It is this type of issue that taints our culture, suppresses innovation, weakens our productivity, and condemns those who accept politically correct thinking to a life of mediocrity.

Glorifying the Few

Leadership is not a position or a title. It is not a job retained only for a few presiding over the masses. Here is something to keep in mind: if you tell people enough times or loud enough that they are not leaders, you must not be amazed when they begin to believe you.

Your job is not to repress people from leadership but to establish leadership ubiquity.

The most triumphant organizations are those where all team members view themselves as leaders. Leadership that cannot be transferrable, scalable, repeatable, and sustainable is not leadership. Build your organization on a foundation that builds leadership in all team members regardless of where they are on the org chart.

Unwillingness to Change

Look at any study on the speed of change, and you will find you are living in an unprecedented time. The rate of change is surpassing most leaders’ capability to learn and unlearn. Most leaders fight to remain current, much less find a way to move ahead of the curve.

Here is the thing: if leaders live in the past, their organizations will be required to travel an extremely rough road to the future.

The solution to the leadership training problem is to scrap it for development. Do not train leaders, mentor them, coach them, and develop them, but please do not train them.

Where training attempts to homogenize by blending into a norm and adapting to the status quo, development attempts to call out the unique and discriminate by shattering the status quo. Training is something leaders hate and will avoid, while they welcome development.

Development is nuanced, contextual, collaborative, fluid, and primarily actionable.

The reason it is crucial to stop doing things that do not add value is to free up the time you will need to start doing things right.

People always tell me, “This is great, but I do not have time to do what I am doing now.” I found myself in this same place before I realized that about half of what you are doing each day does not add value. Taking a critical look at your daily activities will open your eyes. How many meetings do you attend that have other members of your team in them? Why? How many meetings do you attend and say nothing? This goes on and on.

When I say this, I always hear, “Not me. Everything I do adds value.” Sorry, you are lying to yourself because that is not possible. The only way to make a change happen is to do something. To do something, you need time. To get the time, you must stop doing things that do not add value.

So, as a leader, you need to understand what adds value. The key to adding value is to take ownership and not use victim statements. Next, I want to explain what I mean by taking ownership and not being a victim.

We all find ourselves participating in some leadership training these days. Most, if not all, of these are corporate or human resource-driven based on a well-intentioned company desire to strengthen the organizational culture. This desire is driven by an underlying need to be a better company to achieve its desired success.

The issue arises when those charged with the execution of this objective fail to understand what drives leadership. All too often, the folks charged with the implementation of such endeavors lack leadership themselves and, as such, fall victim to the hype and buzzwords being peddled by unqualified external resources/consultants with good marketing but no leadership abilities themselves.

My goal with this article is to inform you on what it takes to achieve transformational leadership development.

I am often asked if leaders are born or made. A colleague of mine wrote a great book on this subject, Leadership Development in Balance, by Dr. Bruce Avolio.

The quick answer is both. Even those who are said to be born leaders need help in becoming true transformational and authentic leaders.

With all the talk of leadership these days, I wanted to provide some context to the discussion. I see everyone boosting their leadership training and certification on social media. There is discussion in the news and almost every aspect of our lives.

Sadly, all of the bluster is mostly buzzwords.

Organizations and individuals use fancy-sounding words to make it appear that they provide leadership.

So, let’s look at leadership.

Leadership is the most researched topic today. Everyone wants to understand it, but only some want to do the work associated with the understanding. One of the most widely misused buzzwords is transformational leadership.

If you need leadership help and the organization is touting transformational leadership, ask these simple questions. Where does the term come from? Who was the first person to coin this term? What are the four I’s of transformational leadership? If they cannot answer these simple questions, they are not the right organization to help you achieve it.

In his analysis of political leaders, the term transformational leadership was introduced in 1978 by Dr. James MacGregor Burns. His conclusions centered around the differences between management and leadership. Dr. Burns stated that transforming leadership is a practice where “leaders and followers help each other to advance to a higher level of morale and motivation.”

Burns associated the difficulty delineating between management and leadership and claimed that the dissimilarities are in behaviors and characteristics.

He further defined transformational leadership as charisma, like power, often used to explain leadership. Burns notes that the word transformational has become so abused as to “collapse under close analysis.”

He spoke of transformational leadership in four primary groups: heroic, intellectual, revolutionary, and reform leadership. Burns reasoned that transformational leaders develop followers as individuals and future leaders by allowing them to respond to their needs.

The terms transactional and transformational were first used by Burns, who studied political leaders like Roosevelt and Kennedy, to define these two different leadership styles in his 1978 book Leadership. Burns used the word ‘transforming’ rather than ‘transformational’.

Transformational leadership has four elements (also known as the “four I’s “): inspirational motivation, idealized influence, individual consideration, and intellectual stimulation. Each element will be examined to help leaders use this method on the shop floor.

Since the idea of transformational leadership was introduced by Dr. James Burns in his explanatory research on political leaders, its usage has increased in organizational psychology and management with additional changes by B.M Bass and J.B Avolio. They developed the full-range leadership model.

Transactional leadership is mainly grounded in control and processes and needs a strict management structure. On the other hand, transformational leadership centers on inspiring others to follow, and it entails a great degree of communication, coordination, and cooperation.

Next time your organization seeks outside assistance in developing transformative leadership skills, they must do their due diligence to see if the resource knows the subject or is just peddling stolen ideas with their unqualified twist.

Let’s look further into the body of knowledge around leadership. Leadership style was first studied in detail by Kurt Lewin in 1939. He was the first to identify the three leadership styles.

He labeled these styles as authoritarian (autocratic) leadership, participative (democratic) leadership, and delegative (laissez-faire) leadership. Dr. Burns used the terms transactional, transformational, and laissez-faire.

Dr. Burns worked alongside Kurt Lewin to advance the leadership style body of knowledge. Reimagining organizational change leadership requires revisiting the seminal work of these two giants. In the 20th century, the leading organizational development and change and leadership academics fundamentally changed their respective fields.

However, often misunderstood, misinterpreted, and even misrepresented, their exact advice was mainly ignored. In this article, we discuss why this is so. Despite decades of transformation and organizational change leadership discussion, leadership still needs to be solved. Working towards a substitute to the current convention, we reimagine organizational change leadership as a practical resulting process.

Countless political leaders show a transactional style. Mother Theresa was an example of someone who led using the transformational style.

The transformational leadership style consequently can overlap with other leadership philosophies.

1. This involves purpose.
2. This involves morality.
3. This involves the timescale.

Transformational leaders apply a style of leadership that encourages changes in both the team members under them and the company. A mentor and visionary with an equivalent source of inspiration, these leaders promote a culture of innovation and change that provides a desired business outcome.

Transformational leaders do this by creating a distinctive culture within the organizations and teams that they lead.

It can be enticing to associate “transformational leadership” with a leader’s personality, thinking that strong, enthusiastic and/or passionate personalities drive transformational thinking, vision, and change within an organization.

While these may be the types of leaders who automatically come to mind, the characteristics of a transformational leader go much deeper and shouldn’t be thought of as innate personality traits or types. Developing a transformational leader is about building actions, behaviors, and strategies based on leadership theory.

Most admit that the concept of transformational leadership belongs to Burns, a political science and leadership researcher, who defined transformational leadership as “when one or more persons participate with others in a way that leaders and followers educate one another to greater heights of motivation and morality.”

In 1985, Bernard M. Bass, leadership researcher and professor at Binghamton University, expanded on Burns’ ideas to develop the Bass Transformational Leadership Theory, consisting of four main components of transformational leadership.

