One of the things I love about working at The Margin Builders is watching people grow.

Like the pipe operator whose idea drove $40 million more throughput of steel pipe. Or the rig manager who told his team he had to get better — and then they posted the best safety record in the fleet. Or the construction worker turned manufacturing operations manager who helped his team improve margins by 12% by unleashing a string of small process changes. In every one of those cases, the idea was already locked in an employee's head, just waiting to get out.

Even in my own shop, the first time I gave my welding team their performance numbers, I thought they'd kill me. Instead, they took those numbers and — now that they knew the score — doubled their performance. And instead of killing me, they started coming to me with, "What do you think about this?"

So I'll say it plainly: the talent is always on the floor.

Most owners I talk to are quietly convinced their next margin point is locked up in someone they haven't hired yet. The right operations manager. A better estimator. A foreman who "gets it." So they wait — for the budget, for the posting to fill, for the market to loosen up — and in the meantime the shop runs at the level it ran last year.

Here's the thing they're missing: the person who could solve their throughput problem is often already on the payroll. They're just standing one rung below where anyone's looking.

I think about a small-market basketball coach who spent close to 25 years coaching in gyms with empty bleachers before anyone gave him a real shot. When it came, he took a 16-seed and beat a 1-seed in one of the biggest upsets the sport has seen. The talent was always there. The spotlight just hadn't found it yet.

Your shop is full of people like that. The question is whether you've built a place where they can be seen — or whether they're going to keep their best ideas to themselves until they leave for a competitor who asks better questions.

For years, the standard answer to a capability gap was simple: go hire it. Post the role, pay the market rate, bring in the person who's already done it somewhere else. That playbook worked when there was a deep bench of experienced operators to pull from.

That world is gone. The skilled-trades and experienced-operator pool in western Canada has thinned out — the people who built their careers through the last few decades are retiring faster than they're being replaced, and the ones who remain have their pick of employers. The perfect outside hire you're waiting for is either not coming, or is going to cost you far more and take far longer than your plan assumes.

So the leverage has moved. It's shifted away from acquiring talent on the open market and toward developing the talent already clocked in on your floor. The owners who'll widen their margins over the next five years aren't the ones with the best recruiters. They're the ones who got the most out of the people they already had — because that's now the only supply they fully control.

That's a genuine shift, and most operating playbooks haven't caught up to it yet.

So how do you keep the faith — and keep funding it — when developing your own people pays off on a delay, and the easier-feeling option of "just hire someone" keeps tempting you back?

Empowered teams aren't a personality trait you either have or don't. They're the output of a system you build deliberately and protect through the slow stretch. Here's the system, and how to push it down to the people running your floor day to day.

1. Go looking for talent below the spotlight. Stop scanning the org chart for the obvious stars and start watching for the quiet workarounds. The person who's already fixed a problem informally — re-sequencing a job, jury-rigging a fixture, covering a gap nobody assigned them — is showing you exactly where your hidden capability lives. Make a standing habit of asking one floor-level person each week: "What's something you do that makes your job easier that nobody told you to do?" That question alone surfaces more usable process improvement than most consultants do.

Push it down: Tell your supervisors their job isn't to have all the answers — it's to find out who on their crew already does.

2. Give people the score. My welding team didn't double their performance because I motivated them. They did it because, for the first time, they could see the number they were being measured against — and people who can see the score start playing the game differently. Show your floor the metrics that matter to their work: throughput, scrap, on-time, safety. The instinct is to hide the numbers because you're afraid of the reaction. The reaction is almost always the opposite of what you fear.

Push it down: Coach your supervisors to post the crew's numbers where the crew can see them — not as a stick, but as a scoreboard.

3. Give a real decision, not a fake one. Empowerment dies the moment people learn their "ownership" gets overruled the second it's inconvenient. Pick one genuine decision a person can own end-to-end — how a cell is laid out, how a job gets scheduled, which vendor to call first — and then actually live with their call, even when you'd have done it differently. The cost of one suboptimal decision is almost always smaller than the cost of teaching your best people that their judgment doesn't count.

Push it down: Coach your foremen to delegate the decision, not just the task. "You figure out the sequence" beats "do it in this order" every time.

4. Make the slow payoff visible so you don't lose your nerve. This is the discipline that separates owners who stay the course from owners who snap back to control. You can't see culture, but you can see its leading indicators. Pick two or three you can track now — near-misses reported, ideas raised in the toolbox talk, rework caught before it left the cell, voluntary turnover — and watch those while you wait for the lagging financial numbers. When the P&L is flat but reported near-misses are climbing, that's not nothing. That's the early signal that your investment is working. Faith is a lot easier to hold when you've got a number telling you the foundation is moving even if the roof hasn't.

5. Protect the people who speak up — visibly. The first time someone surfaces a problem and gets blamed for it, every other set of eyes on your floor closes. The single highest-leverage thing you can do for an empowered culture is to make the first few acts of candour pay off publicly. Someone flags a quality issue that costs you a day? Thank them by name in front of the crew. You're not rewarding the problem — you're rewarding the fact that it surfaced while it was still cheap to fix.

Push it down: The fastest way to know if a supervisor is building or killing your culture is to ask their crew, "What happens here when someone raises a problem?" The answer is your culture, in one sentence.

6. Keep pouring into the floor you have, not the one you're waiting for. That coach's upset wasn't built in the tournament. It was built years earlier, in empty gyms, by pouring everything into the team in front of him instead of pining for a better one. Your version of that is the team clocked in right now. The owner who develops the people he has — rather than waiting for the perfect hire who may never come — is the one who's quietly building the capability that shows up as margin two quarters from now.

The talent is already on your floor. Your job as the leader isn't to go find better people. It's to build the conditions that let the people you already have show you what they're capable of — and to hold your faith steady through the lag, because that's exactly where most of your competitors give up.

The Margin Builders helps Alberta industrial SMEs turn operational discipline into measurable EBITDA improvement. If you've got talent on your floor you suspect you're not getting full value from, that's exactly the kind of thing a Margin Audit surfaces.

Ready to Find Your Margin?

Walk through any industrial shop floor in Alberta and you'll find the same thing: a welder, a fabricator, a foreman, an operator — people who have spent years, sometimes decades, doing the work with their hands. They know the job. They know where it bogs down. They know what would make it faster, safer, or cheaper.

Most owners and operators don't ask them.

We assume the best ideas come from the top — from the office, the consultant, the leadership team. We assume the guy on the floor is there to execute, not to think. So we plan, we direct, we optimize from a distance — and we leave the most valuable intelligence in the building sitting in a hard hat we never engaged with.

W. Edwards Deming spent his career making the same point: people come to work wanting to do a good job. The system around them is usually what gets in the way. And the people closest to the system are the ones who can see it most clearly.

So why don't we ask them?

Years ago I was a young foreman on a roofing crew. I'd hired a kid — let's call him Ben. Hard worker, on time every day, always moving. Back then, that was my whole scorecard.

Ben's job was to tear off old roofing and throw it over the edge into the bin below. Heavy, repetitive, and — though I didn't think about it at the time — not particularly safe. One day he came up to me and said, "What if we built a chute? Guide the material straight into the bin."

My first thought was: Why didn't I think of that?

I told him to go ahead. He built it in under an hour. It saved us hours a day for the rest of the project. It was safer — nobody standing at the edge of the roof anymore. And here's the part I've never forgotten: Ben didn't ask for a raise. He didn't ask for credit. He just wanted to help, and helping made him feel good. Which made the whole crew feel good.

From that day forward, I made a rule for myself: I always ask.

