Ask the People Who Keep It Running

“It’ll never work.”

The chief mechanic said it in a thick South Carolina accent, standing beside the sewing machine I had just asked him to reset. “I been fixin’ these machines for a lot of years, and what you want will never work!”

I was the new sheriff in town, full of my own authority, and I was sure he was wrong.

He was right, and what he taught me that day is still how I approach every operation I walk into.

The Feed Dogs

The plant was in Orangeburg, South Carolina. It was my fourth apparel employer and my last stop before I joined a management consulting firm. Like the first apparel company I worked for, it was a union shop. Nearly every change was examined from both sides, management and workers, often with a union representative in the room.

I had been asked to review the production quota and piece-work pay rate for a style already in production. Before I timed anything, my boss, the operations manager, told me to compare the machine specifications with the actual settings at the workstation I’d be studying. Small settings change output. A quality standard might call for 12 stitches per inch, but 10 was sometimes acceptable, and fewer stitches sew faster. A larger pulley speeds up the machine. There were others.

One of them was the feed dogs, the toothed plates beneath the presser foot that move fabric through the machine. An operator can usually adjust the presser foot, but the feed dogs are set by a mechanic. Our chief mechanic liked to set them high to give the fabric as much traction as possible, and every mechanic in the plant followed his lead.

As he and I checked the machine together, I saw that the feed dogs sat well above the manufacturer’s recommendation. I told him everything had to be in spec before I could conduct my study. That’s when he told me it would never work. He reset the machine anyway, reluctantly.

It was a disaster. The operator immediately complained that the machine wasn’t working right. The supervisor came over, and before long we were heading toward a union incident.

That’s when I understood what I had missed. Every sewing operator on the floor had adapted to the chief mechanic’s settings. What the manual called correct, the people running the machines experienced as broken. I was outnumbered, and I had two choices: invoke the general operations manager’s name to back me up, or gracefully accept their settings.

I yielded. The chief mechanic reset the machine, the operator settled back in, and I conducted one of the easiest time studies of my career. I recorded every actual setting, from stitches per inch to pulley size to feed dog height, so the study would hold up if anyone contested it and anyone who came after me would know exactly what the numbers were based on.

The chief mechanic gave me a little “I told you so” at first. Once he saw I was willing to listen, that faded, and we built a working relationship that served me well for the rest of my time there.

The specification told me what the machine was designed to do. The mechanic knew what it took to keep that plant running.

The Knowledge Is Already There

Every operation has people who know things that never make it into a report.

A maintenance technician knows which machine needs more attention than its downtime record suggests. An operator knows where material catches or a task becomes awkward. A shipping clerk knows which recurring exception turns a straightforward order into an afternoon of phone calls.

They know because they run into these problems again and again. They make adjustments, find workarounds, and keep the work moving. Over time, those accommodations become almost invisible to everyone else. The operation appears to run smoothly because somebody has learned to compensate for what doesn’t work well.

Then a manager or consultant arrives to improve things, as I did in Orangeburg, with observations, calculations, and perhaps a solution that worked somewhere else. All of that can be useful. But without talking to the people doing the work, our understanding is incomplete, and we may be about to change something we don’t fully understand.

Ask Before the Decision Is Finished

There’s a difference between asking people for their judgment and asking them to react to a decision that has already been made.

Once we’ve selected the equipment, committed the money, and announced the schedule, a mechanic’s concern feels like an obstacle. We’re ready to move, and now somebody is telling us why it might be difficult. Heard earlier, that same concern could have helped us choose better equipment, revise the layout, plan for maintenance access, or avoid an unnecessary expense.

Before making a change, ask:

• What gives you the most trouble with the current process?
• What do you have to adjust or work around to keep things moving?
• What would make this proposed change difficult to operate or maintain?
• What are we likely to overlook?
• What would you change first?

Then give people time to answer. Better yet, let them show you. A few minutes beside the equipment will teach you more than an hour around a conference table.

Listening Still Requires Judgment

The people closest to the work won’t always agree. They have different priorities, and sometimes they prefer a familiar method even when a better one is available.

Listening doesn’t remove our responsibility to evaluate what we hear. We still need to weigh cost, capacity, quality, reliability, and the purpose of the change. We need to tell a preference from a practical constraint, and sometimes we need to test an assumption. In Orangeburg, accepting the mechanic’s settings didn’t mean giving up the study. It meant documenting the conditions the work was actually done under.

That discipline applies to our own assumptions, too. When someone raises an objection, it’s worth understanding the experience behind it. “That won’t work” may be the beginning of a useful explanation. Ask why. Ask what happened the last time. Ask what would have to change to make it workable. The conversation may reveal a problem with the proposal, or a way to improve it.

Make It Worth Speaking Up

What happens after people offer their judgment affects whether they’ll offer it again.

When someone identifies a problem, follow up. If their suggestion changes the plan, tell them. If you choose a different approach, explain why. People don’t need to get their way every time to know they’ve been heard, but they do need evidence that speaking up was worth the effort. The next observation they share may be the one you most need to hear.

That chief mechanic could have stayed resentful. Instead, he became one of my best sources of practical knowledge in the plant, because he saw that what he said made a difference.

Before You Decide

The lesson from Orangeburg has stayed with me: the people responsible for keeping an operation running deserve a place in the conversation about improving it. It’s still how I start every engagement at Holland Resource, on the floor, with the people who will have to live with whatever we change.

Before you approve the equipment, redesign the process, or settle on a solution, spend some time with them. Ask what they know, and listen long enough to learn something.