When Habits Become Barriers

Less than two months after the let down of not being offered the behavior-based safety facilitator position, I noticed a new opportunity posted on the internal job board. This was for a “5S Trainer” position, one of four throughout the facility, that would have responsibility for implementing a foundational part of the overall lean manufacturing strategy the corporate office was embracing. Equipped with the input from Terry and Dennis on how I could perform better in the interview process and supporting Ron heavily in the time since he took on the BBS role, I was even more confident. While I had no real understanding of 5S or Lean manufacturing, all my other qualifications were stronger - except for any actual experience beyond my home department or behavior-based safety. I still had no computer experience to speak of, and the job description was very specific about what the ideal candidate would be capable of.

Never one to allow details to get in the way, I pushed forward. I remember going to a friend’s house the night before my interview so he could show me what PowerPoint and Excel were. He helped me create a very simple example in each and saved those to a floppy disc that I could take to work the following day. By “helped” me, I mean he did it while I watched… The Excel file was maybe five or six rows by four or five columns with one simple formula. I understood what it showed but there’s no way I could have re-created it at that point - and this was well before Google could have helped (which should be obvious by the floppy disc reference). The PowerPoint had around five slides with cheesy clip art images, but that was what my three-minute presentation would be based on during the interview. Sitting around the table and answering questions was a breeze, even the ones I had to BS my way through since I was ignorant about 5S and had no real understanding of how spreadsheets worked. Those three minutes standing up to present in front of the same few people felt like a hostage situation. I knew each of them, having interacted with them routinely for months or years prior to that, but actually presenting something in front of them was nearly paralyzing. My knees were shaking and my mouth was painfully dry; the paranoia was like having smoked a whole bag full of weed.

Somehow, though, I survived the interview. A week or so later, I was surprisingly offered the position. Again, four spots were filled so I’m still not sure if only four people applied or if I actually out-performed anyone else. Regardless, this was my shot. While everything I learned about 5S and Lean leading up to that point made perfect sense to me, I had not sure learned just how much my peers, the supervisors, or managers would actively push back against every step that followed. Still being relatively new to the company, and the manufacturing world as a whole, I wasn’t all that familiar with the idea of the “flavor of the month”, the term used for all the initiatives a corporate office shoves down the throats of folks at the plant level. Even then, how bad could it be? I wasn’t afraid of work, and what could possibly go wrong in rolling out a new way of doing things with folks who had worked there longer than I had been alive, with no authority or support from the ones who had authority?

My first day in this new position was the day I returned to work after our honeymoon. Talk about cramming multiple life changes into a short period of time, wow! Buying our first home, planning and going through with a wedding, and taking on a new job that I was barely qualified for, all within six months… In this case, ignorance truly was bliss. I didn’t recognize how significant any of those really were - let alone all of them together - to experience the fear that I probably should have.

The first few weeks in the role were filled with training and preparation. By early June of 2000, the rubber had to meet the road. In Leveraging Leadership Growth: Strength Through Great Professional Relationships, I included a full chapter on the importance of “Influence Over Authority” and shared a story about one of the first sessions I attempted to lead rolling that 5S initiative out with a small group of folks I had worked side-by-side with just weeks before. One of them was clowning around, like he did every other day I had been around him, and I flexed the authority I mistakenly thought I carried in this new position. The moments that followed, let’s call that a learning opportunity. While so much of my new responsibility was outside my comfort zone, this was the first real adversity I encountered. Although brief, our exchange was more than a little heated. But that gave me the chance to own the role in my failure, search for the hidden seed, and identify a few decisions I’d need to make to have a shot at being successful in this new role and grow beyond it in the future. All too often, cumulative unchecked habits turn minor bad situations into major roadblocks. Recognizing the pattern is key to extracting leadership lessons in accountability. Recognizing the pattern is just the starting point, though. Then we have to execute on our decisions. We’ll dig into that next. Before that, identify one habit you can track over the next few days and note its specific impacts on your work or life to build awareness.