As the old song says, “People are people where ever they are.” Seems the Good Lord wired the vast majority of folks with a fairly keen sense of right and wrong, along with an innate ability to tell when they’ve been lied to by others.

Your workforce is no different. Employees will figure out who to trust really fast. They know when somebody is being sincere or if they are just feeding them a line. That is why the number one rule in labor relations is “DON’T LIE”. Always tell the truth.

A big mistake many managers make, however, is to adopt the line from the Jack Nicholas, Tom Cruse movie “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” Leaders sometime think that employees can’t deal with reality or that they will make bad assumptions so they tell them something different than the truth. Big mistake.

The manager that does this doesn’t think of it as a lie or manipulative but their employees do and their perception is reality. The leader who gets tagged as somebody that can’t be trusted will struggle working with the team from that point on.

Along with telling the truth, supervisors and managers have to be sincere. They have to say what they mean and mean what they say. It is a leaders ability to convey sincerity that determines their ability to inspire and lead their team. Often young managers will “rally” the troops around working hard to hit a number for the good of the cause but their delivery is so insincere that the team walks away jaded and resentful. The response is often a skeptical workforces who ends up wasting time speculating about what is really going on, as opposed to focusing on the task at hand.

Once an employee begins to question your motives, they start losing trust in what you do and say. There are a few rules to remember to avoid losing the trust of your team:

1. Treat people like you would want to be treated
2. Never lie to your team
3. Be sincere in all your dealings with people that you supervise
4. Treat your people like adults
5. Your actions will speak louder than your words so walk the talk at all times

If your leadership team lives by these five guidelines, you will have an organization that is built on trust and communicates in a healthy manner.  This doesn’t mean everyone will always agree or that you will never have conflicts.  You will.  These tough issues, however, will be much easier to deal with if your people trust what you are saying and believe that you really do care.

Always, sincerely, tell the truth.

If you had to choose one quote that is the foundation of managing any part of a supply chain, it would be “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Every operational area that involves people or product movement must be measured in digestible time increments.

Whether you are managing a transportation fleet, a million square foot distribution facility, a computer return center, or a liquidation facility, developing a way to measure productivity and inventory is THE critical step to driving bottom line performance.

Once you figure out how to measure an activity, you can set goals and drive for improvements.

The first facility I ran had no productivity measuring system and the workforce had no goals other than not to get hurt. For six months, the leadership team gathered information and experimented with how to capture data. Back then, we had no systems so everything was manual.

Once we figured out how to capture the data, we started telling the employees how they were doing, posting their individual results in the break room, and counseling people who were lagging behind the pack. After six month of communicating and tweaking the measuring process, we develop productivity goals for each area based on their previous productivity we tracked plus 15%. Along with this, we put in an incentive program to pay employees when they achieved the goal.

Within three years we had doubled productivity and improved quality to a 99.5% accuracy level. We also set a Walmart DC record for the most days without a lost time accident. That team was focused, motivated and we all shared in the rewards.

The bottom line was that everyone from the newest guy on the dock, to the department managers, ops managers, lift drivers and every other member new their numbers, every day. Everybody knew their productivity for the month, what the goal was, and what they had to do to get there.

If you develop a way to measure productivity for each job function and set up an incentive program where everyone wins, you’ll see process improvement in every area and you’ll reach productivity levels you could never imagine.

If you need to improve moral in your warehouse and wish your supervisors were better trained and prepared, set up a “Work Day” program.

“Work Days” are days when a supervisor shows up dressed like regular employees and they actually do the work, just like a normal employee. No meetings, no extra breaks, they just do the work. Supervisors and managers cover for each other so the manager or supervisor on a “Work Day” has their supervisory responsibilities taken care of.

Often, supply chain managers and supervisors never actually do the work that they are charged with overseeing. Requiring them to do the work will teach them more about their job than any class on leadership ever will. The employees love it also.

Supervisors will dread it and you will have to force them to do it, but soon they will see that they are more effective and their team is more cooperative than before. Don’t stop with the supervisors in an area. Require every manager to spend one day a month working in one area that they oversee.

