Weekly Insight – The Leadership Shadow

Every leader casts a shadow. Whether they realise it or not, their questions, priorities, and the way they run meetings shape the culture of the team around them. In my Asset Manager Growth program this idea is captured in the Leadership Shadow model. The culture people experience is largely a reflection of what leaders emphasise, measure, and discuss.

In maintenance teams, this becomes very visible in one simple place: What gets reported and discussed in meetings.

If daily meetings revolve around “What broke down yesterday?”, then that is the culture you will create. People will become very good at reporting breakdowns. But reporting breakdowns is not improvement.

In almost every maintenance team I have worked with, breakdowns are well captured and documented. At the end of every shift there are logs or reports completed that anyone can read. Whether they are digital or physical they will be there. Do we need another meeting to repeat what was already documented?

What we actually need is a culture that asks a different question: “What are we doing to eliminate the causes of breakdowns?”

Imagine a different style of meeting. Instead of superintendents reporting failures, they report:

• The actions they are taking to eliminate repeat failures or the failures that occurred since the last meeting
• The improvements they are implementing in their areas
• The learning from recent breakdowns and how they are preventing them from happening again and reinforcing good practice within their team

Very quickly, the focus of the team shifts. The conversation moves from reacting to failure to eliminating failure. Another important point of this adjustment that is often misunderstood. This responsibility does not sit with the reliability team.

Reliability engineers are a resource. They bring analysis tools, failure mode thinking, and technical support but the accountability for eliminating breakdowns sits with the area superintendents who own the equipment and the work execution. They are the ones who must drive the improvements in their areas, drawing on reliability expertise when needed. The reliability team leader should report on how they are assisting the execution teams.

When leaders structure meetings around improvement actions, they create a proactive culture. When they structure meetings around reporting problems, they reinforce a reactive culture and this brings us back to the leadership shadow.

Your team will focus on what you, the maintenance manager, focuses on.

So here is the self-reflection for maintenance leaders this week: What questions are you asking in your daily and weekly meetings? What are you measuring? Are these questions and metrics creating improvement or reporting of what happened? When you change the conversation, the culture begins to change.