It reminds me of a story I came across recently — Tobin Anderson, a college basketball coach who spent 25 years in tiny gyms at the Division II and III level before finally getting his shot at Division I. In his first tournament he knocked off a #1 seed in one of the greatest upsets in NCAA history. The lesson everyone took away was about persistence. But there's another one buried in it: talent isn't where you think it is. The brightest people aren't always under the brightest lights. Sometimes they're on the bench of a 200-seat gym. Sometimes they're on the back of a Harley with a welding hood in the truck.

The leaders I respect most all share one habit: they seek advice from the people closest to the work. Not as a performance. Not as an engagement exercise. As a discipline. Because they know that's where the real intelligence in the business lives.

If you want to build this into how you run, three things to try this week:

1. Pick one person on your floor and ask them one question. Not "how's it going?" — that gets you nothing. Try: "If you could change one thing about how we do [specific task], what would it be?" Then shut up and listen.
2. When someone gives you an idea, let them own it. Don't take it, polish it, and present it back as yours. Put them in charge of trying it. Ben building his own chute is what made it work — and what made him want to bring the next idea.
3. Do it again next week. And the week after. One conversation is a gesture. A habit is a culture. The people on your floor will know the difference within a month.

Think about that math for a second. One new idea a week is over 50 a year. Even if only a quarter of them stick, that's a dozen improvements to safety, throughput, scrap, downtime, or process. How much margin would that put back on your P&L?

You are still the boss. You can still say no. But every time you ask, you give yourself a chance to see the business through a set of eyes that's closer to the work than yours will ever be.

That's not weakness. That's leverage.

One next step: Pick the person on your team you'd be least likely to ask for advice. Ask them anyway, this week. Tell me what happens.

Further Reading & References

On Deming's philosophy of the worker and the system

• W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (MIT Press, 1982). The foundational text. Deming's argument that "a bad system will beat a good person every time" — and that the system that people work in may account for 90 to 95 percent of performance — is the intellectual backbone of this article. Dense but worth it for any operator. InspiringQuotes.usInspiringQuotes.us
• W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (MIT Press, 1993). A more accessible companion. Deming's "System of Profound Knowledge" framework is especially useful if you've ever felt your team had ideas but couldn't get them implemented.
• The Deming Institute — deming.org. Free articles, podcasts, and case studies on the 14 Points and the System of Profound Knowledge. A useful primer if you don't want to commit to a 500-page book.

On the Tobin Anderson story

• Anderson spent years coaching at the Division II and III levels, most recently leading St. Thomas Aquinas to seven straight Division II NCAA Tournaments before getting his first Division I job at Fairleigh Dickinson. In March 2023 the Knights — the shortest of the 363 Division I teams in the country — knocked off top-seeded Purdue 63-58 to become just the second No. 16 seed in history to win a March Madness game. Coverage in ESPN, CBS Sports, and CNN from March 17–18, 2023 if you want the full story. CBS SportsESPN

On talent, ideas, and frontline contribution

• Daniel Pink, Drive (Riverhead Books, 2009). Pink's autonomy/mastery/purpose framework is the modern-day complement to Deming. Useful for understanding why Ben built the chute without being asked to and didn't want a raise for it.
• Edgar Schein, Humble Inquiry (Berrett-Koehler, 2013). A short, practical book on the discipline of asking instead of telling. Directly applicable to the "shut up and listen" advice in this article.
• Toyota Production System / Kaizen literature. The "one idea a week" math at the end of this article isn't theoretical — it's the operating principle behind Toyota's continuous improvement system, which generates roughly one implemented suggestion per employee per month at scale.

You've probably been through this before.

A firm shows up with a deck. Nice logo. Confident associate. They present a methodology — lean, six sigma, operational excellence, whatever the current label is. Six weeks and $60,000 later, you have a binder. The binder goes on a shelf. Your margin keeps sliding.

The problem wasn't the binder. The problem was that the consultant showed up already knowing the answer. They had a framework before they had a conversation. They fit your business to their theory, presented to your leadership team, and left.

Your foreman — the one who's been running the press brake for 22 years and could tell you exactly where throughput dies on second shift — was never asked. Or they were asked, and what they said didn't fit the framework, so it got filtered out.

This isn't a consulting problem. It's a posture problem.

Chris Hoff, a therapist who writes at Liminal Lab, draws a distinction that translates almost perfectly to our world. He contrasts two stances a practitioner can take: the Expert and the Guide.

The Expert claims portable, universal solutions. They arrive with a methodology and design outcomes. The work is something they perform on the client.

The Guide knows their experience is real but not portable. What worked in the last shop might not work in yours. They hold their methods loosely enough to learn from the business in front of them, and they design conditions and invitations rather than prescribing a destination.

Hoff is writing about therapy. But read it again with a fab shop in mind, or a 60-person construction company, or your O&G service outfit, and tell me it doesn't describe every consulting engagement you've ever been part of.

The Expert shows up with the answer. The Guide shows up with the questions.

Here's why that matters for margin.

In a $5M–$100M industrial business, the answer is already in the building. The welder knows why the fixture is costing them 11 minutes a job. The controller knows which customer's payment terms are quietly bleeding working capital. The foreman knows which scheduler is afraid to push back on sales. None of this is hidden. It's just unspoken — because nobody with authority has asked the right question, or because the last person who asked didn't actually want the answer.

The Expert can't surface this. The Expert's framework filters it out. If the welder's answer doesn't match the lean template, the template wins and the welder shuts up. Permanently.

The Guide's job is the opposite. The Guide builds the conditions where the welder finally says the thing they've been thinking for three years — and gets heard long enough that the fixture actually gets fixed.

This is the mindset shift: the consultant's job is not to know. It's to hear.

That doesn't mean showing up empty. A good guide shows up with sharp questions, operational fluency, and enough pattern recognition to know which thread to pull. But the answer isn't theirs to import. The answer is already standing on your shop floor, in steel-toed boots, waiting to be asked.

I learned this the hard way at U-Flow.

When I started U-Flow Inc. — a specialty flat-roof drain manufacturer — I had read the books. I had the frameworks. I knew what ISO 9001 was supposed to look like on paper. And for about the first year, I tried to run the shop that way: import the system, train the team to comply, measure against the template.

It didn't work. Not because the team wasn't capable. Because the system I was importing didn't know anything about the actual work.

The turn came when I stopped trying to install a quality system and started watching where the same mistakes kept happening. A particular weld kept failing inspection. A specific assembly step kept getting skipped on rush orders. A drawing revision was getting missed somewhere between engineering and the floor.

So I asked the people doing the work. Not in a meeting. On the floor. Why does this keep happening? What would actually stop it?

The answers weren't in any textbook. One person needed a different jig. Another needed the drawing revision printed in a different colour so it was obvious at a glance which version was current. The skipped assembly step was happening because the standard work instruction was wrong — the actual best sequence was different from what the document said, and everyone on the floor knew it except the document.

The ISO 9001 system that eventually got certified wasn't the one I imported. It was the one the team helped build. The procedures were written in their language. The controls addressed the failures they had actually seen. The training stuck because they had written it.

That's the difference between the Expert stance and the Guide stance, made concrete.

The Expert version would have been a binder full of generic procedures, a certification audit we barely passed, and a quality system that everyone resented and quietly worked around. I've seen that version in plenty of shops since. It's the default outcome when someone imports a framework instead of drawing one out.

The Guide version was a quality system the team owned. It survived me leaving. It got better after I left, because the people who built it kept refining it. That's the test — not whether the system works while the consultant is in the building, but whether it survives them walking out the door.

