Unlocking Success in Manufacturing Leadership
Let’s explore how to accelerate operational performance and foster effective leadership in manufacturing. To do this, we tapped into the experiences of Jon Heffelfinger, Plant Manager at Hendrickson in Somerset, Kentucky, a global commercial transportation industry manufacturer specializing in heavy-duty truck suspensions. Jon brings extensive experience in leading teams and optimizing operations within a complex manufacturing environment. He provides a practical, down-to-earth perspective on the challenges and triumphs of factory leadership, covering everything from personal career progression to cultivating a winning workplace culture and driving continuous improvement. You can listen to the episode of the Accelerating Operational Performance (AOP) podcast here or watch the conversation here.
Jon Heffelfinger’s Path to Plant Manager Leadership
Early Career and Growth at Hendrickson
Jon’s journey to plant manager at Hendrickson spans 22 years, beginning as a painter in Lebanon, Indiana, at another facility. Despite initially being timid and not seeing himself in leadership roles, he found enjoyment in the challenges and working with people. His varied experience within the company includes painting, assembling, fabrication, and machining departments. Hendrickson’s commitment to employee development is evident in Jon’s utilization of the company’s education assistance program to earn his bachelor’s degree. He became a supervisor in 2011, transferring to the Somerset, Kentucky, plant, where he deeply appreciated the culture and the people in the area. His progression continued, becoming a production manager in 2018 and then plant manager right after the COVID-19 pandemic. This transition occurred during a period of very high demand for their business.
The Transition to Leadership in Manufacturing: Overcoming Hesitation
“Hendrickson wants you to succeed.”
Many aspiring leaders, like Jon, initially hesitate to pursue plant manager roles, often due to perceived stress or a desire to avoid certain leadership styles observed in others. What changed Jon’s mind? Several individuals played a role, but a specific conversation with Perry Barr resonated deeply. Perry Barr’s powerful statement, “Hendrickson wants you to succeed,” helped Jon overcome his nervousness about the additional responsibility of the plant manager role. This assurance that the company would support him on his path was profoundly impactful, meaning a lot and helped him realize his path. The importance of developmental leadership is highlighted by leaders like Perry Barr and Devin (a great leader at the Somerset plant), who think in a developmental way and are crucial for nurturing talent, helping individuals progress in their careers, even when it means facing initial uncertainty.
Gaining Self-Confidence: A Key Project in Operational Performance
A defining success for Jon, which solidified his confidence, was the successful production of the first “slider box” at the Somerset facility. This project was significant because it involved introducing a new product different from anything produced before, requiring a new assembly line and unique parts that differed from what they had ever assembled in the past. It was an accelerated project with a very tight timeline to make it happen. Despite these challenges, the team successfully completed it on time and met customer demands. This product continues to be manufactured to this day. Jon expressed great pride in this accomplishment, noting that the team did an amazing job, and it helped their company and customers both equally.
Leading Operational Performance in Manufacturing: Challenges and Culture
Tackling Challenges: The Post-COVID Talent Shortage
One significant, humbling struggle for Jon and his team after COVID was in hiring, which historically had never been an issue for the Somerset plant. Despite their “we can” attitude, they struggled for years to find candidates, especially skilled ones like G-certified welders—they have about 132 of them—to meet customer demand. This inability to meet customer demand, despite extra recruiting efforts, was very difficult and humbling for Jon, given the plant’s history of high performance. This talent shortage was a widespread problem across the industry, compounded by a tightening job market and wage compression that reduced the premium for factory work compared to other jobs. We believe this talent shortage will persist for the next 10-20 years, emphasizing the critical need for companies to focus on being a great place to work.
The Somerset Advantage: Building a Unique Workplace Culture
“One of the things that this team does that I truly love, and I think it’s really important to protect this in the culture, is they are very good at taking care of one another.”
The Somerset plant’s culture is truly special because of the team’s ability to take care of one another. This fosters a familial atmosphere within the factory. For instance, teammates rally around each other during traumatic events, organizing potlucks, raising money, and even performing personal favours when team members are in need, such as mowing a coworker’s lawn. This demonstrates that employees are valued as more than just workers or numbers. While the company has core values, the team actively drives this unique culture, which Jon believes the company should strive to protect.
The local Somerset community also contributes significantly to the plant’s appeal:
- Technical schools in the area help provide skilled workers, such as 2G welders.
