When we left off in Part 3, things turned for the worse. This week, there’s no turning back.
As strong as the underlying culture was, a stronger one ruled over the engineering department.
My direct manager held a culture of performance as the highest standard. Not a bad thing in itself, but holding it regardless of the personal cost made an uncomfortable counterbalance.
He was the guy who sat in a Fierce Accountability seminar years before. It got results, but something important was missing: prioritization. If it came up, it needed to get done, now. And he would hound his team until it did.
Sitting pushed off to the side didn’t sit well with him, and the engineers were doing something wrong if they were sitting still. When pitted against other strong personalities over whom he had little sway, the engineers took the brunt of the frustration.
No clear direction from management made this a frequent occurrence.
Things that could have been delegated to other parts of my team he insisted I take on myself. Any minor things he found from skip-level conversations he hammered me for not knowing about. My asking the plant manager to follow the procedure for an inconsequential NDA became “insubordination.”
Trying to keep him happy cost me more than I wanted to admit. I couldn’t swallow anymore and my weight dropped to 135 pounds.
As much as I put into the plant for the promise of rescuing American manufacturing, neither my family or my health had any more patience for it. I was part of something bigger than myself that was consuming me.
I was rescued by a friend from Church, a plant manager in need of a project engineer. It came with dreams of building a new facility. A dream I wouldn’t realize for another 6 years and two employers afterward.
The supervisors fought to keep me when I took another job. They wanted my work to continue. I fixed things. I got things done. Things that made it easier for them and their people to do their jobs because they cared about what they did.
I loved that about the culture. It made it even harder to leave, even if it was for my health and my family’s sanity.
Of course, struggles of who’s leading make the whole organization vulnerable to unexpected changes. Like a coalition of community groups bringing a lawsuit in 2019 over the plant’s use of a reproductive hazardous chemical to sterilize certain products. Or the volume drop off when most of America cancelled their elective surgeries during COVID lockdowns. A contamination lawsuit last year put the final nail in the coffin and the company issued WARN notices to the remaining 200 employees, a mere third of what remained after I left 8 years ago.
The wound dressings we made at that plant helped so many people. The largest posterior pads in the industry that could move a new mom recovering from an epidural from balancing the end of her spine on a fist-sized cushion to sitting comfortably on a pad that covered her whole bottom.
We provided the petroleum jelly-soaked dressings for kids burned in horrific accidents. We made algae-based dressings that would build a protective barrier as decay wounds healed, like those from a brown recluse bite.
Even Keanu Reeves patched himself up with our products at the end of John Wick. Our brand was an icon embedded in American medical culture.
Those are the sort of things lost when minor improvements to make production a little bit cheaper become the end goal. When it’s a constellation of department heads acting in their own interests in a leadership vacuum. When an operations manager thinks he can get his crew over the productivity hump with a pep talk while cost cutting is hamstringing his operators’ ability to make product.
That’s the mentality a generation of business school graduates learned. But is that the end?
Or is there room to learn a new way to rebuild manufacturing plants?
What I learned there has worked for me elsewhere: walking the floor, finding pain points, designing and installing lasting resolutions to eliminate headaches for the operators. Operators who are now free to do what they’re best at: make American products.
That skillset continues to serve me and open new opportunities. A skillset sorely needed for a manufacturing renaissance. A skillset that can bridge the glory days of the US with new ways of doing things.
A skillset that got me into a company that just posted its best month in its over 60 year history. Where growth principles positioned it to benefit from trends.
There is a difference in how you cut costs. And it makes all the difference in the world.
So when I hear about another plant closing, I think about that lacking skillset. It stings all the more that my effort couldn’t outlast my time there. And that sting is felt in communities big and small throughout America.
Thanks for reading through this saga. If this landed with you and you want to take steps to save American manufacturing, leave me a comment or let me know of opportunities through the button below.
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