This was a common practice at Walmart and it worked like a charm. Soon the supervisors were adding value by coming up with ideas for improvement, eliminated redundancies, and labor relations improved dramatically.

Setting up a program for management to rotate every month to complete Work Days is a best practice that shows immediate payoff.

Human Resources is one of the most important departments within any organization. HR responsibilities can range from policy administration, to hiring, to labor relations, benefits, and beyond. HR departments are like….. uh… noses.  Everyone has one but they can vary greatly.

My experience has been that there are three kinds of Human Resource Departments:

1. Bureaucratic – They are more interested in filling out the right form than they are helping people
2. Road Block – Their job is to stop management until they ask nicely and always remind everyone of the risk of a legal suit that the company will lose, through no fault of theirs.
3. Advocate – These HR professionals recognize that their job is to champion the cause of their employees and help management apply policies in a fair, firm, and consistent manner.

You often hear about the “culture” in a company.  The HR department has more to do with defining that culture than most think.  If they work WITH management to help them achieve their tactical and strategic goals, while filling their role as employee advocate, the culture will be norished and will thrive.

If Human Resources is contantly at odds with Operations or serves employees only by filing forms and effectively shutting the “open door”, the culture is undermined both in the board room and on the shop floor.

HR impacts every part of every organization.  If you have a “culture” issue in your company, look first at how the Human Resource Department interacts with the rest of the organization.  If there is no upward communications from the shop floor, or rampant law suits, or union organizing efforts going on, don’t ignore HR’s role in helping create the situation while on your way to fire the VP of Operations.

Human Resources must be your finger on the pulse of your people.  They have to maintain a balance between supporting management and “protecting” your employees from unfair decisions or work place abuse.  HR can be a company’s greatest tool or it’s weakest link.  Like everything else, it comes down to leadership.  If Human Resources is not walking the talk, you must take action or a ripple could turn into a tsunami.

The degree to which your leadership team excels at the three key leadership principles below, will determine whether labor relations in your organization are good or ill.

The three key principles to leadership and labor relations are:

1. Treat people like you want to be treated.
2. People don’t care how much you know, they want to know how much you care.
3. Treat all your people in a fair, firm, and consistent manner.

Organizations that live these three principles are easy to spot.  They are the winners.  Their customers are more satisfied.  Their employees are more productive, happier, and never leave.  They are the ones who drive innovation and their numbers are better in every way than their competition.  They achieve all of this because they live these principles from the board room to the shop floor and they don’t tolerate those who do not live these principles.

If I only had ten minutes to teach a room full of new supervisors anything, I would focus on these guiding principles.  If a leader understands and lives by these three tenents, they will perform optomally their entire career, regardless of the situations they may face.

Take a lesson from the Stanely Cup Champion Pittsburgh Penguins.  The key to turning around a poor operation, company, or situation always starts with leadership.  The Pens were not even in playoff contention when they fired their head coach and brought in Coach Dan Bylsma.

In his first season coaching the big leagues, Bylsma put in a new system, was steady as a rock regardless of the situation, took the shots from the media, and was the calm voice in every storm.  The result was Pittsburgh winning their third Stanely Cup with a team whose superstars did not score in the last three games.  The team won and they did it because the had the right guy at the helm.

I’ve been involved in many situations over the years where operations were not performing like they should, or the employees didn’t feel like they were being treated like adults, etc. and every time, the issue was leadership.  Good operations are like sports team.  It starts with the leader.   It is impossible to overcome poor leadership.  Likewise, you can overcome almost anything if you have the right person at the top.  Just ask the new Stanely Cup Champions Pittsburgh Penguins.

Many times, your employees will judge you not by how you deal with them but how they see you act when it doesn’t matter. Are you a law and order person on the floor but make fun of the boss in the break room? Do you make public proclamations about how you care, but mouth off to people in the bathroom?

Leaders have to be “on” all the time, because their people are always watching.