Intellectual Stimulation

Transformational leaders question the “this is the way we’ve always done things” mentality, challenging the status quo and defying the norms of even veteran leaders. They encourage this attitude in their employees. This means accentuating new experiences, new opportunities, and innovative ways of thinking.

By stressing the opportunities to grow and learn, rather than concentrating on the outcomes of the efforts, the transformational leader removes the “fear factor” from work, allowing employees to constantly learn and look for and act upon opportunities rather than playing it safe.

Individual Consideration

One of the key transformational leadership traits is the ability to communicate a sense of the larger culture to the individual, providing employees a feeling of ownership in company goals and individuality in the workplace.

Transformational leaders do not dictate ideas from their office and leave it to team members to carry them out. They are concerned with the professional development of team members and nurture positive relationships with them. This involves good communication skills, attending to the individual needs of the team members, mentoring them, and knowing each person’s unique contributions.

You can often spot a transformational leader by the trust, respect, and admiration others feel for them. Transformational leaders do not micromanage. They lead by communicating a clear vision and establishing a workplace where seasoned employees are trusted to make decisions in their work areas. All team members are encouraged to think creatively to find new solutions to longstanding problems.

Inspirational Motivation

Team members want leaders to impart a vision that is interesting and desirable. Transformational leaders do that by communicating a vision so well that followers internalize it and make the goal of attaining that vision their own. That starts with giving team members a strong sense of purpose and establishing high standards and expectations for achievement.

The motivation to achieve is not fear-based but inspired by the leader’s example. Transformational leaders set lofty standards and expectations for themselves and then model them for their team members and the company. Their actions instill the same desire they feel in their followers, whether for a project, a goal, or the larger company vision. Team members have a genuine sense of purpose and a “mission approach” to achieve their goals.

Idealized Influence

Showing it positively is the best way to impart inspirational motivation to team members. Transformational leaders serve as role models for team members in every way. That also includes demonstrating ethical and socially desirable behavior, upholding a dedication to work objectives, and exhibiting enthusiasm about company strategy.

The basis of this influence is trust and respect. Leaders who have developed idealized influence are trusted and respected by team members to make good decisions, not just “for the good of the company” but for the good of the team and themselves as individuals. With this trust, team members become followers who want to mimic their leaders and internalize their ideals.

Transformational Leadership Compared to Other Leadership Styles

These four “I’s” of transformational leadership laid the foundation for the philosophy and continue to help define it from other leadership styles. Let’s look at the relationship between transformational leadership and those leadership philosophies with a similar style and sound:

Transformational Leadership vs. Visionary Leadership

Some use the terms “visionary leadership” and “transformational leadership” interchangeably. A transformational leader may also be visionary when the situation calls for it. Visionary leaders look for new opportunities for the future of a company, the team, or even the product being made by the company.

Then, they aid others to conceptualize those visions and inspire them to find solutions. The difference between these leadership styles lies in a true transformational leader’s capability to encourage the development of new ideas. Even if the vision is not theirs, transformational leaders can make it a reality.

Transformational Leadership vs. Transactional Leadership

While visionary leadership may be very similar to transformational leadership, transactional and transformational leadership take opposite approaches, particularly motivation.

Transformational leadership plays the long game, concentrating on individual and company growth instead of short-term achievement. Transactional leaders create standards for success and reward or penalize team members based on their performance. This leadership style is mostly results-oriented and is more suitable when the goal is to complete specific tasks within a limited time frame.

Both leadership styles can be applied and combined to best aid a team’s function and achieve preferred goals. It is the job of the leader to recognize which leadership approach can best motivate team members to achieve those goals.

Following the development of transformational leadership, we have started with the seminal researcher Kurt Lewin. We traveled through Dr. Burns and Dr. Bass, and the next step was to Dr. Avolio. While working with Dr. Burns and Bass, Dr. Avolio advanced transformational leadership another step.

He identified that being transformational in leadership is not always a good thing. Let’s look at Adolf Hitler. He was very transformational in approach, but his leadership was not the desired.

Dr. Avolio added another measure of good transformational leadership with authentic leadership traits. To better understand the transformational leadership we desire, he measured a comprehensive range of leadership types, from passive leaders to leaders who give contingent rewards to leaders who transform followers into leaders. Transformational leaders can, however, be very effective without being authentic.

Authentic Leadership

The authentic leadership traits are:

Self-Awareness

To what level is the leader conscious of their limitations, strengths, how others see them, and how well the leader influences others?

Transparency

To what level does the leader reinforce openness with team members, allowing them to be forthcoming with their opinions, ideas, and questions?

Ethical/Moral

To what level does the leader set a lofty standard for moral and ethical conduct?

Balanced Processing

To what level does the leader ask for enough opinions and perspectives before making important decisions?

Combined, the full range and authentic leadership models offer a convenient approach to benchmarking and developing leaders.

I have added the final aspect of transformative leadership. As a student of Kurt Lewin, James Burns, Bernard Bass, and a colleague of Bruce Avolio, I have advanced their work to include ownership spirit. My original research and contribution to the leadership body of knowledge are documented in my doctoral dissertation and subsequent books.

Working with Dr. Dennis Deaton, we defined ownership as not waiting for other team members to act and wanting the outcome as much as an owner of the company would. It is being responsible for the outcomes of your actions, guaranteeing that they are of the uppermost quality and provided promptly.

Taking ownership shows team members that they can trust you to do the right thing. Those who take ownership are ready to take on whatever tasks come their way. They have strong problem-solving skills and foresee issues to prevent them, rather than waiting for things to go wrong and then scrambling to fix them or blaming someone else (victim thinking).

I hope this provides you with a roadmap through authentic transformational leadership, and now I want to leave you with the path to achieve it.

So, how do we wade through the sea of unqualified external resources to find those that can help our organization?

1. Due diligence: stop listening to the hype and buzzwords. Do not fall for the marketing campaign. We must do the hard work of vetting those we plan to trust with this crucial aspect to our success. We cannot ever train our organization to be transformational. Training without development is a waste of time and money. Any effort to make a difference will require effort. You will need a leader who has led teams across many industries. Look for a well-rounded leader with the education, experience, and original research on leadership style that has contributed to the leadership body of knowledge. This will quickly eliminate well over 96% of all advertising they can help.
2. Understand this is not a flavor-of-the-month effort. Leadership development takes time and investment. If the organization is unwilling to invest in developing their leaders with real work, save your money and your leaders’ time.
3. Leadership is not developed in a conference room or classroom. It is not done by meeting a few hours once a month or reading a book. It is not done by assigning homework and adding to the list of things we are forcing our plant floor leaders to do.
4. Leadership development must be executed on the shop floor where the work is. There is no one-size-fits-all approach or playbook like many external resources will advertise. There is no quick and easy fix; it requires hard work.
5. The mentor you select must have led teams on many shop floors or in combat environments. Only with an understanding of leadership under extreme pressure at all hours of the day/night can they coach and mentor your team to the desired results.
6. It must start with proven benchmarking methods. External resources employ many fancy tools to give the appearance of benchmarking, but none deliver actual results. Suppose we benchmark our team’s leadership style. In that case, a tool is the most used and accepted method to accomplish this—the multifactor and authentic leadership questionnaire, which provides not only a self-assessment by the leader but an assessment from all levels of the organization with respect to the leader. Employed by the skilled hands of a qualified leadership coach, we develop an individual leadership development plan to enhance desired traits and build needed traits.
7. When we have done our work and identified the right external resource, we will partner with them to achieve the desired results, transformational leaders.

I chose this topic this issue because the biggest bang for any organization is to get their lubricants right. With anywhere from 50% – 70% of your current downtime being caused by improper lubrication, there is only one way to spend your limited maintenance and reliability funds, proper lubrication.