If your last consulting engagement didn't survive the consultant leaving, you didn't have a Guide. You had an Expert. And the binder is on the shelf to prove it.

So what does this actually look like when you hire it?

The Margin Audit isn't a diagnostic I perform on your business. It's a structured way for you and your team to see what you're already standing on.

I sit in on the morning huddle. I walk the floor with your foreman — not with a clipboard, with questions. I read the variance report with your controller, not at them. I ask your scheduler what they've been trying to tell sales for the last six months that nobody's heard. I ask your shop lead which customer's jobs they dread seeing on the board, and why.

None of that requires my framework. It requires my attention.

The findings that come out of a Margin Audit aren't mine. They're yours, surfaced. My job is to ask sharply enough, listen long enough, and pattern-match across enough industrial businesses that the things your team already knows but has stopped saying out loud finally get said — and get connected to the margin number on your P&L.

That's why the work sticks after I leave. Because it was never mine to take with me.

If you've been burned by a consultant who already knew the answer, the question worth asking isn't which framework should I try next.

It's: who's actually willing to listen to the people running my floor?

If that question lands, reply to this email or book a call. The Margin Audit takes about three weeks and is priced against the EBITDA gain, not the hours. The first conversation is free and is mostly me asking what you've already tried.

Ready to Find Your Margin?

Philip Uglow is the founder of The Margin Builders. Better Leadership. Better Operations. Better Margins.

References and further reading

The source for this piece:

Hoff, Chris. Ways of Seeing #6: Ethical Reflexivity. Liminal Lab, Substack. chrishoff.substack.com/p/ways-of-seeing-6-ethical-reflexivity

Hoff is a therapist and the founder of California Family Institute. The Expert/Guide distinction I borrow here comes from his sixth essay in the Ways of Seeing series. He's writing about clinical practice, but the frame translates almost without modification to consulting work in industrial businesses.

If you want to go further:

Schein, Edgar H. Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. Berrett-Koehler, 2013 (3rd edition 2021 with Peter A. Schein). The closest operational cousin to what I'm describing. Schein — a fifty-year fixture at MIT Sloan and one of the most respected voices on organizational culture — defines humble inquiry as "the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer." Short book. Worth a Saturday morning.

Schön, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books, 1983. The foundational critique of what Schön calls "Technical Rationality" — the assumption that professional work is just applying universal theory to defined problems. Schön argues the best practitioners in any field rely less on imported frameworks than on improvisation, situational reading, and reflection in the middle of the work. Older book, denser read, but the arguments hold up.

Liker, Jeffrey K. The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer. McGraw-Hill, 2004. Principle 12 is genchi genbutsu — "go and see for yourself." Toyota's stance is that you cannot understand a problem from a desk, a report, or a deck. You have to be on the floor where the work happens. The same principle, in industrial language your team will recognize.

The question I keep getting

Every few weeks, someone asks me a version of the same question:

"What's the difference between coaching and therapy?"

It usually comes from an owner or plant manager who's trying to figure out what to do with a struggling employee — or, just as often, trying to figure out whether they themselves need a coach, a therapist, or just a long weekend.

It's a fair question. And the answer matters more than most people realize, because in a 25-to-100-person shop, you wear both hats whether you signed up for them or not. You coach your supervisors on Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, somebody's in your office because their marriage is falling apart and the hydraulic press is down and they can't think straight. Same person, same office, two completely different conversations.

If you don't know which one you're in, you'll do harm in both.

The simplest distinction that's ever held up for me

I don't remember where I first heard it, but it stuck:

Coaching looks forward. Therapy looks back.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

Neither is better. They're different tools for different problems.

Coaching is for someone who wants to get somewhere they aren't yet. A coach uses models — GROW, "Back to the Future," structured listening — to help the other person see what they want and build a path to get there. The mentee decides the destination. The coach helps them find the route.

Therapy is for someone whose past is sitting on top of their present. Trauma. Loss. Events that already happened and can't be undone. A coach can't fix that. We're not trained for it, and pretending otherwise is how good intentions turn into real damage. Therapists have tools — clinical, evidence-based, regulated — for helping people deal with what was.

Past events can't be changed. But they have to be dealt with. That's therapy's job, not yours.

The complication: you're going to misdiagnose this

Here's where it gets uncomfortable for owner-operators.

When a long-tenured employee starts missing deliveries, snapping at the apprentice, and showing up late — your instinct is to coach. Set a goal. Build a plan. Hold them accountable.

But what if the issue isn't forward? What if their kid just got diagnosed with something serious, or they're six months into a divorce they haven't told anyone about, or they came back from a deployment ten years ago and never really came back?

You can run the cleanest GROW conversation in the world and it won't touch any of that. Worse — you'll frustrate them, frustrate yourself, and conclude they're "not coachable" when the truth is you were using the wrong tool.

The reverse is also true. Sometimes a struggling supervisor doesn't need anyone to dig into their feelings. They need someone to ask, "What does good look like in 90 days, and what's one thing you can do this week to move toward it?" — and then get out of their way.

A story I learned the hard way

Years ago I took on a coaching client who was doing well at work. He'd been stuck at the same level for years and wanted my help to move up. Forward-looking, ambitious, clear goal. Right in my wheelhouse. Coaching, yay. I jumped in.

It didn't take long for the conversation to go somewhere I wasn't expecting. The answers stopped being about his career and started being about how much he hated his wife. He became a different person in front of me — angry, agitated, somewhere I couldn't follow. None of the coaching tools I had were going to touch any of it.

So I stopped. I asked his permission to bring in someone who could actually help.

Here's something I do at the start of every coaching relationship, and you should consider doing it too — whether you're hiring a coach or coaching someone yourself:

"I'll keep everything we discuss confidential. I won't share anything with anyone — even something good — without your prior authorization. The one exception: if you tell me you want to hurt yourself or someone else, I won't keep that confidential. I'll bring in people who are trained to help. Is that okay with you?"

I've never had anyone refuse. In this case, he agreed. His company had excellent therapists on call. He got the help he needed for what was behind him, and we got back to work on what was in front of him. He progressed in his career. Others — qualified others — helped him deal with the rest.

I tell that story for one reason: the moment you realize you're holding the wrong tool, your job is to put it down and find the right person. Not to push harder. Not to "get through to them." Stop, ask permission, and refer.

The question

So how do you tell which conversation you're in — and which hat to put on?

Not perfectly. Not always. But well enough to do less harm and more good.

The mindset shift: two hats, one rule

Here's the rule I work with, and the one I'd offer you:

If the obstacle is in front of them, coach. If the obstacle is behind them, refer.

That's the whole mindset shift. Most operators I know default to coaching because it feels productive and forward-leaning — that's our wiring. But the moment you sense the issue is rooted in something that already happened and can't be unwound, your job changes. You're not the fixer anymore. You're the person who notices, who says something kind, and who points toward someone qualified to help — your EAP, a doctor, a therapist.

That's not weakness. That's not "going soft." That's knowing the limits of your tools, which is exactly what a good operator does on the shop floor every single day. You don't use a torque wrench on a finish carpentry job. Same idea.

The two hats:

• Coach hat: Worn in 1:1s, quarterlies, project debriefs, performance conversations about capability and growth. Your job is to ask, listen, and help the person see their own path.
• Referral hat: Worn the moment something tells you the issue is bigger than the workplace. Your job is to acknowledge, not pry, and to point them toward real help.

You wear the coach hat 95% of the time. The other 5% is where most owner-operators get into trouble — usually by trying harder, longer, with the wrong tool.

The mechanism: GROW on the shop floor

Once you accept that coaching is a forward-looking process where the other person controls the destination, the daily mechanics get a lot easier. Here's how I'd run it in your environment.

