Making one of these mistakes can severely undermine your organization's maintenance department — and possibly your career.
1. Saving money at great cost
You can find all kinds of ways to save money; some of them are very costly. Consider a manufacturing plant in central Tennessee, where the plant controller denied a $17 purchase for the monthly water treatment chemicals for the cooling water circulating through the plant. When those pipes clogged up, important processes had to shut down. The repair bill was just over $15,000 and the revenue loss was in the six figures. This isn’t an electrical example, but it makes the point with a huge loss relative to what was saved.
Always perform some kind of analysis to determine the consequences of a particular cost cut or purchase avoidance. What do you think your analysis would conclude for saving money these ways:
- Opting for fluorescent luminaires instead of LEDs to make the lighting project cheaper.
- Going for the cheapest DMM.
- Removing the boxes of ear plugs just outside noisy areas.
- Selecting a base model infrared camera because it is the least expensive option.
These kinds of decisions are made not with logic but with fear. The person is afraid of investing to achieve the desired outcome. Your company made the investment in the plant, equipment, and personnel, so of course the company expects you to spend appropriately to protect that investment.
2. Losing your focus on the mission
A maintenance department exists to serve the production department. Its has three main missions, in this order:
- Ensure the safety of people and property from equipment failures, infrastructure problems, and the like.
- Protect the environment from events related to equipment malfunction or human error.
- Optimize the ability of the production department to get product out the door, with work prioritized by their needs. Typically, those needs are based on meeting delivery dates and on the high revenue generators. Learn what their needs are, and stay abreast of changes.
3. Permitting or engaging in negativity
Backbiting, gossip, complaining, and other negative behavior can sap the energy out of any organization. Often, the person engaging in them has a legitimate beef, but these behaviors won’t bring anyone closer to a solution.
With backbiting, the reason is usually the “offended” person doesn’t want to start a fight with the “offender.” So telling the “offender” directly seems like an insurmountable challenge. The reality is when a person is approached in a professional manner rather than being attacked, that person is unlikely to feel offended. Sometimes, a person just needs some honest feedback. It’s a sign of respect that you approach someone privately about something that’s bothering you rather than complain about them behind their back. Before you do anything, though, ask if it’s you who has the problem by letting this bother you in the first place.
4. Making and accepting excuses
rather than identifying and solving the problem. An excuse-making culture is a failure culture. An excuse is an attempt to divert blame to somewhere other than where the problem is. Excuses retard the learning process. You can’t learn from your mistakes unless you clearly identify how it is you failed at whatever it is you failed at. The person who is always late because “the traffic was bad” will never learn to leave earlier.
Excuses also prevent people from trying harder. If you have the attitude that you take full responsibility for your performance, you are going to perform much better than if you feel you can just whip out an excuse.
5. Letting the tail wag the dog
Don’t let minor things dominate your attention or your thinking. Don’t let minor issues drive maintenance decisions or practices. Don’t let the means be the ends.
Don’t, for example, spend your first two hours of the day answering emails and returning calls. Email and phone calls aren’t the job; they merely support the job. The same goes for meetings. Always think about the important things that need to get done today, and get the ball rolling on those right away. Allocate the bulk of your time to those tasks. If you don’t have enough time to get to all of your meetings, it’s the meetings that have to go rather than your key responsibilities. In many companies, meetings are the tail that wags the dog. Simply limiting each meeting to people who actually need to be there is a good first step to solving this problem.