I can tell you factually that if you do not believe that your downtime is being driven by improper lubrication, you have not properly identified your root cause. Deny this to your peril. Spend all the money you want elsewhere and cover it up with manipulated figures; the reality is that until you admit this, much like an addict, you will never have real success.

Why Many Lubricants Are Similar

Most industry professionals do not know that there are few similarities between lubricants simply because they come from the earth. Petroleum-derived lubricating oil is a mixture produced by atmospheric and vacuum distillation of selected paraffinic and naphthenic crude oils, after which chemical changes may be required to produce the desired properties of the refined product.

Typically, lubricants contain 90% base oil and less than 10% additives. Vegetable oils or synthetic liquids such as hydrogenated polyolefins, esters, silicones, fluorocarbons, and many others are sometimes used as base oils.

Base oil is produced through the refining of crude oil. A 42-gallon barrel of crude oil can yield nearly 45 gallons of petroleum products, but only about .4 gallons or less than 1% goes to make lubricants. The bulk goes to gasoline, diesel fuel, and kerosene.

Crude oils are classified by their sulfur content. Sweet oils have a lower sulfur content than sour oils. High sulfur or heavy oils are the lowest quality and the least expensive on the global market.

There are three reasons high-sulfur crude oil is lower quality and less expensive than its low-sulfur counterpart.

• The first reason is that high-sulfur crude oils produce greater emissions, particularly those that are toxic and have a high global warming potential.
• The second reason is that high-sulfur oils cause oxidation and corrosion. Refining high-sulfur crude is expensive because of its high oxidation and corrosion qualities.
• The third reason is that the higher the sulfur count, the lower the hydrocarbon count and hydrocarbons are the components in petroleum that combust and generate energy.

 Low sulfur or light oils bring the highest price because they are of the highest quality. They require less effort to obtain better results than their high-sulfur counterparts.

Where do these oils come from? They are classified into four known types.

The tar sands, also known as oil sands, are a mixture of mostly sand, clay, water, and a thick molasses-like substance called bitumen. Bitumen is made of hydrocarbons, the same molecules in liquid oil, and is used to produce gasoline and other petroleum products.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is widely known. OPEC is a loosely affiliated entity with 13 OPEC members and 10 of the world’s major non-OPEC oil exporting nations. OPEC aims to regulate oil supply to set the price on the world market.

According to current estimates, 80.4% (1,241.82 billion barrels) of the world’s proven oil reserves are in OPEC member countries, with the bulk of OPEC oil reserves in the middle east, amounting to 67.1% of the OPEC total.

As a cartel, the OPEC member countries collectively agree on how much oil to produce, directly affecting the ready supply of crude oil in the global market at any given time. OPEC subsequently exerts considerable influence over the worldwide market price of oil and, understandably, tends to keep it relatively high to maximize profitability.

The oil from these regions is typically on the heavier and sour end of the spectrum.

Brent oil is a name given to a relatively light crude oil made from a blend of crudes from 19 oil fields in the North Sea. Brent crude is one of the three main benchmarks for oil, along with West Texas Intermediates (WTI) from North America and Dubai Crude from the Persian Gulf.

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is from the United States. These are sweeter and lighter than all other crudes and are usually considered the finest crude oils.

If I was to stop this article here, you should be able to see that the statement that oil is all the same because it comes from the earth is far from accurate.

However, after deciding which crude oil base we desire for our equipment lubricant, there is much more to consider.

The Truth About Lubricant Suppliers

During my training classes and presentations, I draw a parallel to the difference in whom you buy your lubricants from to a comparison between Bobby Flay cooking a prime rib and me.

While we both can be given the same recipe and the chance to select our ingredients, the fact is that Bobby Flay will always provide a better product because of his experience and his knowledge of the difference in premium meats and ingredients.

This is the same with lubricants. The companies we are most familiar with, because of their gasoline production and global marketing departments, buy base oils and ingredients to make fuel. Initially, they saw lubricants as a waste product, and now they sell them to unknowing users as a profit stream for them but to our detriment.

Again, using my Bobby Flay example, the recipe can be followed by an idiot. Still, if you want the best reliability for your plant, you need a real skilled trades professional (Bobby Flay), not trying to sell you lubricants and profiting from your lack of knowledge.

As I have said in previous articles, do not fall for “free” supplier offerings or meaningless titles used to deceive you. Suppliers, salespersons, and OEMS are not qualified to make any lubrication decisions for your plant. My other warning is to vet any consultant carefully.

Most consultants lack any qualifications, so verify these individuals and organizations well, and you will be surprised at how little they know. In 42 years, I have yet to walk onto a site as an employee or consultant that has not been lied to by their lubricant supplier and OEM.

Lubricating oils and greases are comprised of 70% – 95% base oil, 0% – 10% additives, and in grease 35 – 30% thickener.

The decision on mineral, synthetic, and vegetable base oils is reliability based and should never be made by the lubricant supplier, salespersons, or original equipment manufacturer (OEM).

They lack any experience or training in reliability and focus solely on their profit.

Deciding on the additives is another decision never left to the supplier, salesperson, or OEM. Additives will enhance, suppress, and add a new property to the lubricant, which should be left to qualified reliability professionals.

In grease applications, selecting a thickener again should not be left to amateurs, like suppliers, salespersons, and OEMS. Only a skilled trades professional with experience and knowledge should select the grease thickener.

With the base oil being 70% – 95% of the makeup, the properties of these base oils need to be matched to each lubrication point. The base oil type must be decided by someone who understands their properties and is not skewed by a desire to sell you their product.

Know that viscosity is the single most important aspect of oil. It is the measure of the lubricant’s resistance to flow and shear. Simply selecting lubricants based on an average could result in critical equipment premature failure. Many organizations consolidate their lubricants to reduce the number to the detriment of their equipment.

Most of these efforts are driven by the site’s lack of knowledge and blind trust in the lubricant supplier. To achieve the reliability we desire, it takes the best ingredients. Buying lubricants based on “cost-to-buy” is never the right decision. I guarantee that working with a qualified reliability professional to identify the right lubricants and making this decision on a cost-to-use basis is the greatest key to reliability success.

The decision on additives is important. Again, this decision must be made by a qualified person without any monetary influence.

The professional must focus solely on the reliability of the operation and nothing else.

Since the base oil is doing all the work, the selection of additives goes a long way to improving the service life of that base oil. Remember that the additive can either suppress, enhance, or impart new properties to the base oil, allowing it to do its best job.

Another thing to remember regarding additives is that filtering your lubricants is vital to success and that too much of a good thing can hurt your lubricants. Over-filtration will strip additives from the base oil and accelerate the degradation of the lubricant. I have seen many organizations do the wrong things for the right reasons.

They are filtering their lubricants without any knowledge. They run the filter system continuously and without regard to stripping additives. This practice will lead to premature failure of the lubricants and unnecessarily early oil changes.

Grease is different from oil in that it has a thickener added to it. This is to keep the oil where we need it. Grease is used in applications where oil will not stay put. The thickener can be thought of as a sponge. The grease will remain in contact with the moving surfaces without leaking out under the force of gravity, centrifugal action, or being squeezed out under pressure.

The decision on which thickener to use is another important one. Never allow the supplier, salesperson, or OEM to dictate this reliability-dependent element to you. While the thickener acts as a sponge, there is much more to consider.

Like my example above, Bobby Flay, there are significant differences in how each type of thickener works and what it is capable of. There are premium and cheap greases. How the grease is manufactured makes a big difference. Two critical aspects of greasing are the thickener’s reversibility and the grease’s water-resistant or waterproof property. All these properties are application specific, and one grease may not be the answer in all lubricated points.

