Why Team Members are the Biggest Obstacle to Success in our Heat Treatment Facilities

He didn’t have the ability to heat metal to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, but Henry Ford understood a challenge every heat treatment business faces. He famously said when giving advice to leaders, obstacles are the frightful things seen when we take our eyes off a goal.

That advice is still true 100 years later, and applies more than ever to heat treatment businesses. As I interview leaders across the largest companies on the planet, I’m told that goals don’t fail in the boardroom — they fail in execution when obstacles get in the way.

Great goals aren’t enough to ensure success in heat treatment; it’s achieving them even in the face of obstacles that matter.

The first step in overcoming obstacles, many of us are told, is to ensure goals are clearly communicated. Sharing goals across our heat treatment business is only part of the answer, however. To ensure those goals can overcome inevitable obstacles, we need to ask another question: How deep do our goals go?

As part of my work studying teams within the Department of Defense, I was often sent in after a dangerous mission concluded to discover how they achieved success. A question I always asked senior military leaders:

“How did you communicate your objective – your goal – to overcome obstacles?”

They would often respond with a message many heat treatment leaders understand: “Communicating goals across teams doesn’t ensure they’re achieved.”

In order to achieve something that hadn’t been done before, military leaders had to look at their goals in a new way, and so do we in the heat treatment industry.

The military’s mission objectives go deep. Why? The first obstacle any goal encounters isn’t resources or competitors — it's the people responsible for executing it.

Whether you’re leading a team of hundreds or less than a dozen, here’s how to make sure the people in your heat treatment business aren’t an obstacle to success:

1) Define success for the business

When establishing goals for your heat treatment business, start with gathering your folks together and getting agreement on what success looks like. Too many goals are missed because team members are driving what they think their goal is and never get alignment across their organization. 

Does everyone in your organization understand what success looks like when it’s achieved? Is it simply operating safely? Is it ensuring every item that passes through your heat treatment process meets specifications? Is it a combination of those and other items?

2) Define success for the team

One of the biggest challenges with achieving goals in any business is competing priorities. As leaders, we need to ensure each department’s goals don’t conflict with the goals of another department or the overall goals of our business.

The quickest way for any employee in a heat treatment facility to disengage is for them to see people on their own team working against them. Can your departments and shifts work together, or do their goals or culture conflict with one another?

3) Define success for the individual

Once we’ve worked with our teams to define success for the business and its departments, it’s time to confirm what goals look like for individuals. Having a clear definition of individual success is a great way to attract and retain top talent and younger employees — high performers love being held accountable to, and working hard towards a clearly-defined objective.

Does each person in your organization understand what they’re responsible for achieving, to what standards, and by when?

Sharing a goal across your heat treatment facility only ensures we reach leaders. To get everyone on board, ensure goals reach every member of your team as well.

Written by:  Shawn Rhodes, nationally-syndicated columnist and professional keynote speaker (keynoting MTI’s 2022 Spring National Meeting).