What Is a Reliability Professional?

An ideal reliability professional has a variety of attributes: a lifetime of real-world experience, a master or journeyman’s license, trade certifications, professional licenses, and a professional reputation for success.

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The work experiences that enable them to develop and lead a reliability team include stints as a combination of the following: maintenance person, planner, supervisor, reliability engineer, and maintenance or?reliability manager, depending on the level of their position.

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In addition to this practical, real-world experience, they possess an advanced education with finance, development, change, and leadership concentrations.

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A Navy SEAL friend of mine used to say that “they don’t bring SEALS in to negotiate, they don’t bring them in to be fair, they don’t bring them in for any other reason but to win. It’s not a self-help group – they are there to take over and tilt the odds back in favor of America.”

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Now I am not equating a reliability professional with a Navy SEAL, but there are similarities in the philosophy. Reliability professionals do not negotiate; they are not fair; they take over and win. In the case of?reliability, this unfolds as a dogged effort to transform an organization from production-centric to productivity-centric.

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Production cannot and will not happen without reliability. It takes a hard-charging reliability professional to move this needle. These professionals operate and dwell in the space between reality and fantasy.

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The reality is that most organizations do not value maintenance but want reliability. When a true reliability professional leads an organization down the path to reliability, some might think it is a fantasy, but it is only a fantasy if the reliability leaders are engineers or consultants not qualified by experience to lead the efforts.

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Job Description

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The first step in finding a real-world true reliability leader is to write a good job description. Specify the qualifications the organization is looking for. I have reviewed thousands of job offerings from all industries searching for a?Maintenance Manager.

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These offerings list having a mechanical or electrical engineering degree as their first qualification. This tells me that the organization does not understand or value reliability and does not have a robust reliability approach. They feel that a four-year degree qualifies an individual for the position when the reality is that it qualifies them for nothing.

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The first and most important qualification for any reliability leader is to have, especially the Reliability Manager, a journeyman-level skilled trade. I have found that an electrical or mechanical emphasis is relevant here. It is absolutely a requirement for a reliability leader to have done maintenance. Without this crucial experience, they will never truly understand how to lead the team.

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Identifying a Reliability Professional

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To identify a reliability professional, all you must do is ask them, “How exactly do you go from run-to-failure to proactive reliability?” It is important that the senior leader conducting the interview be a qualified reliability professional who will know if the answers are correct.

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Prospective reliability professionals should be able to explain the detailed steps necessary to achieve the results. They can give examples of hands-on, real-world experience doing these efforts, not regurgitating something they read or a course they took.

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They can assess an organization’s level of reliability leadership by determining if they have a mature maintenance and reliability program. Does their?CMMS?work? Is their?maintenance,?repairs,?and?operations?(MRO) functional?

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Do they have a work management process in place and a reliability-focused?proactive approach?(programs addressing lubrication, contamination, and improper installation)?

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Companies that entrust their new efforts to the same individuals without the qualifications repeat the same failed approaches repeatedly. The fact is, despite many excuses, if the tenured staff had the necessary reliability skills, the organization would have reliable operations.

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When I hear company leaders say that “it is not necessary to have done maintenance to lead it,” I know they do not understand or value maintenance and reliability. No one can lead maintenance and reliability unless they have done it.

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Create

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You do not gain a competitive advantage by copying others. True leaders create and do not need to copy. Each organization is its entity, and you cannot copy your way to success. Reliability leadership needs people who can create on their feet using years of experience and education.

The respect of the reliability personnel is necessary, which comes from shared experience of doing the jobs you are asking them to do. Reliability is not a theory but the result of having held each maintenance and reliability position and the ability to train and develop the personnel needed to drive success.

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The organization of the reliability department is critical to its success. The most important aspect of this organization is that the Maintenance or Reliability Manager must report directly to the General/Plant Manager.

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Any other iteration does not provide a strong enough structure for an organization to truly realize the competitive advantage that a robust reliability department can provide.

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The structure of the department is essential to a strong reliability organization. The minimum structure must include three branches: planning, execution, and reliability. There is more to this structure than just having it.

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The branches must focus on their responsibility. If the department cannot focus the branches to concentrate on their duties, the results will be mediocre. The current trend in business is for everyone to do everything, and this failed approach leads to nothing being accomplished. If everyone is responsible for the results, then no one is.

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Reliability Leaders

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Are leaders in reliability a good idea? This is like Mahatma Gandhi’s answer when asked what he thought of Western civilization. He replied that he felt it was a good idea. This is the same thought I have when considering management in reliability.

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In my experience, reliability leaders are regularly promoted because they are good technicians. I often refer to this as the wave of a “magic wand.” The ability to turn a technician into a leader in this manner is beyond me.

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How can you transform someone who has never had a leadership job into a leader? The senior managers who make these decisions believe it can be done without a?job description, coaching, or development.

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This transformation occurs at quitting time on Friday, and the person returns on Monday as a leader. This “magic wand” must be the most fantastic tool available.

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Other examples of these magically born leaders are young engineers placed in supervisory positions or senior engineers selected as reliability managers. I want to share my thoughts on leadership in reliability, especially for those who have encountered the “wand.”

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The Role of a Reliability Leader

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The next part of reliability leadership is recognizing the role of a leader. Many people think that a leader's role is to tell others what to do while others believe it is to motivate and encourage people. I think this is misguided.

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The role of a reliability leader is to get others to follow them. As I said earlier in this book, a title does not make you a leader – having followers does. Following is a voluntary act, so you must inspire people to want to follow.

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You cannot lead from an office; leading is accomplished by encouragement, motivation, group discussion, and much more, with the goal of achieving the company’s objectives. We will discuss what is required to develop these transformation abilities in people. These objectives must be well defined to ensure the leader is aligned with the company objectives.