Beware Lubricant Compatibility Charts

Another warning I want to share is the salesman’s use of compatibility charts. If you google compatibility charts on the internet, there are over 100 different charts. Each lubricant supplier makes their own, as do many OEMs. All these are misleading and designed to lie to you about their products.

The only way to determine compatibility is to perform a work test with the products in question. Many so-called independent labs fail to understand this and make wrong compatibility determinations based on their agreements with different suppliers. Again, this is sales motivated, and why allowing your samples to be tested for “free” is a reason your lubrication program is ineffective. Never let the fox watch the hen house.

So, the bottom line is that lubricants have significant differences. Just like everything else, there are top performers and bottom feeders. Invest in premium lubricants and make these decisions on a cost-to-use and never a cost-to-buy basis. If you want to know if you are using a premium lubricant today, it is easy.

If you can pull into a gas station anywhere on the planet and fill up your car, and the sign on the pump is the same as the supplier of your lubricants, you are not using a premium lubricant. Stop falling for the marketing hype.

 

Many years ago, I wrote a book entitled The Death of Reliability, Is it too late to resurrect the one true competitive advantage? I wrote the book because of my growing concern that we are losing the experience and skills necessary to deliver reliability.

It is not just my opinion. There is a public outcry about the loss of skilled trades in the United States and the impact this is having on the industry. Famously, Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs had testified before Congress about this topic. He points to the onslaught of naysayers across many lines that are contributing factors.

He highlights the “no child left behind” initiative that greatly emphasized college education over skilled trades. It was a mantra First Lady Laura Bush started and echoed by parents, teachers, and media.

It is so prevalent in education, not because it is correct, but because it drives revenue to these institutions. The loss of education of our children to indoctrination is a foundational aspect of this erosion.

President Donald Trump also identified the crisis facing the skilled trades industry when he directed the Secretary of Labor to impanel a group to address this. The panel focused on apprenticeship training in the industry as an answer, but the Secretary failed to select the right resources to address the issue.

He impaneled a bunch of CEOs from companies who did not have apprenticeship programs and failed to recognize the vital need. Many of the other members of this panel were from academia, and their interests were not to assist in apprenticeships but to maintain the status quo of their revenue stream.

Finally, the unions were asked to participate and were part of the problem. The union’s inept management of their groups and watering down these programs have led to the crisis.

So, without actual skilled trades journeymen, organizations are turning towards consultants. This has accelerated the death of reliability because 96% of these “experts” are frauds.

The duty of journeyman skills tradespeople is the education of the next generation. To this end, it is my duty to alert consumers about another alarming trend in reliability. I have repeatedly stated that 96% of all reliability consultants are not qualified.

This is not my assumption; it is the findings of a century of research into top management and its composition. The results of these studies show that less than 4% of leaders have any qualifications in reliability. Despite this, many unqualified leaders decide to open consulting firms or join others and mislead clients about their capabilities.

The Private Equity Takeover and its Consequences

Now there is another issue. The few qualified firms are selling out to more prominent venture capitalists or private equity-backed groups masquerading as smaller organizations. Even firms with some of the pioneers in reliability are now nothing more than mascots.

The modern private equity industry has its roots tracing back to 1946, and since then, it has traversed four significant eras, each punctuated by three cycles of prosperity and decline.

The nascent stages of private equity, spanning 1946 to 1981, were defined by minimal investment volumes, primitive firm structures, and a lack of widespread understanding or knowledge of the industry. This resulted in minor disruptions to the US industrial fabric.

The initial wave of prosperity and subsequent downturn, which stretched from 1982 to 1993, witnessed a sudden escalation in leveraged buyout operations funded by high-yield bonds, and this period peaked with the sizable acquisition of some landmark companies, followed by a near implosion of the leveraged buyout sector in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This event marked the beginning of a downturn in the US industry, shifting from value and quality towards a scenario where bankers drove companies towards ruin.

The subsequent cycle of boom and bust, lasting from 1992 to 2002, rose from the ruins of the savings and loan crisis, insider trading controversies, the collapse of the real estate market, and the recession that marked the early 1990s.

This era was marked by the rise of more institutionalized private equity firms, culminating in the immense dot-com bubble of 1999 and 2000. This further resulted in industry collapse and forced a move towards technology. The loss of experience and skills led to digital and virtual nonvalue offerings.

The infiltration of technology into leadership has done some of the most significant damage.

It replaced leadership and ownership with management and emails. This is seen when you see the leaders sitting behind their desks typing on a computer and no longer out on the plant floor leading.

During this period, we saw the most significant accelerated decline in industry. The third boom and bust cycle (from 2003 through 2007) came after the dot-com bubble’s collapse—leveraged buyouts reached an unparalleled size, and the institutionalization of private equity firms is exemplified by the Blackstone Group’s 2007 initial public offering.

Since 2007 we have seen an accelerated decline in value and quality across the US industry in favor of quick short-term profits. Along with this migration, we have seen companies once run by qualified people who earned their position by working their way up the chain of command to lawyers and bankers looking to hop from company to company and leaving the latter in ruins.

The key here is that private equity is described as periods of boom and bust cycles because the bankers see the boom side of making money off of you, and you get to feel the bust side of losing money because of them.

In its early years to roughly 2000, the private equity and venture capital asset classes were primarily active in the United States. With the second private equity boom in the mid-1990s and the liberalization of regulation for institutional investors in Europe, a mature European private equity market emerged.

You will be surprised by what you find if you do the due diligence. Most organizations are little more than non-value-added fronts for venture capitalists. If you need help identifying these, please give me a call. I have a list of organizations that will surprise you.

The more significant issue is that clients are not doing their due diligence to identify these posers. They fall victim to the marketing hype of these venture capitalists and end up no better off and, in most cases, worse off than they were.

This gives them a bad taste for the 4% of firms led by truly qualified reliability professionals working to help organizations who lack the leaders with the experience and skills but know they need to improve their reliability.

Finding Qualified Reliability Professionals

When a client asks me how they verify they have found someone in the 4%, I tell them to investigate the consultant. First, what is their background? Are the senior leaders of the organization skilled tradespersons? The venture capitalists are bankers, marketing, businesspeople, etc. This will eliminate the most significant percentage of consultants.

Look to see who owns the firm. Don’t just select a familiar name or one that may have been used previously. Most of the firms with longevity founded by icons are no longer owned by the founders. While the founder may be involved in name, it is a contractual agreement with the bankers to mislead the client base.

Most contracts include a 1-3 year agreement to masquerade as the older company to ensure the bankers get their investment back. Nothing in these agreements has anything to do with value or providing clients with reliability. It is about bankers making money.

Another red flag is that if you believe you are getting the principal when you contract with these shell groups, the person who shows up is not them. You may get the icon during the sale presentation, but you never get them when the work starts.

Research the person doing the work on your site. Verify their stated advanced education. A simple Google search will show you many of the advanced credentials advertised by leading consultant groups/companies, are paper mills. Look into the accreditation of the schools if the education or title is important. You will be surprised.

Another easy verification is work experience. If the consultant has only worked as a consultant for a decade, there is no experience or trade skill.

Have they done the work that they profess to be an expert at? Have they turned a wrench, troubleshot equipment, planned, scheduled, worked as a reliability engineer, supervised, or led a department, team, or program, or are they someone who was given a title or has a college degree that means little to reliability qualifications? Many makeup titles like reliability or lubrication engineer; however, neither degree exists.

They are sales ploys to mislead you as to their nonexistent qualifications.