The setting: It's Wednesday morning. Your lead hand on the fab line, Mike, has been quietly off for two weeks. Quality is fine. Schedule is fine. But he's not himself. You've already ruled out — through a short, human conversation — that there's something heavier going on at home. He says no, he's just stuck. He wants to be doing more.

That's a coaching conversation. Pull him aside for ten minutes by the coffee station. Use GROW:

• G — Goal. "Mike, when you picture the next quarter going well for you, what does that look like?" Let him answer. Don't fill the silence.
• R — Reality. "Where are you right now, honestly, against that?" This is where you listen. He'll tell you more than you expect.
• O — Options. "What are two or three things you could do — that you control — to close that gap?" He generates the options. Not you.
• W — Way Forward. "Of those, what's the one — at most two — you're going to actually do this week?" Pick one. Write it down. Walk away.

Total time: ten minutes. No PowerPoint. No HR form.

Then — and this is the part most operators skip — next Wednesday, you start with: "How did it go?" Not as a gotcha. As a continuation. That's how a 1:1 turns into a coaching relationship instead of a status check.

The same structure works in your scheduled quarterly reviews. Build the agenda around it: Here's my goal. Here's the reality. Here are the options I'm weighing. Here's the one or two things I'm committing to. Next quarter starts with "How did it go?" Simple. Repeatable. And it puts the drive where it belongs — with the person doing the work.

The bottom line

Coaching and therapy aren't competitors. They're different professions solving different problems on different timelines.

As an owner-operator, you'll never be a therapist, and you shouldn't try. But you can become a genuinely good coach — for your team and, with the right outside coach, for yourself. The two hats aren't a burden. They're a clarifier. The moment you know which one you're wearing, the conversation gets easier and the outcomes get better.

Coaching looks forward. Therapy looks back. Know which one is in front of you, and act accordingly.

That's it. That's the difference.

Ready to Find Your Margin?

References & Further Reading

• Whitmore, John. Coaching for Performance — the canonical text on the GROW model, written by the person who developed it. Still the clearest explanation in print.
• Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — Habit 2, "Begin with the End in Mind," is the conceptual root of the "Back to the Future" approach.
• International Coaching Federation (ICF) — coachingfederation.org — the global standards body for the coaching profession; useful if you're evaluating coaches for yourself or your senior team.
• Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) — cmha.ca — practical guidance for employers on recognizing when to refer, and how to support employees navigating mental health challenges.
• Your provincial EAP provider — if you have an Employee Assistance Program, know the number, know what it covers, and make sure your supervisors do too. It's the single most useful "referral hat" tool in your kit.

If this resonated, forward it to one operator who's wearing both hats this week and might appreciate the distinction.

Years ago, in the early days of accounting software, I had a CFO who was petrified to try anything new. Not lazy. Not unintelligent — the opposite. She was sharp, careful, and deeply committed to getting things right. And she was convinced that if she made a single wrong move in the new system, she would delete months of work. Books that took her weeks to reconcile. Reports the bank was waiting on. Gone, in one click.

So she didn't click. She kept doing things the slow way. The old way. The way that was costing us hours every week and quietly capping how fast the business could move.

I didn't push. I sat down with her and asked questions instead.

What can you do to recover from a mistake?

What are the advantages of learning how to recover?

Is recovery even possible? If so, how?

If none of these things you're afraid of are actually issues — what does success look like? What would you be able to do?

She thought about it. She backed up the work. Twice. Then she made the changes.

Sometimes things did go sideways. But she could always restore and start over. Within a few months she was running circles around the old process. The thing she had been certain would destroy months of her work was, in reality, a Ctrl+Z away from being fixed.

That's the gap. Between what we are certain will happen and what actually happens, there's an entire continent of opportunity that most operators never set foot on.

There's an old acronym kicking around recovery rooms and motivational books for exactly this gap — FEAR: False Evidence Appearing Real. Origin's murky; it predates most of the leadership books that quote it. But the idea has legs. Fear isn't usually a response to what's actually happening. It's a response to what we imagine will happen, based on stories we tell ourselves with very little evidence.

In a $5M–$100M shop, that imagined story is the single biggest reason owners and operators leave money on the table — and the single biggest reason teams go quiet on the problems you most need to hear about.

I used to run marathons. Inside that running world, FEAR came up constantly — the wall at mile 20, the cramp that's definitely a torn hamstring, the certainty at mile 18 that you cannot possibly make it to the finish. Talk it through with the person beside you and most of it dissolves into something manageable. The run gets easier. Or at least more understandable.

I was running with a buddy one morning, mid-conversation about FEAR — false evidence appearing real — and he stopped me. "Oh," he said, "I thought it stood for F*ck Everything And Run."

I laughed for about a kilometre.

Different words. Same meaning. Both versions describe the same instinct: when the evidence in your head outruns the evidence in front of you, your body wants out. Your CFO wants to keep using the old software. Your foreman wants to handle it himself. Your operator wants to keep his head down. Everyone wants to f*ck everything and run — and then we all wonder why nobody talks about the actual problems.

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman wrote a book called Top Dog about how people perform under pressure, and they put a finer point on it. Their line that's stuck with me:

"Success in competition requires taking risks that are normally held back by fear. The first risk is entering the competition itself — choosing to compete. Everyone has their own personal threshold where the benefits of competing outweigh the fears. Those who focus on what they'll win choose to compete far more. Those who focus on their odds of winning choose to compete far less."

— Top Dog, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

Read that twice. Then ask: which one is your team doing right now?

Are they focused on what they'll win by bringing you the truth — a faster fix, a better outcome, the satisfaction of being the one who caught it? Or are they focused on their odds of bringing it to you cleanly — the odds of you reacting badly, the odds of getting blamed, the odds of being told "figure it out" with an edge in your voice?

Bronson and Merryman are clear that the same situation, with the same stakes, produces wildly different performance depending on whether the person experiences it as a threat or a challenge. Threat state: the brain narrows. Risk-aversion spikes. People stop volunteering information and start protecting themselves. Challenge state: the brain opens. People take smart risks. They speak up.

Same room. Same boss. Same problem on the floor. The difference is entirely in how the person walking up to you has learned to expect the conversation will go.

Here's the part that should make every owner uncomfortable: you are the one who taught them which state to be in. Not on purpose. Not in a single moment. In a thousand small reactions over years.

The shop foreman who got publicly second-guessed in front of his crew three years ago? He learned. The estimator who flagged a margin problem and got told "figure it out" with an edge in your voice? She learned. The new hire who watched both of them learn? He learned by watching.

None of those reactions were unreasonable in isolation. You were tired. You were under pressure. You were right about the underlying issue. But your team wasn't filing those moments under "boss had a hard day." They were filing them under evidence. False evidence, maybe — you'd happily hear bad news today — but it appears real to them, and they act on it.

That's the trap. The fear isn't about what is. It's about what they've come to expect.

So how do you tell which state your floor is actually in?

You don't ask your team. They've already adapted to whichever signal you've been sending. Asking them to grade you is asking them to take exactly the kind of risk you're trying to find out whether they'll take.

Watch the leading indicators instead:

• How often does bad news reach you late? Not occasionally — systematically. If problems consistently surface after they're expensive, your floor is in threat state.
• Who brings you the rework? If it's always the supervisor, never the operator who spotted it first, you've got a layer of filtering happening that's costing you money and time.
• What happens in the 30 seconds after someone tells you something you didn't want to hear? Your face, your tone, your first sentence. Your team has memorized all three.
• How many of your last ten "surprises" were actually surprises to your team? If you ask honestly, the answer is usually very few.

