In 1966, at the height of the “swinging sixties” movement, the world of lubrication, friction, and wear finally received worldwide recognition as a scientific entity responsible for continued machine health and asset longevity.

In retrospect, such recognition was long overdue, considering the practice of applying lubricants to moving surfaces to reduce friction and surface wear is now recognized to be over 5,000 years old.

This fact was substantiated by the discovery of some archaeological evidence in the East Asia Tigres-Euphrates river system, i.e., wooden cart wheels and wheel-bearing material thought to have been lubricated with water, tallow, or beeswax (Jenkins, 1980).

I discussed that finding with a colleague, which eventually led to an exercise that came up with a “Top 10” list of pioneers in the lubrication field.

Most people would consider this a challenge, but many true pioneers are worthy of mention in the fields of lubrication, friction, and wear. The following list reflects my ten personal, gold-medal “Lubrication Hero” choices, in chronological order, starting back in the 1600s.

1. Sir Isaac Newton

Newton was an English Physicist, mathematician, and scientist who lived from 1643 to 1727. Famous for describing gravity and the three laws of motion, he was the first to recognize surface friction as an external force.

2. Elijah McCoy

The Canadian-born McCoy worked as an oiler for the Michigan Central Railroad when he invented the world’s first patented, self-pressurized oiling device. It used steam from a locomotive engine to force-feed lubricant to various points automatically. The design worked so well that railroads shunned all competitive products and only wanted to purchase McCoy’s lubricator. This, in turn, led to the coining of the phrase, “It’s the real McCoy!”

3. Richard Stribeck

Stribeck was a German engineer who 1902 first described changes in the friction coefficient of bearings as they experienced different lubricant regimes (Boundary, Mixed film, and Hydrodynamic) from startup to full running. He graphically represented these changes in what is now known as the “Stribeck Curve” diagram.

4. Arthur Gulborg

Driven by the repetitive task of manually refilling oil cups of the die-cast machines in his family’s business, Gulborg was motivated to develop a less taxing process that employed a new grease-lubricant medium. The result was the world’s first grease gun, which featured a screw-type design built to mate up to a proprietary bearing point fitting. Gulborg called his invention the “Alemite” high-pressure lubricating system, after his family business.

5. John R. Battle

Battle was a U.S.-born engineer who, in 1916, penned The Lubrication Engineers Handbook. Four years later, he published the encyclopedic Handbook of Industrial Oil Engineering.

A prolific inventor of all things lubrication, his “Gun-Fil” system is still sold today. The International Council of Machinery Lubrication (ICML) presents an annual award in Battle’s honor that recognizes best-practice machinery lubrication programs.

6. Joseph Bijur

Until 1923, automobiles required a rigorous daily lubrication schedule to lubricate up to 50 chassis lubrication points.

To alleviate this burden, the American inventor Bijur developed a self-contained engineered pump and the world’s first centralized lubrication-delivery system for oil, which he called a “single line resistance (SLR)” system. His namesake company still exists today, and the SLR system remains the most copied and highest-selling lubrication system ever.

7. Oscar V. Zerk

Zerk emigrated from Austria to the United States and became a prolific inventor (with over 300 inventions to his credit).

His most famous contribution to the world of lubrication manifested itself as the now-famous, patented “Zerk” push-style grease fitting that has been unchanged since 1929. By the time he died in 1968, more than 20 billion zerk grease fittings had been manufactured.

8. August H. Gill

A U.S.-born chemistry graduate of MIT in 1884 (at the tender age of 20), Gill made his mark as a founding member of the ASTM committee for petroleum products and lubricants.

More importantly, he’s credited as the founding father of oil analysis (having been one of the first to formalize it as a field of study). The ICML presents an award in Gill’s honor to recognize organizations that exhibit excellence in applying used oil analysis and lubricant-condition monitoring.

9. Sir Peter Jost

Funded by the British Ministry of State for Education and Science, Jost was tasked to investigate the position of lubrication education and research in the United Kingdom and give an opinion on industry needs in this field.

This assignment led to a landmark study of the measured effects of friction, lubrication, and wear on the British economy. Jost coined the term “Tribology” and introduced it to the scientific and industrial world. For this contribution, he received a knighthood.

The resulting Jost report was then used as a model for further studies in the U.S., Canada, and Germany. All of them echoed similar results that highlighted the importance and effectiveness of lubrication.

10. Ernest Rabinowicz

As a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, Rabinowicz followed up on Sir Richard Jost’s study with his ground-breaking study on “Design, Friction, and Wear of Interacting Bearing Surfaces.”

This study led to Rabinowicz’s seminal tribology book, Friction and Wear of Materials. He is also credited as the author of the “Rabinowicz Law,” which states: “Every year 6% of the GDP—Gross Domestic Product—is lost through mechanical wear.”

We must understand who from the past (and how the past) helped shape our modern-day approach toward lubrication practice and management. I have admired the above lineup for many years and believe that all those listed are worthy of note in the tribology field.

Initially published in The RAM Review

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.