The smoke and mirrors that most consulting firms hide behind is an overpromised and under-delivered result.

They are masters at convincing their clients they achieved the desired result. In reality, they manage your expectation to the watered-down version of their playbook.

They attempt to force your (round) organization into their (square) hole. They force you into a nonvalue-added result and use smoke to give the illusion of success. Bottom-line is despite all the pomp and circumstance, your organization sees no real change in reliability.

They water down the goals and objectives, and because clients are reluctant to admit they were taken, the repeated failures of prominent venture capitalists and private equity-backed firms are hiding in plain sight.

Why does this matter? More than 50% of a company’s expense is maintenance and reliability. At the same time, only 4% of organizations have a leader qualified by experience and skills to lead reliability. So, the other 96% of organizations must do the hard work to identify the 4% of consultants with the expertise and skills to deliver.

In reference to my book, written years ago, I am afraid to admit that we are witnessing the death of reliability. It is happening for all the reasons listed above, and I wonder if the 4% has the time left to turn this around.

I know this article will be met with a lot of resistance. I would guess that 96% of the folks that take issue with my comments and facts do so because it hit close to home.

Much of my company’s business is conducting reliability assessments and providing our clients with findings and recommendations for improving their reliability efforts.

With over 40 years of experience with equipment and its reliability, I can say, without a doubt, that lubrication is the most significant opportunity to improve reliability at any organization.

This is usually driven by a lack of knowledge and understanding of how much lubrication impacts reliability. It is the lifeblood of the equipment, and before you spend your money anywhere else, you need to get this right.

Ironically, this usually does not cost much money, and the return on investment (ROI) is significant. The average internal rate of return (IRR) on a lubrication project is well over 100%, with a net present value (NPV) in the millions.

How Many Companies Get It Wrong

Sadly, most organizations are misled by consultants, lubricant suppliers, and original equipment manufacturers (OEM) on what reliability is. These unqualified consultants and OEMs recommend costly technology additions that have no chance of improving reliability.

Lubricant providers have no qualification to perform a survey or assist in your program. There is no such thing as free; falling for this is a fatal error many plants make. The propensity to use tech and call it reliability is factually wrong.

No technology will provide reliability. All that technology can do is monitor how bad the organization is at its job.

Stop playing video games and start doing the hard work to achieve actual results.

So, what is hard work? I like to refer to it as block and tackling. I use this to depict proper lubrication, contamination control, and proper installation. These are the only three things that cause unreliability, so addressing them is how you obtain a reliable plant.

To further use the imaginary, it does not matter how much you spend on a quarterback if the line cannot block. This is evident across the NFL. You can buy a great running back, but if your defense cannot tackle, you will not win. That is why professional players and Hall of Fame coaches say defense wins championships.

So, if you are not properly lubricating, all your expensive technology will tell you is that you are not lubricating properly. So spending money on useless tech will never lead to winning.

The Most Common Findings from Assessments

The top finding in most assessments is that companies are not storing their lubricants correctly. When I say that most companies think this starts at their site, that is incorrect.

You are already behind the curve if you begin your lubrication program when it hits your site. Who and where your lubricants are coming from is where it starts. Assuming that the supplier understands lubricants is a big mistake. Most suppliers do not have a clue about lubricants and how they impact reliability.

Never believe your lubricant supplier has any expertise or assume they have your plant reliability in mind. They solely have their sales and own agenda in mind. So, the lubrication program starts with your supplier and follows the chain of custody to your site.

Once the lubricant reaches your site, you have a lot of work to do. Most new oil is dirtier than what your equipment can use.

In addition, a UL study found that 1 out of 6 quarts of oil sold was the wrong viscosity. So, assuming that the supplier got it right, even after you have vetted them and their chain of custody, trusting the viscosity is correct is another failure.

When lubricants arrive, the site must verify the products and filter the oil to their standards. Proper storage of lubricants in a climate-controlled room at 70 degrees Fahrenheit, 41% humidity, and the air filtered to a level consistent with the desired ISO cleanliness is the definition of proper storage. There must be measures to monitor and maintain these cleanliness levels and audits to verify them.

Once you have ensured the supplier is doing their part and have a proper storage room, you will also need appropriately trained personnel to manage and execute the program.

The best option for this training is to reach out to the International Council for Machinery Lubrication (ICML) to identify their verified training partners and to adhere to the established ICML standards.

Several organizations are qualified to perform this training and assist in the certification process, but only some of these are led by the top qualified Machinery Lubrication Engineer (MLE). I recommend looking for the best to ensure you get the desired result.

Depending on your team’s tasks, the Machinery Lubrication Technician (MLT) level 1 and/or Machinery Lubrication Analysis (MLA) level 1 are the best places to start. For your program leader, I would require additional training as Machinery Lubrication Technician (MLT) level 2 and Machinery Lubrication Engineer (MLE).

Once you have achieved the items above, the next hurdle to tackle is handling and delivery of the lubricants from the storage room to the equipment. This is a precise process that requires onsite determination.

The critical element is the process to accomplish this and the resources necessary to achieve it. Some basic equipment modification is needed to ensure contamination control and prevent dispensing the wrong lubricants into the wrong location.

Gone are the days of the old coffee can, open bucket, or other poor lubricant handling methods. Investing in proper containers and dedicating those containers to specific lubricants is vital to success.

Another aspect of handling and delivering is properly labeling the lubricated points. This increases the chance that correct lubricants end up in the right place.

Remember to use a system for labeling that allows not just for color but shape to assist technicians that may be color blind. Properly labeling the entire chain of custody on site will improve your efforts towards reliability.

Implementing a proper sampling program will ensure you meet the cleanliness and other important aspects of the lifeblood of your equipment. Like the doctor taking your blood to identify issues, sampling is a proactive method of stopping failures. Remember following the proper sampling procedures is a must to ensure you get an accurate picture of equipment health.

If you are doing the right things for your equipment lubrication, you will see a significant step change in your reliability. It is that simple and does not require fancy technology or a lot of money to accomplish. You just need to roll up your sleeves.

My focus is on what and how companies invest in their equipment to drive results. As someone who has worked in maintenance and reliability for more than 40 years, I enjoy learning about what is new. However, the reoccurring mistake in all equipment purchases is the lack of knowledge of how to achieve and sustain the performance of the latest equipment.

The truth is that most companies don’t develop reliability programs with proactive approaches because they believe that new equipment does not need these efforts. This is where they start accruing maintenance debt.

Maintenance Debt

Maintenance debt is like all other types of debt. When you run (spend) the equipment outside the design standards or forego maintenance, it creates accelerated deterioration (debt). You build so much debt that the equipment fails when you do this enough.

If you continue to run the equipment in this manner, you lose the design life you sold to the decision-makers to purchase the equipment. Foregoing maintenance never pays off. The damage caused by this poor business decision will never be repaid and will result in failure and accelerated need to replace the equipment.

By not developing proactive approaches to keep their shiny new toys in reliable condition, they operate the new equipment without regard to its long-term success to make a quick buck.

This makes them look like geniuses and gets them their next job with the next company, but it leaves the company that made this investment with all its promises and a maintenance debt they will never overcome.

Having said this, I have also been a part of the decision-making process of many companies to procure the equipment. The capital processes are extensive and require a significant investment in time and effort. These decisions rely heavily on promises from the original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and misleading information regarding their equipment capabilities.

I have also worked for major equipment manufacturers and know the strategy they used to mislead and misrepresent their products to make the purchase by the company appealing. These promises are on unrealistic throughput/production and reliability. Neither of these is ever realized by the company, and the sad part is the company does not hold its team or the equipment manufacturers accountable.