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Followers

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How do reliability leaders get the reliability team to follow them? This is an art that few master, but can be improved upon. In my experience, a journeyman-skilled reliability team will only follow a leader with journeyman-level skills.

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Again, some of you might think that your team follows you and that you do not have a skilled trades background. This tells me you do not have a team comprised of journeymen.

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Leaders must set up roles and responsibilities for planners and others involved in the?planning and scheduling process to ensure the process is followed.

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These people need to work with operations, engineering, and stores to agree upon work priorities, schedule cutoff times, and identify critical equipment, spares, and much more. Your chance of getting people to follow you drastically increases if the enablers are instituted plant-wide.

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Setting the Example

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A leader must realize that people do what they see being done, not what they are told to do. It is critical to “walk the walk” by sticking to your plans and following up on what you say. To go back to what I said earlier about what constitutes a reliability professional, to “walk the walk,” you must have done the work.

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The “magic wand” will never replace hands-on experience and the necessary skills to deliver results through authentic leadership. Leadership must be measurable with proven measurement tools by a proven, qualified, authentic, and transformational leader. Leadership is a journeyman-level hard skill that can be developed, benchmarked, and measured. This is factual, not an exercise in smoke and mirrors.

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If you are a leader who shows up to meetings late, you will find it difficult to instill good scheduling practices in your team. Leaders should not expect quality work if they constantly ask for results in last-minute and unreasonable time frames.

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A leader should not expect quality results if their team members are not adequately trained, lack the financial resources to effect quality repair, or are not given enough time to complete the tasks and no standards or expectations have been communicated.

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True Leader

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A true reliability leader makes sure that all improvements have substance to them by ensuring a solid plan with costs and benefits considered before rolling it out to the organization. All too often, plants sign up for a project of the month, only to replace it with a new project every few months.

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Hiring any of the 96% of unqualified consultants to lead your reliability efforts is an example of a project of the month. Most consultants contort the assessments they do to meet their offerings and needs. When you decide to use a consultant, it should be limited to a strategic, very focused task or tasks, and never a one-size-fits-all broad-stroke “model.”

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While visiting a plant a few years ago, I mentioned that reliability improvements should continue forever. It is a continuous process. A tradesperson in the audience said, “In this plant, forever is six weeks, and the yield for reliability enhancements in six weeks will most likely be honestly small.”

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I was trying to understand what he meant by his statement. He further explained, “Every time we start improvement efforts that are announced to last forever, the average life of a new initiative here is about six weeks.

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Therefore, forever here means six weeks.” Even though he was partly joking, he was right about the plant’s history.

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The Gap

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Someone once told me, “There is a small gap between inexperience and knowledge. There is an enormous canyon, however, between knowing and doing.” This resonated with me because it is precisely the same difference between most consultants and a reliability professional.

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A consultant is all about knowing the theory, and a reliability professional is all about knowing?how to do it. It applies here because a reliability professional knows how to build the bridge over this canyon and get lasting results because they have done it.

As a reliability professional, you know what to do. You know why you should do it. And more importantly, you know how to do it. Most people don’t change as individuals or in how they run a reliability program.

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The problem is that most improvement efforts assume that all you need to do is explain to the team that things will be better and then tell them to do it. Do you think that would work in real life?

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For example, people are told, “Smoking and excessive drinking are really bad for you.” “Oh, well then, everyone will quit right away.” If this were that easy, we would have no smokers, alcoholics, drug addicts, over-drafted credit cards or gamblers.

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I have spent my life developing people in scheduling, planning,?root cause analysis, proactive reliability, and storeroom management.

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A request for consulting and development has always been a pleasant part of my professional life. Still, I must ask any potential client, “What is your development plan once my work is complete?” Sadly, the answer usually is nothing. They expect that the development or consulting is the permanent fix to their issues. They believe that by training people to perform root cause analysis, they will solve all the plant’s woes.

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By consulting on reliability, their team will suddenly be able to lead the implementation of a reliability strategy. Training is the number one reason development fails. If you plan to train your way to reliability, you should save the money. All you will do is pay for the next flavor of the month.

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Awareness training is one of the first steps, but you must remember the desired results. Execution is the key, not knowledge itself. True reliability professionals know how to execute where others, sadly the growing majority, do not have a clue.

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Every day organizations are setting up engineers and production employees for failure by placing them in leadership positions in reliability. Leadership in these areas is not something you can learn in a book, classroom, or seminar.

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It requires years of hands-on experience and development with “boots on the ground.” Most organizations are looking for a quick fix, and if that is the objective, you are better off saving your money. You cannot copy or cheat your way to reliability; you must do the work.

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How to Motivate Reliability People

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Do you believe there should be a different strategy to motivate your reliability team than you use to encourage other plant personnel? My answer is no. A good thing to remember is that people are people, whether they have funny nicknames taped to their hats, are salaried, or are union members. The main question at many plants is how to motivate people.

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A cheap hat or pizza lunch has never inspired anyone to do a better job. The top prize in un-motivating motivation goes to an organization a friend of mine worked for. During Christmas, all the employees were given Lifesavers candy with a note saying, “You are a lifesaver.” How is that motivation? The organization was a hospital, but it did not achieve its intended results.

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How do leaders motivate their people? The first thing you must realize is that there are a few people who can inspire people en masse through a speech. With the exceptions of Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela, leaders must rely on motivating their employees one-on-one.

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True leaders need to take time to listen, challenge approaches, and discuss ideas with each direct report. For most people, pride in their jobs is an incentive. Leaders should provide honest feedback to their employees using skillful diplomacy.

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The leader must have the employee’s respect for the recognition to have merit. To accomplish this, the leader needs to have earned it.

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