Although management and leadership are different ideas, they are frequently used interchangeably. While the two have some parallels, their focus, abilities, and philosophies differ.

Understanding even the basics of management and leadership can help organizations determine how they want to approach the concept of lubrication-driven reliability.

Planning, organizing, directing, and controlling resources to accomplish particular goals or objectives is the process of management. Achieving a common purpose entails directing and coordinating the actions of a group of people.

The focus is on upholding the status quo and reaching predetermined goals through effectively and efficiently utilizing available resources. Usually having formal power over their employees, managers prioritize keeping consistency, minimizing risk, and accomplishing predetermined objectives. This idea is frequently used in the maintenance and industrial sectors concerning program management for lubrication.

Simply put, lubrication program management ensures that lubrication is carried out according to a set of predetermined KPIs. As a result, these managers typically adopt one of two dominant management philosophies: transactional management, where a manager sets clear expectations and goals and permits feedback, rewards, or punishment based upon employee performance towards those goals, or autocratic management, where the manager makes all the decisions and exerts total control over employees, expecting them to comply without question.

With any of the two major management approaches, employees are sometimes resigned to following instructions and are not necessarily encouraged to come up with fresh ideas.

Furthermore, the program manager is not encouraged to seek different ways of performing the work. It is often a process already in place with an expectation of execution with minimal variance in what is done or how. They are simply tasked with managing the existing process.

To create a true transformation in how lubrication is perceived and performed, it’s time to move from lubrication management to lubrication leadership.

Leadership is the ability to inspire and motivate people to achieve a shared vision or goal. It involves setting a direction for the organization or group and inspiring people to follow it. The emphasis is on innovation, creativity, and change.

Leaders often use their influence to achieve their objectives. They inspire and empower their team, take calculated risks, and drive change and growth. Generally, we think of leadership as someone at the top level of an organization or even a location. This is supported by common phrases such as “corporate leadership” or “site leadership.”

However, when understanding the previous description of a leader, we realize that the leader isn’t necessarily the one at the top. Instead, it’s the one that inspires. Creating a true transformation in lubrication-driven reliability takes someone with vision, charisma, and a genuine desire to influence change.

As with management, there are several leadership styles or theories, many of which overlap in many ways. However, in the world of lubrication leadership, the dominant style that comes to mind shares the namesake of what we are trying to execute- transformation.

Transformational Leadership

The transformational leadership approach focuses on inspiring and motivating others to achieve a shared vision or goal by empowering employees to take ownership of their work and encouraging them to be creative and innovative and to take calculated risks.

Transformational leaders are charismatic and have a strong vision for the organization’s future, and they inspire their followers by setting high standards and challenging them to meet those standards.

When the transformational leader focuses on programs such as lubrication, we can expect to see significant changes in what is done, how it is done, and finally, learn why it is done. The transformational leader will ensure that employees get that critical information often missed in today’s transactional approach: the “why.”

In short, we’ve often considered lubrication processes as something we manage. When we manage something, we ensure that tasks are performed as prescribed and focus on KPI tracking. We work towards numbers.

However, when we look at lubrication as something we lead, we open up the opportunity for innovation. We empower employees to want to do better. We reward them for finding ways to make their job easier and more exciting. There will always be a place for managers, but now is the time for leaders.

A successful lubrication program must have the proper organization in place. The correct lubrication functions help implement and sustain a robust precision lubrication program that provides value to the maintenance organization and the company. It is about more than assigning dedicated lubricators to perform the different lubrication activities. It’s also about designing the lubrication activities workflow, which eventually allows for streamlining the various lubrication tasks and workloads.

The first thing to think about is how to have the right and dedicated people to implement and sustain your lubrication program. This allows the lubricators to focus on performing their lubrication activities rather than distracting them with other day-to-day maintenance activities.

The lubrication team organization is highly dependent on the size of the site. For larger sites, it is highly recommended to:

1. Centralize the lubrication function into the reliability group.
2. Have a dedicated lubrication technician/s with the correct job descriptions, who are trained in modern lubrication skills and standards, and act as the champions of the lubrication program.

For small or medium-sized organizations that cannot hire a dedicated lubrication team, any of the following solutions may be considered:

1. Dedicated resources (when neither combined nor outside resources are possible)
2. Combined roles (For example, a mechanic is also the lead lubrication technician)
3. Use outside resources (e.g., lubrication service provider)

How to Measure the Staffing Requirements of your Lubrication Team

Now that you have set up your initial lubrication organization, how do you validate that you’ve done it correctly? Maintenance management may be able to help by preparing a report which includes annual lubrication working hours data to help measure staffing requirements. There are multiple ways to achieve this, including:

1. Use a set of duration values for lubrication tasks. This table may be generated from your CMMS database for previous lubrication jobs. Or use a benchmark for lubrication tasks duration that a specialized organization recognizes.
2. Use specialized lubrication management software (if any) to tabulate the work hour requirements and generate reports to show annual assigned hours and annual hours required to accomplish the lubrication work.

Designing a lubrication organization correctly can take time and effort, but if done correctly, it will pay dividends long into the future.

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.