What’s the Real Problem in Reliability?

The foundational issue that drives this failure today in all industries is the loss of genuinely qualified reliability professionals as part of the senior leadership team. Less than 4% of these leaders have any real-world experience in reliability. This limited experience gives them little knowledge base to achieve the desired results.

There has been a shift from developing senior leaders from within to employing job hoppers.

Job hoppers are short-term employees focusing on making themselves look good rather than on the long-term sustainable success of the organization. This drives reliance on OEM lies and leaves the inexperienced decision maker to make a wrong decision.

Forty years ago, the story was significantly different. The successful companies developed their leadership from within and invested in actual capital expenditures and operations. Qualified professionals led these companies, not venture capital groups, accountants, or lawyers. They did not rely on OEM lies because they possessed the experience to make the right decision. Now Boards of Directors want short-term ideas rather than long-term results and make terrible decisions daily.

They confuse throughput with success and have lost the ability to see what their operations are truly capable of. I cannot tell you how many senior leaders have told me that throughput covers many mistakes. This is true if those leading the company are not knowledgeable and lack the skills of a true leader. This is the predominant leadership style used today and the root cause of underperforming capital projects.

Let us look at what I mean by my statements above. The capital justification process is usually laborious and all about leadership knowledge and experience. The first question should be, what are we trying to achieve? Without question, the answer will be more throughput. That is a convenient answer.

Why Experience Matters in Overcoming OEM Misinformation

The next step is where we start to fail. We specify the necessary equipment based on our needs and the manufacturer’s misleading information. We need the equipment to produce specific tons/hour. The OEM promises their equipment will deliver it. Forty years ago, we knew through experience that the OEM was lying about the equipment’s capabilities.

Any OEM promised production should be discounted by 20%. If you want to achieve the throughput desired, you need to find equipment that the OEM says will deliver 20% more tons/hour. Here is your first opportunity to get it right. We fail to make the right decision because of our lack of experience with the decision-makers and the misleading promises of the OEM.

Another aspect of equipment selection is how well it is designed for reliability and maintainability. The more reliability and maintainability built into the equipment, the less scheduled downtime you need to do these functions.

When I say reliability and maintainability built in, I do not mean the OEM version. The design for reliability and maintainability needs to be done by qualified maintenance and reliability professionals.

OEMs do not possess the qualified personnel or the interest in increasing the reliability of their equipment. OEMs make the bulk of their profits on parts and service sales. Unqualified leaders allow the OEM or inexperienced staff to sell them on unrealistic capabilities.

To prove this, you must look at the OEM manual and its recommended maintenance. They recommend fixed time/usage-based maintenance, which offers no proactive efforts. They recommend gas company lubricants, which could be the least effective and the most important aspect of proactive maintenance.

This is factual evidence that they have no interest in reliability or providing value. I have worked for a few major OEMs. When I suggested providing premium lubricants or any other real reliability or maintainability improvement, I was told that we are in the business of selling parts, services, and new equipment. Reliability hurts our bottom line. Qualified leaders can see through this and possess the experience to see through the lies.

The Dangers of Short-Term Decision Making

Now, look at their recommended spare parts list. It is one or more of everything—proof positive where their allegiance lies. The highest cost to any organization is the loss of opportunity because of equipment downtime.

The short-term “cost to buy” decision to remove the reliability and maintainability capabilities will always cost the organization more than the costs to include it from the beginning.

Additionally, keeping these capabilities will go a long way to limiting the maintenance debt that most organizations begin to incur the day the equipment goes into production. I have watched many companies remove this functionality to reduce the cost of buying.

Senior leaders lacking qualifications fall for this short-term approach emphasizing that leaders without experience and capabilities are at the root of this entire issue. What they need to focus on are costs to use. The reason for this wrong business decision is that we have lost the experience and skills necessary to make these decisions.

In our haste to promote job hoppers and shortcut what leaders are, we employ people that are the perfect example of the “peter principle.” The “peter principle” states that we have promoted the person to their highest level of incompetence.

Again, I cannot tell you how often I hear those terrible business decisions made because of the short-sighted “cost to buy” approach. The reason the value focus on “cost to use” has fallen by the wayside is that companies are lazy and do not want to do the work necessary to make the right decision; the senior leaders making these decisions are not interested in the long-term success of the business. We have lost the senior leaders with the experience to lead and make these decisions. It has given way to job hoppers, not internal development.

Capital Purchases

Now let us continue with the discussion of capital purchases. The decision to produce the required tons/hour needs to be vetted. We must add in any time we need to make the equipment deliver reliable results. We must understand how many hours a year we need to schedule the equipment down to avoid unscheduled downtime.

Again, building in reliability and maintainability reduces the need for additional throughput capabilities. We need to buy equipment that produces at a higher rate to allow for reliability efforts. If, after designing in reliability and maintainability, we see that we need the equalizing time, this will push the production per hour to higher tons/hour.

We know that its maximum throughput is 80% of the OEM promise, so we need to procure equipment with a production rate of more than the required ton/hour. The experience and understanding of equipment are something other than what you get taught in college or a seminar or sitting behind a desk with a title.

There is no quick fix or shortcut to this knowledge. Never trust the OEM to represent their product honestly. I can tell you that forty years ago, senior leaders who were developed within the company and qualified to do their jobs delivered what they said. They did not have to hide behind throughput or smoke and mirrors.

Let us take a moment to reflect on your day-to-day life. If your organization did make the necessary adjustment to throughput, instead of allowing this adjustment to be used for reliability and the organization’s long-term success, it would just use the additional capability to cover operational/leadership mistakes.

They will push the equipment to its limits and justify it because production is king. This approach is the death of our industrial might. It is the rallying cry of the unqualified leader and at the root of the end of our competitive advantage.

Since capital is the start of the competitive advantage available to us if realized, how we operate our equipment is the sustainable part of the equation.

In industry, the price point of the commodity sold is fixed for companies. The only competitive advantage available to these companies is the cost reduction to allow for the most significant profit margins. How do we reduce costs effectively and in a sustainable manner? Many organizations look for quick reductions that result in long-term damage.

The biggest mistake that comes to mind is the reduction in the workforce. While reducing the workforce is a quick and easy solution, it is always a long-term disaster. This poor solution results from senior leadership teams needing more leadership skills and experience to lead an organization into the next century.

Let us look at a sustainable approach to reducing our costs and thus leveraging the most significant competitive advantage available to all organizations. Qualified senior leaders know that a 10% reduction in maintenance costs is the bottom-line equivalent to a 40% increase in throughput.

We know that achieving a 40% increase in throughput would require significant investment, including building new facilities and staffing this facility. This is usually cost-prohibitive for most organizations.

Often unqualified senior leaders focus on the 10% reduction in maintenance costs. However, they do this arbitrarily and without experience and knowledge of what this type of reduction means—cutting the annual spend by 10% with no thought other than the cuts will always result in higher costs to the organization in downtime and subsequent repairs.

It costs 90% less to proactively stop the failure than it does to repair.

Because of the loss of qualified maintenance and reliability leaders, senior leadership is caught off guard by these increased costs. Many organizations hide these costs in other areas to prevent the board from realizing that their poor leadership has damaged the organization.

How do we reduce the maintenance costs by 10% with actions designed to sustain the reduction and profit of the organization? The answer is with truly qualified maintenance and reliability leaders. These leaders are almost extinct.

They are being replaced with college degrees or unqualified job hoppers who may have held a title but possess no fundamental skills or experience or “jacks of all trades” (and masters in none) over the past 30 years.

