Manufacture Your Own Greatness: 3 Lessons From Our New Name

Last month, we made a big announcement: Operations Kickstart is now Manufacturing Greatness! This new name symbolizes our mission of guiding manufacturing teams into greatness by bridging disconnect, fostering curious dialogues, and sharing the tools for finding stronger leadership and more productive outcomes.

Are you ready to manufacture greatness in your own organization? Here are three simple, actionable lessons you can learn from our new name and logo!

Three Lessons for Manufacturing Greatness

Lesson #1: Care Deeply

To manufacture greatness, you must care about how you show up. Think about others and how your actions impact them. By being intentional about your behavior and how you show up every day, you can find the path toward productive results, improved relationships, and a decreased disconnect. This is symbolized by the heart in the logo.

Lesson #2: Develop Your Skills

Connection is a skill. It takes time and practice to develop the ability to connect with others in an authentic way. To build your connection skills, treat it like you’d treat the process of building a technical skill. Stay curious and stay willing to shift your mindset and learn from new perspectives. The importance of connection and other emotional intelligence is why we include a brain as well as a heart in our logo!

Lesson #3: Be Intentional

This lesson is right in our name! With the right heart and emotional intelligence, we can lead with intention. Our intentions don’t always align with how others perceive us, but by using our hearts and minds to change how we show up, WE can all manufacture greatness!

Learn More with Manufacturing Greatness

We’re excited to keep helping others improve their organizations by connecting the top to the shop floor! To learn how we can help you and your team, contact us here.

Mindfulness Manufacturing

Our show is about providing listeners with real stories that come from a place of experience, transparency, and authenticity. Most importantly it’s about what we learn from these stories and applying Mindfulness in our everyday work and personal lives.
Our intention is to create an environment where people can learn through open honest discussions on how we apply Mindfulness. Although our experiences and stories come from time in a manufacturing environment hence the title “Mindfulness Manufacturing”, we still see our discussions and topics relatable to any organization or profession.

When a mistake occurs on the plant floor, your mind might jump to one question: who caused this issue, and should I write them up for their mistake? But there’s a more productive approach you could be taking—and in this episode of Mindfulness Manufacturing, guest Dr. Jake Mazulewicz breaks it all down!

With a background as a firefighter, EMT, and military paratrooper, Jake knows the challenges of high-hazard industries, and works with organizations to reduce errors and create safer, more reliable workplace environments. In this episode, Jake shares why you can’t procedularize everything, including the way you handle errors and accidents, and offers great insights and stories about how to use connection and curiosity to improve safety, address errors, and strengthen your organization.

3:35 – Procedures and policies are the work that is imagined, and on the floor is how the work actually gets done

4:19 – The work as-done is almost always radically different than the work as-imagined

5:20 – Even when you have standards and people show up wanting to do a good job, you can still see issues that need to be addressed

6:44 – There will always be areas that absolutely need to have procedures in place

8:02 – There are also adaptive jobs, which leans less into procedures and more intro troubleshooting and tacit human knowledge

10:56 – In an ideal environment, both mechanistic and adaptive models are used and respected and needed

12:11 – There are four levels, ranging from strict procedurals to looser guidelines that show what to do, but not how to do it

15:36 – Tacit knowledge gets shared through conversations

16:22 – A way to share important information is to have frontline experts record videos sharing their insights to problems, especially those that are not covered in procedures

19:44 – Through conversation and connection, more knowledge is shared

21:58 – Debriefing also plays a central role

23:45 – If you have strong discipline, you’ll find more freedom

25:31 – In most situations, errors are signals, not defects

27:07 – When an error occurs, be curious and find the deeper cause of the problem

Connect with Jake Mazulewicz

Find him on Linkedin

Visit his website