- Somerset is highlighted as a great place to raise a family, offering abundant outdoor activities, an active community, and a lively downtown, making it appealing to people of all ages.
What Jon describes at Somerset aligns with Google’s Project Aristotle findings on high-performing teams:
- Psychological Safety: The ability for individuals to be themselves, knowing the group will welcome them, notice when something is wrong, and act.
- Solid Group Norms: An understanding of mutual commitments within the team, which can even help assimilate disruptive influences. Jon’s plant achieves these implicitly.
Principles for High-Performing Teams and Continuous Improvement in Factory Leadership
Engaging Teams in Lean and 5S Initiatives
When it comes to implementing initiatives like 5S and Lean, which are crucial for continuous improvement, getting consistent engagement and empowerment has been a struggle. Jon believes there’s no end game to these principles; they require continuous work and adaptation. The key to success is getting every team member involved in the planning, training, and setup of their workstations. Leaders must create an environment where every teammate feels safe to speak up. It’s easy to design initiatives in a boardroom, but the real challenge is ensuring everyone is involved in the planning, gathering feedback and input from every teammate, and crucially, following up on what they say. This prevents initiatives from feeling like a surprise mandated for compliance. While involving everyone can feel frustratingly slow, it ultimately helps initiatives gain traction and succeed.
Empowering Teams and Avoiding Micromanagement
“I think it is so important to reward the try and not necessarily the success of a project, but the effort.”
The dream in manufacturing is to achieve true empowerment and accountability, moving away from leaders at higher levels constantly solving lower-level problems or micromanaging. Jon’s core belief for fostering empowerment is to reward the effort and attempt, not just the successful outcome. Making this effort visible to others encourages more such attempts. Even failures provide valuable learning opportunities, and focusing on the effort will eventually lead to success.
There’s a key distinction between appreciation and recognition. Recognition typically focuses on the outcome or a “win”. Appreciation, however, focuses on what people contributed to the effort, regardless of the outcome. It acknowledges positive expectations and contributions, fostering a belief that continued effort will lead to future success. So, for leaders, especially those with micromanagement tendencies, it’s vital to understand that not every day is a win. The focus should be on relentlessly doing the right things and celebrating the tries.
Navigating Multi-Generational Workforces in Operational Performance
The Somerset factory, like many others, has a wide range of ages in its workforce. A significant area of focus and occasional struggle has been effective communication across generations, as different age groups appreciate different communication methods. To address this, Hendrickson employs a multi-faceted approach:
- In-person monthly communication meetings.
- Monthly mailers.
- A text-out group for sending messages to phones.
Surveys indicate communication is often a source of frustration for employees, highlighting the importance of continually improving in this area. Regardless of generation, people want to be successful and add value.
At the Somerset plant, every station has what they call a “Realistic Expectation” (RE). This is determined by a time study over multiple shifts and operators to find an average. Employees are expected to achieve 85% of what’s possible for their station’s RE. This clear benchmark helps everyone understand what “winning looks like” and fosters a healthy sense of achievement and pride in their work. While people are competitive, the focus should be on individual achievement and striving to do better against one’s own benchmarks or the realistic expectation, rather than purely competing against others. Jon loves to see people go home happy with what they completed, having that pride in what they did.
Key Takeaways for Aspiring Leaders in Manufacturing Leadership
“My job is no longer necessarily always to do. It’s to either create an environment that is friendly for somebody else to do or assist them and get the resources they need.”
The shift from “doing” to “enabling” was a crucial learning for Jon, transitioning from operations, understanding that his job is no longer to do the work directly. Instead, it’s about creating an environment that allows others to do their best work and providing the necessary resources. This approach aligns with the concept of servant leadership, where the leader’s primary role is to serve their team. Plant manager leadership is an ongoing journey of learning, adapting, and striving for improvement, both personally and for the organization. By focusing on communication, clear expectations, team empowerment, and a supportive culture, leaders can build highly effective teams that achieve sustained operational performance and foster a sense of pride and accomplishment among employees.
Empowering the Future of Operational Performance
Jon’s journey and the successes at Hendrickson’s Somerset plant offer a compelling blueprint for effective plant manager leadership. From nurturing talent and building a supportive culture to strategically tackling challenges like talent shortages and implementing continuous improvement, his insights underscore the importance of people-centric leadership in achieving accelerated operational performance. By focusing on open communication, empowering teams, and celebrating effort, leaders can create environments where every individual feels valued, motivated, and capable of contributing to collective success.
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