The trend today among unqualified maintenance and reliability managers is to implement a wide array of technology to distract from their lack of leadership skills and experience. These shiny toys and fancy tech mislead the organization into thinking they are being proactive.

The fact is that no technology will make you more reliable. Technology cannot and will not make your organization more reliable. If you have a reliability and maintenance leader recommending tech as an answer, you now know they are not true leaders in reliability but the reason your company is failing.

What is Reliability to Your Organization?

The definition of reliability is the quality or state of being reliable. It is the extent to which an experiment, test, or measuring procedure yields the same results on repeated trials. Reliability is achieving the equipment’s optimum reference state. In short, the optimum reference state is the prescribed state of machine configuration, operating conditions, and maintenance activities required to achieve and sustain specific reliability operations.

To qualified maintenance and reliability professionals and leaders, this means taking the actions necessary to achieve equipment design life. Anything less than that is a failure. Maintenance and reliability leaders/professionals know their job is to achieve equipment design life, not employ technology to monitor its death.

Scheduling Downtime to Avoid Unscheduled Downtime

If your company believes scheduling downtime is reliable, you are not qualified. Scheduling downtime based on vibration, thermography, or other tech is a failure and the approach of an unqualified leader or consultant.

These unqualified pretenders boast that they can monitor equipment using vibration, thermography, ultrasonics, etc., and schedule the replacement before failure. They call this proactive maintenance because they avoid unscheduled downtime.

This approach costs the organization 90% more than stopping the failures. No maintenance and reliability experience or skill is required to monitor your equipment’s death. Often the operation suffers unscheduled downtime because of the 75% – 89% variable.

Why is the breakdown 75% – 89% variable? It is because the technology cannot know how well the component it is monitoring has been cared for. It needs to be cared for properly, or it will not fail.

Technology does not know if the component was professionally installed, kept contamination free, and properly lubricated. These are the top three reasons components fail.

Reliability can only be accomplished by stopping failures. This is where a qualified senior leader makes a difference, especially an experienced maintenance and reliability leader. These leaders know this and how to accomplish it.

Qualified senior leaders know what true proactive maintenance is. Proactive maintenance is creating or controlling a situation by causing something to happen rather than responding to it after it has happened.

The fact is that technology requires a failure, and all you are doing is responding, so by definition, condition monitoring/predictive maintenance and preventive/fixed time maintenance are reactive and respond to failure after it has happened.

Proactive maintenance includes proper lubrication, contamination control, and proper installation. These are the proactive maintenance activities. It is simple but requires an expert in maintenance and reliability to lead these efforts.

Only through years of skilled trade experience and education can someone achieve this level of expertise. No shortcut, college degree, seminar, abbreviated academic program, etc., can equal the time and effort required to lead maintenance and reliability.

The industry is in the crisis we are in now because unqualified senior leaders attempt to shortcut these requirements and then falsely promote success.

I challenge any organization that feels it has a proactive reliability approach to answer a few quick questions:

1. How long do most of your bearings last?
2. How often do most of your motors last?
3. How long do most of your gearboxes last?

If the truthful answer to all three of the above questions is not 25 years, then you need a proactive reliability approach. Does your lubricant come from a gas company? If it does, you need a reliability approach.

Remember, the job of a qualified maintenance and reliability leader is to stop failures. It is to achieve equipment design life, not monitor its death using one of the fancy technologies today. The only way to accomplish this is through proper lubrication, contamination control, and installation. 98.8% of all failures fall into these areas.

No technology or computer program will ever make a difference in these areas. Only qualified maintenance and reliability professionals with knowledge and experience in these areas will stop the failures.

The development of qualified reliability and maintenance professionals stopped in the 1980s. It was replaced with a multi-craft handyman or worse. If your company does not have an apprenticeship program led by real journeyman tradespeople, you cannot and will not have reliability. If you shortcut this program with titles or community college crap, you cannot have reliability.

While there is a lot of excitement in purchasing new equipment and using fancy technology to monitor it, as senior leaders, we are not doing our job if this is our approach.

Buying new equipment without understanding its functionality and reliability is irresponsible. Using technology and touting it as reliability is irresponsible. Hiding mistakes by short-term throughput is reckless.

Senior Leadership Responsibilities

Senior leaders need to do challenging work to achieve sustainable, reliable operations. If you need to know what that work is, find someone to help you figure it out. I will tell you to beware of consultants. Ninety-eight percent of consultants today are part of the problem rather than the solution. They are desktop engineers without qualifications or any real-world experience.

Do not accept inferior qualifications from hacks, wannabes, or those that think they hit a triple because they were born on third base. You will be replacing unqualified senior leaders with an unqualified external resource. Stop hiring them based on their hype and interview them as if they were new hires.

As a senior leader, it is your job to hear what they are saying as they manipulate you to what they offer, not what you need. Remember, no two operations are alike. Supposed success at other locations does not equate to your site or success. Most of these success stories are just that, stories. If it sounds too good, it is.

Senior leaders must challenge these fake professionals to prove their claims. Consultants cover up their failures with broad motherly statements that do not answer your questions. False reliability claims are perfect examples of the opinion that figures never lie, but liars can figure.

Please do not fall prey to them and work to identify qualified, skilled trade reliability professionals. As a senior leader in your organization, you must look for someone who has run a plant, has a skilled trades background, and has been on-site at 3 AM turning wrenches to get the plant back up. This is where you will find your bang for your buck.

Buying new equipment is not the savior of your organization. Buying the right equipment and maintaining it in its optimum reference state is. Senior leaders must invest in a resource with the knowledge, trade skills, and experience to achieve this.

Any organization can buy equipment and trust the OEM to represent their product correctly. If long-term success is the organization’s goal, there must be much more work. Never trust the OEM, and never make new equipment decisions on buying costs. As a senior leader, it is always your job to keep your eye on the long-term success of your organization. It is never about you; it is about the facility.

Stop making bad decisions because you are afraid to admit you do not have the knowledge or experience necessary in this area. Find a qualified maintenance and reliability professional with hands-on experience. I will leave you with this quote from my father, “You do not have to be the smartest person in the room, but make sure to surround yourself with them.”

Forget everything you’ve learned about how to build a healthy organizational culture at your plant.

Every year industry spends 170 billion dollars trying to train people to build organizational culture. 98% of this spending has no positive results. Companies fall prey to unknowing consultants and trainers with a lot of hype and no knowledge, education, or true experience in organizational culture. None of these consultants and trainers has done the work necessary to have any impact on the organizations that trust them. They may have read a book or attended a seminar, but they have yet to do the hard work necessary to make a real difference. They offer quick fixes that make them money while dummying down your expectations to meet what they can falsely make you believe has an impact.

I have been lucky enough to work alongside pioneers in organizational culture. These subject matter experts have no peers in this area. I earned my doctorate in organizational development and change and have spent more than two decades working on my doctorate and continuing my research on this topic. So what follows is not an opinion but a fact based on the scientific method and more than a century of expertise by those who literally wrote the book on the subject.

What is Culture?

Culture is more than words on a mission, vision, or value statement. It is not something you put on a wall, and it is not something that starts in an organization. Culture is rooted in the upbringing of the employees in the company. It is that simple. A company can waste a lot of money to check a box, but the honest answer starts with the hiring process and continues with development from within.

Building Healthy Organizational Culture Wasn’t Always This Difficult

Before 1980, organizational culture was easy. It had not become a buzzword for consultants or trainers preying on the lack of knowledge of corporate leaders. For the most part, the company’s employees were local workers with shared upbringings; thus, the company culture had the necessary foundation. Probably the most critical aspect of sustaining this culture was that the leaders of these organizations were grown and promoted from within. The leadership had the same upbringing and a shared workforce culture. That is the key to thriving culture and the only honest answer. I could stop here. There is no training by any consultant that can change this fact. Everything else that is offered is a lie.

