#Pillar4-Empowering Teams ⁽⁶⁾

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…