That last one is the gut-punch. The data was there. It just couldn't get to you.

MINDSET

Here's the re-frame, and it's a hard one: the fear on your floor isn't a culture problem. It's an information problem.

Every minute your operators spend deciding whether it's safe to tell you something is a minute they aren't running the work. Every escalation that gets softened on its way up is a decision you're making with degraded data. Every "we'll handle it ourselves" is a margin leak you'll find later — usually in the worst possible week.

This is something I see on every margin audit. There is always — always — at least one idea inside the company that's already been thought of, already been talked about quietly, and already been killed by FEAR before it ever made it to a serious conversation. "We can't do that, the customer will leave." "We can't change that, the team will quit." "We can't try that, it'll blow up."

The work isn't to bulldoze through with a model and a slide deck. The work is to do what I did with that CFO. Sit down with the team. Ask the questions. What's the actual risk? What can you do to recover if it goes wrong? Is recovery possible? If none of these fears are real, what does success look like? Once the real risks are understood — and the real cost, if any, is on the table — it's much easier to proceed.

Most of the time, the team already knows the answer. They just needed somebody to make it safe to say it out loud.

Mindset Pillar #1 in our framework is the owner's mindset, not the team's. Because the team's fear is downstream of yours. If you're operating from a prevention focus — don't screw up, don't surprise me, don't bring me problems without solutions — your team will mirror it back as silence. If you're operating from a promotion focus — bring me what's actually happening, we'll figure it out — they'll mirror that back as information.

You don't fix this with a poster or a town hall. You fix it one moment at a time, in your reaction to the next piece of bad news that lands on your desk.

METHOD

Three things to try this week. Not a program. Just three things.

1. Change the question. Stop asking "Anything I should know about?" It's a yes/no question, and the safe answer is always no. Try "What's the one thing on the floor right now that's most likely to bite us in two weeks?" Specific, forward-looking, assumes something exists. Ask the same person the same question every week for a month and watch what changes.

2. Reward the messenger out loud. Next time someone brings you a problem early — before it's expensive — say so. By name. In front of others. "He caught this on Tuesday. We saved a week of rework because he flagged it." This is the single cheapest, highest-leverage thing you can do, and most owners never do it because the relief of dodging the bullet wipes out the impulse to credit the person who pointed it out.

3. Audit your own face. Next time someone tells you something you didn't want to hear, notice your first reaction. Not what you said — what you did. The pause, the jaw, the breath. Your team reads that before you've finished your first sentence. You can't fake your way around it; you can only get conscious of it. Awareness alone changes the next thirty seconds.

False evidence appearing real. That's what runs your floor when you're not paying attention. The good news: you're the one who can change what's real for them, starting with the next conversation.

And if all else fails — well, you can always f*ck everything and run. But the marathon doesn't get any shorter, and the rework doesn't fix itself.

Further Reading

• Bronson, Po, and Ashley Merryman. Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing. Twelve, 2013. The source of the quote above and the threat-vs-challenge research underpinning this piece. Worth reading in full if you've ever wondered why the same person performs brilliantly in one situation and freezes in another.
• Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley, 2018. The definitive operator's guide to why teams stay quiet — and the practical moves leaders use to change that. Edmondson's research at Harvard Business School is the academic spine behind most of what's worth saying about workplace fear.
• Higgins, E. Tory. Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence. Hudson Street Press, 2013. The original work on promotion focus vs. prevention focus that Top Dog draws on. Heavier read, but the framework is worth knowing if you want to understand why some of your reactions create silence and others create information.
• Coyle, Daniel. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups. Bantam, 2018. Less academic, more field-reported. Coyle's chapters on safety signals — the small, repeated cues that tell people whether it's safe to speak — are directly applicable to a shop floor.
• Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Not about workplace fear specifically, but the foundational text on how the brain manufactures false evidence in real time. If you want to understand the machinery behind FEAR, start here.

This week's question: Of the last three "surprises" that hit your business, how many were actually surprises to your team?

If the answer is "fewer than I'd like to admit" — that's the conversation worth having. Book a Margin Audit.

The Day I Got Booed for Finishing Early

Years ago, I worked for a company where the 'staging' area — a notoriously slow, bottlenecked part of the operation — got cleared early under my watch. Not by accident. By focused effort. We had pushed hard, made the right calls, and the work was done ahead of schedule.

I walked into the office expecting, at minimum, a nod. Maybe a "nice job."

Instead, I got Brenda.

She booed me. Out loud. In front of people. Then — because that wasn't enough — she piled on the guilt. The implication was clear: if I'd finished early, I must have cut corners, or someone else must be picking up slack, or I was making others look bad.

I remember standing there thinking: I just delivered exactly what you've been asking for, and this is the response?

That moment stuck with me for 25 years. Not because Brenda was unusually mean — she wasn't. She was a product of the culture. And in that culture, someone was always waiting to get you. Nobody was ever waiting to thank you.

That's the gotcha mentality. And it's more common in manufacturing, energy services, and construction shops than most owners want to admit.

How Gotcha Cultures Quietly Eat Your Margin

Here's what I've seen on plant floors, in field offices, and in shop yards across western Canada: gotcha cultures don't announce themselves. They don't show up on a P&L line item called "fear." They show up as:

• Foremen who stop reporting near-misses because last time they did, they got chewed out instead of thanked.

• Schedulers who pad timelines because finishing early gets you scrutinized, not rewarded.

• Ops managers who hoard information because sharing it gives someone ammunition.

• Frontline crews who do the bare minimum, because going above and beyond just paints a target on your back.

Every one of those behaviours is a margin leak. And every one of them traces back to a culture where the loudest leadership voice shows up after something goes wrong, and goes silent when something goes right.

If you're running a $5M–$100M shop and you're wondering why your operational improvements never seem to stick, look at your recognition-to-criticism ratio. I'd bet money it's upside down.

The Hockey Moment That Reminded Me of This

A few months ago, The Daily Coach ran a piece about New Jersey Devils captain Nico Hischier. His young teammate Luke Hughes had a rough night — two costly mistakes, an own-goal, a loss. The home crowd booed Hughes every time he touched the puck.

Hischier didn't wait. After the game, he stepped to the microphone — uninvited — and publicly defended his teammate. He didn't excuse the mistakes. He acknowledged them. But he made one thing crystal clear: we stand behind this guy.

Two minutes. That's all it took.

The leadership researcher quoted in the piece called it textbook leadership: defend in public, coach in private, move quickly. (I'll link the full article below — it's worth your time.)

What struck me wasn't the hockey. It was the contrast with Brenda. Same situation — someone in the spotlight, under pressure, trying to do the work. One leader stepped up in two minutes. The other piled on for thirty seconds and shaped a 25-year-old memory.

That's the difference between a culture that compounds and a culture that corrodes.

So How Do You Flip It?

Most owners I talk to agree they want a culture of recognition. They just don't know how to actually build one without it feeling forced, performative, or HR-driven.

Here's the tool I use. It's free. It takes about two minutes a day. And it works.

I call it Planned Spontaneous Recognition.

The idea is simple: the night before, or on your drive into the shop, you ask yourself two questions:

1. Who can I thank tomorrow?

2. What specifically did they do that I can thank them for?

That's it. Then when you walk in and see that person, you thank them. Naturally. In the moment. Specifically.

To them, it feels spontaneous. To you, it was planned.

Why does it need to be planned?

Because if you don't plan it, you'll forget. Guaranteed.

You walk through the door at 6:45 a.m. and the night-shift supervisor is waiting with three problems. The dispatcher needs a callback. A customer is asking why their order is late. The safety guy wants to talk about yesterday's incident. By 7:15, the person you intended to thank has walked past you three times and you didn't even see them.

