#Pillar4-Empowering Teams ⁽¹³⁾

An F, an open door, and the questions that became the foundation of how I coach. Years ago, I was a first year university student studying philosophy. I wasn't a genius in high school but finished with a respectable A- grade. First year university had…

I used to struggle getting people I was leading to do things. When I was a young foreman of a roofing crew I was a dictator. Do this, do that, and do them now! I counted lunch breaks down to the second. It kind of…

"Confidential" on the North Slope means "read this." Richard knew it. He used it. Pillar: #Pillar4-Empowering Teams I was working on improving safety and performance on a drilling rig on the North Slope of Alaska, beside the Beaufort Sea. The rig manager was "Richard". Not…

The most damaging thing a leader can do isn't pile on work. It's making people guess. I was once in a role where I was a middle manager of about 80 people. Basically my job was to keep everyone happy. Happy people do good work…

She'd spent four years waiting tables. And it showed — in the best possible way. The leader pulled me aside after the plant walk. "Phil, who stands out to you?" I'd spent two days on the floor. Watched the morning startup. Sat in on shift…

As an operational consultant, I often find myself walking into industrial SMEs facing a common challenge: stalled initiatives. Take the recent case of an ops manager who had been trying to purchase a badly-needed truck for two years, held up by endless back-and-forth on specs.

Why slogans don't create culture - and what does When I first started U-Flow, a speciality manufacturing company, culture was honestly an afterthought. I was laser-focused on designing a great product and landing those first few critical orders. As we grew and added people, I…

You don't need to hire your way out of a performance problem. You need to surface what's already standing at the machine. One of the things I love about working at The Margin Builders is watching people grow. Like the pipe operator whose idea drove…

Why the best ideas in your shop are already there — if you'll ask for them. 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…

Most consultants arrive with the framework before the conversation. That's the problem, not the solution. 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…

Two hats every operator wears — and the one that gets you in trouble when you confuse them. 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…

And the simple two-minute habit that flips the script. 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…

What my sister's dogs taught me about coaching humans 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…