A promotion’s promise and pitfalls

I know many supervisors, planners, estimators, engineers, managers and owners who began their careers on the shop floor and came up through the ranks. This is great! It shows manufacturing is alive and well in the U.S., even though the industry can be a roller coaster ride. Those ups and downs have always occurred. It’s a cycle that will never change. Some people, on the other hand, do change once promoted.

I have watched various promoted individuals over the years. Some have succeeded; others crashed and burned or at least had to adapt instead of becoming a promotion casualty. Concerning the latter, I knew an engineer who was hired at a company where I worked. He dove into his new position with resolve after being told there were opportunities for improvement.

Unfortunately, within a couple of weeks, he alienated many in the shop. How did he accomplish this? He forgot to treat others like he would have liked to have been treated when he was in their shoes. Instead, he came on like gangbusters, saying everything they were doing was wrong! They were using the wrong tooling, setting up improperly, incorporating poor machining practices–the list went on. He knew better and was going to cure all the company’s problems overnight. After all, he was the new engineer and was going to make a name for himself.

He also didn’t want to hear suggestions from the managers he interacted with, which posed a problem.

Eventually, he realized he was doing something wrong. He had to backpedal and attempt to repair some of the damage he had done. He listened to people and became open to suggestions. The shop people, in turn, became more receptive to some of his ideas and implemented additional improvements on their own. He finally realized the big gains were not going to happen overnight and a series of little ones wind up making a big overall improvement.

I don’t begrudge him his mistakes. We all have made similar mistakes at one time or another.