The plan is what gets recognition through the noise.

Why "specifically"?

Because "good job" is noise too. "Hey, the way you re-sequenced the swing yesterday so we didn't lose two hours — that saved us. Thank you." That lands. That gets repeated at the dinner table. That builds a culture.

Generic praise is forgettable. Specific praise is fuel.

Why does it work?

Because in a gotcha culture, people are bracing for the hit. When the hit doesn't come — and a thank-you comes instead, and it's specific, meaning you actually noticed — the whole nervous system of your operation starts to shift.

People stop hiding problems. They start surfacing them. They start telling you when something finished early, instead of padding the schedule. They start flagging near-misses. They start making suggestions.

That's not soft stuff. That's margin.

Try It This Week

Here's your homework, if you want it:

Pick three people. One per day, Wednesday through Friday next week. Plan it the night before. Thank them specifically the next morning.

That's the entire ask. Three people. Three specific thank-yous. One week.

Pay attention to what happens — not just to them, but to you. Most of the owners and ops leaders I've coached through this, report the same thing: they walk in lighter. They notice more. They start seeing things to thank people for that they were walking past every day.

And here's the kicker — Planned Spontaneous Recognition is the cheapest culture intervention in your toolkit. It costs nothing. It requires no software, no consultant, no offsite. It just requires that you decide, the night before, to be the kind of leader Hischier was for Hughes — instead of the kind Brenda was for me.

The gotcha mentality is a choice. So is the alternative.

Two minutes. Pick three people. Start Tuesday morning.

Further Reading

• The Daily Coach — "Leadership Is Loudest After the Mistake" (the Hischier/Hughes piece referenced above): thedailycoach.com

• The Carrot Principle — Adrian Gostick & Chester Elton. The research case for specific recognition as a performance driver.

• The Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace — Gary Chapman & Paul White. Useful for understanding why generic praise often misses.

• Gallup's Q12 employee engagement research, particularly the item: "In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work." It's one of the strongest predictors of retention and discretionary effort.

• Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code — the "belonging cues" concept maps directly onto what Hischier did in two minutes.

If you've got a Brenda story of your own — or, better, a Hischier moment — I'd love to hear it. Hit reply.

— Philip

P.S. If you're wondering whether your shop has a gotcha culture and what it's costing you in margin, that's exactly the kind of thing a Margin Audit can surface in 15 minutes. No charge.

A few years back, one of our coaches pulled a senior leader aside and started explaining a coaching point using horse training as the analogy. The leader straightened up, looked him dead in the eye, and said — loud enough for the room to hear — "Are you calling me a horse?"

We weren't entirely sure if he was joking. Either way, we learned a useful lesson: set up the "why" before you reach for the metaphor.

So let me set up the why.

I am about to compare coaching humans to coaching dogs. I am not calling you a dog. I am not calling your team dogs. What I am saying is that the science of how behaviour is learned, reinforced, and sustained is remarkably consistent across mammals — and the leaders who understand that science get dramatically better results than the ones who don't.

If you bristle at the comparison, that's fair. Stick with me anyway. The payoff is a set of tools you can use on Monday morning.

My Sister Karen and the Healthy Hounds

My sister Karen runs an Instagram channel called Healthy Hounds (@healthyhoundz), where she helps people train their dogs. She's good at it. Over 12,000 people watch her work.

Every time we get together, the conversation drifts the same way. She'll describe how she got a reactive dog to settle in a noisy park, and I'll realize she's just described — almost word for word — what I do when I'm helping a plant manager get a frustrated supervisor to change how he runs his shift huddle.

The mechanics are the same. The vocabulary is different. The science underneath is identical.

Karen has a line she uses with her clients that stuck with me:

It's not about sits and stays. It's about the dog.

Translated for our world:

It's not about write-ups and reviews. It's about what the employee needs to succeed.

That's the whole article in two sentences. Everything below is the operating manual.

The Science You're Already Using (Whether You Know It or Not)

Both dog training and human coaching rest on the same foundation: operant conditioning. B.F. Skinner laid this out in Science and Human Behavior (1953), and the principle is brutally simple:

"Behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences."

Behaviours that get rewarded increase. Behaviours that get ignored fade. Behaviours that get punished get suppressed — but often produce fear, avoidance, and a quiet resentment that shows up later in your turnover numbers.

Karen Pryor — the marine mammal trainer whose 1984 book Don't Shoot the Dog! is required reading in animal training programs and corporate behaviour consultancies — put it this way: "Reinforcement is the key to changing behavior, and it works across all species."

All species. Including the one that signs your paycheques.

Aubrey Daniels, who built an entire performance management consultancy on applying Skinner's work to the workplace, says it more bluntly: "People do what they do because of what happens to them when they do it." (Bringing Out the Best in People).

So if your team is doing things you don't want them to do, the uncomfortable question is: what are you reinforcing that you didn't realize you were reinforcing?

Five Tools You Can Use This Week

Five — because five is what you'll actually remember on Wednesday afternoon when you need them.

1. Be Clear, Not Clever

In dog training, if "down" means lie down on Tuesday and get off the couch on Wednesday, the dog isn't being stubborn. The signal is broken.

In leadership, this shows up as vague expectations, shifting priorities, and inconsistent feedback. Employees who look unmotivated are very often just uncertain.

Ask yourself: Would a new hire understand exactly what success looks like in this role this quarter? If the answer requires more than two sentences, you have a clarity problem, not a motivation problem.

2. Reinforce What You Want — Immediately

Karen Pryor's most-quoted principle: "The timing of reinforcement is critical. Delayed reinforcement reinforces the wrong behavior."

In her world, a reward delayed by even a few seconds teaches the dog the wrong lesson. In ours, we've institutionalized the delay and called it the annual performance review. A year-end recognition for great work in March is the management equivalent of giving the dog a treat next Tuesday for sitting last weekend. The behaviour and the reward have lost their connection.

Gallup's 2024 research with Workhuman makes this concrete: employees who receive feedback and recognition from their manager at least once a week are 61% engaged. Employees who get the feedback but rarely the recognition? Just 38%. Same managers. Same companies. The only difference is whether the timing and the reinforcement land together.

Tool: Praise specific behaviour within 24 hours of seeing it. Not "good job" — "the way you walked the new hire through the changeover today saved us at least an hour of rework. Thank you."

3. Shape Progress, Not Perfection

Complex behaviours — in dogs and humans — are built through small wins, not by waiting for the finished product.

A dog learning to retrieve doesn't get the full picture on day one. The trainer rewards looking at the ball, then touching it, then picking it up, then bringing it back two feet. Each step gets reinforced.

Translate this to a supervisor you're trying to develop into a plant manager. Most leaders wait until the supervisor is "ready" — which usually means until they've already figured it out alone. That's the slow path. The fast path is reinforcing each step toward the role: the first time they handle a customer escalation well, the first time they run a production meeting without you, the first time they hold a peer accountable.

Mindset: Progress builds confidence. Confidence builds performance.

4. Design the Environment

Trainers know something most managers under-use: you can't out-willpower a bad environment.

You don't ask a puppy to "just behave" in the middle of a dog park. You manage distractions, set up the space, and remove temptation. Behavioural science calls this choice architecture. Kurt Lewin captured it in 1936 with the formula B = f(P, E): behaviour is a function of the person and the environment.

If you want focus, eliminate the open-door interruptions. If you want collaboration, design workflows that require it. If you want accountability, make the metrics visible to everyone every day.

