Supervisory Skills & Competencies

The morning started at Thermal Ceramics with what was intended to be the inaurgural Senior Manager focused SIG in region in order to give the opportunity for more people in manufacturing facilities the chance to learn from each other.  The focus for this session was to review the programs and strategies that we have in place regarding the Supervisors and we were able to shoe horn 25 EMC members for this discussion.

As manufacturers continue along the path toward world class quality, there is an increased need to wean from the top down approach and rely more on the middle managers to take the lead and inspire greatness from the production floor.   This can come with its own challenges if those leaders do not have that instinctive ability or the skills to fulfill the needs of senior management. We know that some people are good at teaching while others are better at doing; the challenge is to bridge the gap of friendship on the shop floor with tough decisions to support management. In this session, we will discuss how you have been successful and what tools your managers have employed to succeed as well we will roundtable strategies on how to choose the right people and better enable those with supervisory roles to succeed.  

It was great to see how this consortium has evolved over the past couple of years.  Even though this was intended to bring Senior Managers together to discuss their successes and challenges what what neat to see is that many of the "senior managers" brought along their team leaders/lead hands so that could offer their perspective of needs in order to succeed. As mentioned, the conversation that resulted from throwing the topic 'on the table' was electric! 

We started off by listing perceived and real challenges that supervisors can face during their daily activities, such as:

• automation & the future
• communication
• culture change
• transition from co-worker to leader
• accountability/problem solving
• union vs non-union
• work ethic (generational)
• conflict resolution
• job specific criteria for supervisors/training
• consistency among leaders
• balancing resources/compliance
• growth organizational/personal
• time management
• promoting from within vs outside (profiling)
• hazard recognition/due diligence
• proper delegating

We then started to tackle this list and as you can imagine a 2 hour SIG session just barely tapped into it.  Areas that we had a chance to focus on were: Communication, Training and Profiling

Some best practices rose up for each of the discussions:

Communication

Training 

Profiling 

Other strategies that came up were to have effective systems in place so that new and current supervisors have something to fall back to when challenge with a decision; importance of self-management; transparency; ability to be able to offer a quick resolution.

This SIG barely scratched the surface and as a group we are committed to continuing this conversation at future SIGs so that we can continue to tackle other challenges indicated above.  The group wants to explore an opportunity for a full day facilitated discussion on this so that more can be accomplished.  It was agreed by all that a great deal of value gain be gained by learning from each other when compared to a full day of formal training.

As we do with every EMC SIG we closed off the event with a tour of Thermal Ceramics and learned how Lean has been a catalyst to a successful and efficient facility.  Thanks to Matt McKinney for hosting and bringing the group up to speed on the organization.

 If you would like more details about the discussion that took place, please do not hesitate to contact me. 

Investigating Workplace Accidents - How prepared are you?

This session was geared to all members of your JHSC, management and worker reps. 

The goals of safety professionals include the effective identification, assessment and control of hazards, and above all the prevention of injuries.  A serious accident is perhaps the most traumatic event that can take place at any workplace.  When these unfortunate events occur it becomes our role to conduct a comprehensive investigation, determine the root causes and develop methods to prevent a recurrence.  This session outlined the steps to be taken following a critical incident to control the immediate risk, comply with legislated requirements, and conduct a thorough investigation. 

We were fortunate to have Yvonne O'Reilly available to lead 14 folks that were interested in benchmarking how effective their investigation of an accident is through this workshop.  Areas that were discussed:

• incident response plan
• reporting requirements
• investigation kits - what is in yours and what you might consider adding
• scene management
• investigation techniques
• conducting the investigation
• incident response plan summary

The presentation and work sheets can be accessed by going to the Burlington/Oakville/Milton consortium page and look under presentations or click here.

In order to give some perspective on why this should be an important part of your JHSC discussion, please refer to what the WSIB has to say about Accident Investigations.

The takeaway from this event was a better understanding of the need to review all aspects of why and how an accident happened so that you can prevent future instances. 

the importance of creating an Incident Response Plan is that it:

•  assists in dealing with immediate medical and safety concerns
• provides guidelines for addressing legal consequences
• ensures consistent communication
• prevents recurrences
• captures near misses

If you would like more information on the discussions from this event please contact me and I will be happy to fill in the gaps.

Yours in networking,

Tim