What changed? The workforce became mobile. Many plant floor employees are still locals with a shared upbringing, so the foundation is still there. However, the leaders are primarily outsiders to the community. Companies no longer grow leaders from within, they hire job hoppers from outside the community, and this is where we fail.

Without a common upbringing, the leaders try to force the workforce into their paradigm. The leader from Chicago working in Tennessee will have no shared upbringing or foundation for culture. They will force their values, desires, and will on the workforce, and the company will fail. These leaders focus on making their name so they can hop to the next company for more money. They burn whatever good the current company has in the short term because long term, they have no desire to be there. This is a shift from before the 80s when employees worked for one organization throughout their lives.

What About Diversity?

Consultants, training organizations, and human resources departments might frame this as diversity. Diversity has nothing to do with this. This is another ploy for those preying on companies to sell their services and products. Diversity does not mean relocating employees from all over the world into your workforce to the detriment of your organization. Diversity is recognizing, respecting, and valuing differences. This is possible within the context of hiring locally and developing within. Organizational culture has suffered because of the globalization of the workforce and the lack of senior leaders to recognize it. This is mainly because senior leaders are the job-hopping problem. The magic cure they are looking for is themselves.

Let’s expand on this and tie it to what you are seeing. Of the top six reasons given for why people leave their jobs, four of the six reasons are related to their boss/manager and company leadership. Money and benefits are five and six. Now dig deeper. When an hourly employee leaves their job, they usually take another position in the local community. This is because they live there, have been raised there, and share a common culture. As I stated above, the foundation of thriving company culture is rooted in the common upbringing of the workforce.

Of the top six reasons given for why people leave their jobs, four of the six reasons are related to their boss/manager and company leadership.

What happens when an organization’s manager or senior member leaves the company? The average time an outsider stays with an organization is less than three to five years. This depends on how long they can hide or run under the radar with their short-term efforts. They usually relocate to the area they were raised or to their next job-hopping position to run the next company into the ground. Please take a look at your organization, and you will find this to be true. While consultants, training organizations, and human resources managers want you to believe they can solve your turnover issue with culture buzzwords, the answer lies in hiring local and developing internal resources into your leadership. No magic program or catchy phrase, or tactic can achieve anything. All it does is make them rich, and you are that much poorer as it further damages the culture you are trying to save.

Let’s look at the companies with the most robust culture. The one thing they have in common is they are family owned and operated. The roots for their strength are their roots. Family-owned companies do not bring in outsiders/job hoppers to lead their organizations. You find incredibly long-tenured employees under family leadership. The focus is on quality and long-term success. The desire to achieve this is because the leader’s name is on the sign. Sadly, when they bring in outsiders, they lose their strength and suffer the same fate as others. All you must do is look at a couple of books written by one of my colleagues, Jim Collins. If you read Good to Great or How the Mighty Fall, you will see that the great companies were all family-owned and were the foundation for their rise to greatness. The sad fate for all these once great companies is documented in How the Mighty Fall and their fall due to a change in leadership to outsiders.

How to Get Organizational Culture Right

The formula for a thriving culture is not a consultant or trainer. Do not turn your leadership development over to human resources. Most of these folks have no leadership skills. They have never led a team on a plant floor and have yet to do the hard work required to lead the desired culture. Trying what they think worked at their last company is a fallacy. They did not accomplish what they brag about. They lie, cheat, and mislead companies into what they want to sell them. It will not make a difference. Do not fall for name association. Covey, Maxwell, Blanchard, etc., do not offer any insight. These organizations, like most others, have packaged hype and offer no solutions to your cultural issues. They will tic a box but little else.

The only way to fix the decline in organizational culture is to stop poor hiring practices. Hire local employees and develop your leaders from within. Hiring an outsider to lead your organization is not sustainable.

What can we do to truly affect an organization’s culture? Stop all the shortcuts we are taking damaging the culture we are trying to fix. Hiring locally and developing your leaders from within is the only fix.

Sadly, if your organization has a culture issue, the middle managers and senior leaders are the problem. Stop attacking the hourly workforce. If you do not know how to create a program to build the internal resources necessary to develop the leaders you need, here is where you need to identify an external resource to assist. It would be best if you did your homework to find the right resource. Most of those advertising that they can help lack the proper skills, education, and experience. Leadership development is not sitting in a conference room for a few hours weekly, monthly, or for whatever duration. It is not giving your team homework. Humans do not learn by training. Humans learn from doing and having guidance from someone with the proper skills working right alongside them. It would be best if you had a proven leader, working on the floor with your designated team member to show them what leadership is. Leadership development is done by someone who has led a team.

Don’t look for titles and false promises; look for a leader. Classroom training is a tool for people without leadership. When selecting external resources, look at their resume. Have they led a company? Have they educated themselves? Can they answer your questions? Interview them like you would any other employee. They are critical to your success, and selecting someone from the vast field of unqualified consultants and trainers is a challenging task. The resume must include real-world leadership on a plant floor in an operational environment. A leader with documented success by actual doing, not someone who is a lifelong consultant with desk experience.

A Healthy Culture Requires Intentional Focus

Culture is the heartbeat of your organization. You should give it the due diligence that you would open heart surgery. How would you select the cardiologist that will save your life? Would it be a fancy website, flowery buzzwords, or recommendations from folks who have never had heart surgery? I bet you would ask many questions and verify every statement. You are looking for the experience to guarantee success with the education and credentials to back it up. The entity you select must have done original research on the topic and provided documented contributions to the body of knowledge. That is what you should do if choosing an outside resource to help you with your organization and culture.

Please stop trying to make your plant operations in Alabama the same as in New York; it is not possible. We are back to a very different upbringing. We believe that forcing a corporate culture across our operations and the world is a failed approach. Not only is it impossible to accomplish this, but it does not make common sense.

This is even true of a single culture within a plant. Employees who work in operations have a different culture than those in maintenance. If the workforce comes from the local community, they will share a common base; there is a different approach to building the culture. Stop forcing everyone into the same mold. Stop looking for quick fixes and false promises. If someone tells you they have a canned answer, you know right then and there they are not qualified and are lying to you. Each company and site is unique, and no one can make a difference without possessing the ability to develop leaders in the field working alongside them. Sadly, this takes time, and few companies are willing to invest in it, and that is why they fail and their consultants get rich. Remember, the root cause of why you have a culture problem is probably you if you are a member of leadership.

I want to leave you with one last thing. There are no absolutes in this. Some organizations have limited success, not because of consultants, training organizations, or human resource departments. The reason is that the outside leaders they bring in happen to have some similar upbringing to the local workforce. This is usually the result of a happy accident. It is not a mindful act but the luck of the draw. This is less than .1 of 1% and not enough to turn the tide, destroying the once-industrial power we call the United States of America.

Many reading this may have a different point of view. Please contact me to discuss your position, as I welcome any input. No college class, corporate initiative, or quick fix will ever make a difference. Like reliability in your operations, culture requires hard work and a qualified professional with the education and experience to make a difference. I promise you that 98% of the consulting and training world possess neither and will only drain your bank account.

Again, I would like to help any of you to identify the right person to help your company. I will use my decades of education and experience in organizational culture and my work alongside the pioneers in this arena and their century of proven scientific methods to help you choose the right external resource. I will assist you free of charge and offer this to make a positive difference for your team truly. Remember, there is no quick fix, training, or buzzword approach. If you are looking for one, you are part of the problem, not the solution.