Tool: Pick one behaviour you're frustrated about. Ask, what about the environment is making the wrong behaviour easier than the right one? Change the environment first. Lectures second.

5. Know When to Stop Using Treats

This is where dog training and human coaching part ways — and where leadership gets interesting.

Dogs are mostly externally motivated. Treats, praise, play. That's the toolkit, and it works.

Humans run on something deeper. Daniel Pink, in Drive, makes the case that sustained human performance comes from three intrinsic drivers: autonomy (control over how you work), mastery (getting demonstrably better at something), and purpose (knowing why the work matters).

Pink's line is the one I keep coming back to:

"The secret to high performance is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world."

External rewards — bonuses, perks, public recognition — are excellent at starting behaviour. They are weak at sustaining it. If your retention strategy is the annual bonus, you've capped your team's ceiling.

Tool: For each of your direct reports, can you name one piece of autonomy they have, one skill they're actively mastering, and one piece of purpose they connect to? If you can't, that's the gap. And the gap is where your best people are quietly deciding whether to stay.

The Bottom Line

Both dogs and humans follow the same laws of behaviour. Humans add layers of meaning, identity, and purpose on top. The leaders who get the best out of their teams aren't using a different species of management — they're using the same laws of learning that every good coach, teacher, and trainer has used for a hundred years, and adding the human layer on top.

Most leaders use only one half of that equation. The dogs-only half — control, treats, the occasional swat with a rolled-up newspaper — produces compliance. The humans-only half — purpose statements and posters in the lunchroom — produces eye rolls. The leaders who combine both produce performance.

Karen had it right. It's not about sits and stays. It's about the dog.

Or in our case — it's about the people.

Now go fetch.

If you read this and thought "we have at least three of these gaps in our shop," that's exactly the kind of thing a Margin Audit uncovers — usually in 15 minutes. It's a free conversation, and we'll tell you straight whether the margin is hiding in your operations, your leadership system, or both. Reply to this email or Book a Call a call.

Sources & further reading:

• Skinner, B.F. (1953). Science and Human Behavior.

• Pryor, Karen (1984). Don't Shoot the Dog!

• Daniels, Aubrey (2000). Bringing Out the Best in People.

• Pink, Daniel (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

• Edmondson, Amy (2018). The Fearless Organization.

• Lewin, Kurt (1936). Principles of Topological Psychology.

• Gallup & Workhuman (2024). Empowering Workplace Culture Through Recognition.

• American Kennel Club. Operant Conditioning & Positive Reinforcement training guidelines.

You're the owner or CEO of a manufacturing, oil and gas service, or construction firm doing $5M to $100M in sales. You've built a real business. You have managers running operations, sales, and the shop floor. You review numbers weekly, you work hard, and you've gotten this far by hiring capable people.

A few weeks ago I came across a piece in a piece in Michael Lombardi's The Daily Coach on the four types of coaches that college football programs hire. It's about football, but every sentence describes the companies we work with at The Margin Builders. Swap "head coach" for "owner," "GM," or "plant manager," and the picture is identical.

Whenever performance slips, the same pattern repeats. A manager gets fired. The next hire is strong in the exact area the last one was weak. Six to eighteen months later a different weakness shows up and the cycle starts again. Margin stays flat. Turnover stays high. You're spending more time hiring and firing than leading.

The Daily Coach piece names why. Most hires fall into three types, and all three are managers in leader's clothing:

The Schemer is a tactical specialist. Great at one thing — a sales playbook, an operational method, a specific product line. You hire them hoping their specialty will pull the whole company forward. It rarely does.

The Caretaker is the brand-name hire. Impressive résumé, delegates most of the real work, and handles problems by firing someone and bringing in another expert.

The Recruiter is the connector. They know everybody and can fill a roster fast, but they can't build one.

All three are doing things right. None of them are doing the right thing.

So what are you actually missing?

You're hiring managers when what you need is a Strategist.

As Warren Bennis put it, "the manager does things right; the leader does the right thing." A Strategist combines all three of the manager capabilities above and adds the ones that actually matter: anticipating problems, asking the right questions, and developing the people already on the team. They care about the present and the near future. They build something that lasts after they leave. In Jim Collins' language, they are clock builders, not time tellers.

When The Margin Builders runs a margin audit, we aren't looking for a new machine to buy or new software to install. We're looking for the dysfunction that's preventing a team from solving problems they already know about, with tools they already have.

When the owner tells us, "Go fix those folks — they're lazy and they don't listen," we already know where the problem is. It's almost never the front line. It's a manager who has stopped being a strategist, or never was one.

Back to the Future

Here's the tool I use with every leader I coach. I ask them to pick a point in the future — three months, six, twelve — when everything is perfect. Not "better." Perfect.

Then I ask: how did you get there?

Most leaders immediately snap back to the present: "Well, I tried this..." or "I don't know where to start." I stop them. No — this is twelve months from now and everything is perfect. What happened? We stay in the future and work backwards, step by step, until the plan is on paper.

That's the difference between a plan and a wish. And it's the difference between a manager and a strategist. Bryar and Carr describe this same mechanism at Amazon in Working Backwards: start from the defined end state and work your way back to today.

Leaders who do this start seeing the present differently. They stop reacting to the latest fire. They start building the team that prevents the next one. Software helps. A new CNC machine helps. But the tools don't run themselves — your leaders do.

I've seen this in my own companies and in the companies we work with. Safety jumps on an oil and gas rig. Downtime drops on a manufacturing line. Millions show up in savings and new sales. Every single time, the change started with a leader who stopped scheming and started strategizing.

What to do this week

Close your laptop for fifteen minutes. Pick a date in the future when your company looks exactly the way you want it to. Write down what's true on that day — revenue, margin, headcount, the three things you're no longer worried about. Then write down the one or two steps that got you there. Bring your team in.

If you'd rather not do it alone, that's what our margin audit is for. We come in, find the dysfunction, and help your leaders become strategists — so the fix lasts after we leave.

Do this, and you'll find your margin.

Book a Margin Audit

Further Reading

• Bennis, W. On Becoming a Leader. The foundational distinction between management and true leadership: "the manager does things right; the leader does the right thing."
• Bryar, C., & Carr, B. Working Backwards. The organizational mechanism of working backward from a defined end-state to ensure long-term focus and alignment, shifting away from orientation toward short-term gains.
• Collins, J. Good to Great. The concept of "Clock Building, Not Time Telling" — great leaders build enduring systems and organizations rather than relying on their own individual problem-solving.

I have to admit that it took me a long time to figure out what I was called to do. I don’t know if its because I was the first born in the family but I  always considered myself the police officer  of the house rules. Then it was being a “good student”, “good teammate”, etc. In business this helped and hurt me. I was always eager to help my boss and the company in the ways they wanted the company to go.  But eventually this produces burnout. You are always fighting to “help your boss” instead of looking at whats going around you and then coming up with solutions based on your own unique identity and experience.

So in my 20’s I left a family business and started my own company. I started 3 more after that. In those companies I could really do what I was called to do. And what was that?  At a high level, “help people be the best they can be”. That lead to a focus on coaching, listening, questioning, and actioning. When covid hit I stepped out of that founders role and went to retail for a while. At first it was fun and met my need of helping customers and fellow colleagues. As I quickly rose through the ranks you became more responsible for doing what the company wants, and if your boss had a dictatorial way of implementing that you were forced out of what you were meant todo. This was a great reminder of the stress involved when you  started doing things that were not you.  So I left the retail world and starte up The Margin Builders. Now I am back doing what I was called to do. Helping people succeed and being the best they can through coaching, ideas and action.

