Karin Lindner has spent fourteen years trying to make manufacturing attractive to the people who work in it, and she says it is still not there. Her new book, Making Manufacturing Sexy, argues that most manufacturing leaders are not leading. They are surviving, stuck in a system that rewards firefighting.

Karin and Trevor both worked at Magna. In this conversation they get into what actually changes a plant, and it is not the equipment. Karin shares the coaching tagline she uses with every client, be curious rather than furious, and the story of a general manager who described himself as passionate when what he meant was that he lost control under pressure. Trevor tells the story of the whiteboard he once wrote on, and the shop floor leader whose feedback stopped him cold.

They walk through the five non-negotiable shifts from the book, starting with the way you open your very next production meeting, and finishing with the one every leader avoids: stop tolerating what hurts performance.

Karin's line to sit with: we judge ourselves by our intentions and we judge others by their actions.

Making Manufacturing Sexy by Karin Lindner is available now. Find Karin on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/karinlindner and at karicosolutions.com.

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Connect with Trevor:

LinkedIn 👉 linkedin.com/in/trevorblondeel

Website 👉 manufacturinggreatness.com

What if the reason nobody applies has nothing to do with what you pay? In new research across the United States and Canada, concerns about physical safety ranked as the number one barrier to even considering a job in manufacturing. Pay came in fourth. Trevor assumed that was a perception problem, an old black-and-white picture nobody had bothered to correct. So he went looking for proof, and could not find any. The people closest to the industry name safety right alongside everybody else. What he found instead was a gap inside the plant. Employees named physical safety at forty percent. Managers, forty. Executives, thirty-three. The people who approve the capital are the least likely to name the barrier keeping people off the floor, and it is not because they do not care. An executive learns about the floor through a report and a recordable rate. An operator learns about it through their body. Same plant, two completely different pictures. Trevor tells the story of a hundred-person meeting where somebody raised a hand to say he could not get gloves, and what it took to find out why. Then three questions to take back to your plant. A practical look at manufacturing recruiting, the manufacturing labor shortage, and manufacturing team leadership for plant managers, operations leaders, and frontline supervisors.

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Connect with Trevor:

LinkedIn 👉 linkedin.com/in/trevorblondeel

Website 👉 manufacturinggreatness.com

When was the last time somebody stopped your line and you thanked them for it? Toyota built the andon cord into the line decades ago and most plants still treat pulling it as a failure. Dr. Michael Gillespie, organizational psychologist at the University of South Florida and co-author of Distancing with David Marquet, studies why the person closest to a problem is often the least able to see it. Being locked inside your own point of view is the default setting, not an occasional lapse, which is how five people can walk up to one stopped line and each honestly see a different problem. Nobody is lying. Everybody is immersed. Mike walks Trevor through the three moves that create distance, be someone else, be somewhere else, be sometime else, and shares the research on why higher performing hospital units report more errors rather than fewer. Trevor brings the plant floor version, including the moment he admits he spent years defending his own department instead of the whole line, and applies temporal distancing live to a month-end budget decision every operations leader will recognize. Ends with one exercise you can try tonight, and it sounds cheesy until you read the research behind it. A practical conversation about decision making, critical thinking, and manufacturing team leadership for plant managers, operations directors, and frontline supervisors.

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Connect with Trevor:

LinkedIn 👉 linkedin.com/in/trevorblondeel

Website 👉 manufacturinggreatness.com