Today's leaders are operating on moving ground, navigating an unstable environment filled with overlapping disruptions, economic uncertainty, and intense public scrutiny. In this high-pressure context, it is incredibly easy to become consumed by "the noise" and the "whack-a-mole" of daily crises. We get caught in a transactional loop, focusing on managing systems and reaching preset goals, while losing the passion and meaning that initially brought us to the work.

Because we crave harmony and success, we often fall into the trap of trying to live up to the expectations of others—our board, our peers, or our industry. We become driven by external validation, slowly adjusting our behavior to ensure we are applauded, supported, and understood. But when we optimize our lives for the approval of others, we create a deep disconnect where what we are doing and why we are doing it fall completely out of balance. We become driven, but we are going nowhere.

The turning point arrives when we realize that leadership is not a popularity contest, and attempting to please everyone is a recipe for organizational and personal burnout. As Edith Eva Eger powerfully points out, "It’s our responsibility to act in service of our authentic selves. Sometimes this means giving up the need to please others, giving up our need for others’ approval".

We begin to understand that true transformation does not come from trying harder to meet external demands, but from shifting our internal identity. We realize that the most effective leaders—those who truly leave a legacy—do not set out to blindly prove themselves to the world; rather, they have an abiding interest in fully expressing themselves. We recognize that to lead effectively, we must uncouple our decisions from the fear of disappointing others.

Where do I need to step away from the noise so I can hear what I’m truly being called to care deeply about—and have the courage to act on it?

As author Christine Caine beautifully outlines, stepping into your true purpose requires accepting a hard truth about human nature:

• "Not everyone will understand. Not everyone will approve."
• "Not everyone will applaud. Not everyone will affirm."
• "Not everyone will stay. Not everyone will encourage."

And that’s okay.

To be a capability builder and a true leader, you must practice "Strategic Defiance". This means having the courage to draw a hard line based on your core identity and values, even when it is unpopular. Your job is not to chase a consensus; your job is to provide a clear, inspiring "Why" that serves as a compass for your organization.

You must remember that meaning comes from within, and it is up to you to take personal responsibility for your own life's program. You don't need a new year or a new title to become a new you; you only need a new response—a shift from worrying about "what if" to leading with the conviction of "even if".

Stop waiting for universal celebration. Stand up, step into the center of your purpose, and do what you are called to do.

Further Reading & References

• "The Choice" or "The Gift" by Edith Eva Eger: These works expand on the responsibility of acting in service of our authentic selves and letting go of the need for external approval.
• "Unstoppable" by Christine Caine: Offers deeper insights into stepping into purpose and navigating the reality that not everyone will affirm your calling.

"Start with Why" by Simon Sinek: Provides a framework for leaders to identify that "clear, inspiring Why" which serves as an organizational compass.

When I was younger, I didn’t think about culture. If you had asked me what it meant, I probably would have said something about nationality, where you grew up, or religion. I certainly never related it to my work or the company I was building. I hadn’t read a single leadership book. I just jumped in, worked hard, and made things happen.

That brute-force approach was easy when it was just me, and manageable when my first startup, a manufacturing company called U-Flow Inc., grew to a team of five. But as sales climbed and we expanded to a team of 25, things got significantly harder. When businesses hit the “Squeeze Zone”—the $5M to $100M revenue mark—complexity compounds. You quickly realize that sheer effort and “grit” are no longer enough to scale the business.

I realized I had to lean on a lesson I’d learned years earlier as a roofing construction supervisor—a lesson delivered not in a boardroom, but at the top of a ladder.

I was driving between sites and casually mentioned to one of my foremen, Evelino, a problem another foreman, Joe, was struggling with. I didn’t think twice about it. I was just chatting. What I’d actually done was betray Joe’s confidence.

I found out the next morning.

I was halfway up the ladder at Joe’s jobsite when the top of it started drifting away from the building. Not falling—drifting. The physics were bad. My inner monologue was worse. I was genuinely convinced I was about to die on a roof in a dispute I didn’t yet know I was in.

Turns out Joe had decided the most efficient way to open a performance review was to push my ladder off the wall. He eventually re-secured it—after working through what I’d estimate was his complete personal inventory of swear words, in alphabetical order. I climbed down, listened, and apologized. We worked it out. Joe and I had a great relationship for years after that.

I didn’t learn that lesson from a leadership course. I learned it from a foreman who was willing to risk a workplace injury claim to teach a young supervisor what trust actually costs.

Fast forward to U-Flow. As we grew past 20 people, I somehow forgot everything Joe taught me and fell straight into the trap of micromanaging. But every time I overruled my staff, I was usually wrong. Why? Because they were the ones close to the issue—they were the ones dealing directly with the customers and the suppliers, not me. I was acting as an exhausted “approval bottleneck” rather than a true leader.

If the best lessons about culture come from the people closest to the work—not from books, not from courses, not from the founder’s instincts—how do you intentionally build a company where those lessons can actually surface?

Here’s what Joe, Evelino, and twenty years of U-Flow taught me: culture isn’t something you write on a wall. It’s what your team does when you’re not on the jobsite—or, more accurately, what they do when someone else is holding the ladder.

At U-Flow, I realized my job wasn’t to give orders, but to give my team the support and tools they needed to accomplish the goal. I started actively communicating the values of trust and confidence, telling them that anyone could speak up. To cement this, I had little cards and screen savers made up for the entire company with a simple slogan: “Do what you think is right”.

That slogan became the bedrock of our culture. Instead of waiting for my approval, people would ask each other, “What do you think is right?” Morale skyrocketed, and the company grew exponentially.

If you want to transition from a top-line obsession to true bottom-line mastery, you must shift from being a problem-solver who dictates the “How” to an empowering leader who provides the “What” and the “Why”. Here is how you actively engineer that culture of excellence:

• Uncouple Fear and Failure: You cannot coddle your team. As Daniel Kish notes, an overly protective “health and safety” culture simply creates “learned helplessness”. At U-Flow, as long as no one would get hurt and the plant wouldn’t blow up, my default answer was “Let’s try it”. Mistakes are great teachers.
• Establish Psychological Safety: Harvard’s Amy Edmondson notes in The Fearless Organization that in the modern knowledge economy, fear is the enemy of flourishing. Your culture must be an environment where people feel entirely safe to raise concerns, admit mistakes, and share the breakthrough ideas that will ultimately save your margins.
• Ask Better Questions: True leadership is the “enabling art” of releasing human talent and potential. Instead of dictating solutions, use Michael Bungay Stanier’s “Kickstart Question” from The Coaching Habit: “What’s on your mind?” Listen first, and let your team provide the answers.
• Build a Culture of Discipline: Jim Collins points out in Good to Great that when you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy, and when you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls.

Culture is not an abstract slogan pasted on the wall; it is the aggregate of your attitudes, actions, and values. It is what your team does when you are not in the room.

At The Margin Builders, we help industrial leaders in the Squeeze Zone eliminate the inefficiencies that drain margin and build teams that don’t need the founder in the room. You don’t learn that from a course. You learn it by doing the work—ideally without anyone pushing your ladder.

Visit www.themarginbuilders.com to start the conversation.

Further Reading

• Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great. On the “Culture of Discipline”—where disciplined people, thought, and action replace the need for excessive bureaucracy.
• Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organization. On psychological safety as the precondition for a team’s problem-solving ability and voice.
• Marquet, D. (2012). Turn the Ship Around! On giving up top-down control—leadership as the enabling art of releasing human potential rather than dictating outcomes.

Stanier, M. B. (2016). The Coaching Habit. On asking better questions—specifically the “Kickstart Question”—to draw ideas out of your team.