Are You Leading Your Shop—or Getting in Its Way? | Ep. 56

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Nobody outworks me. If that’s part of how you see yourself, this episode is going to sting a little. Greg Harrod’s spent 30 plus years in and around manufacturing, and he coaches leaders who feel like everything still runs through them. His point is that the grit that built your shop is the same grit that eventually caps it.

We spent a good chunk of this one on a distinction I hadn’t thought about carefully enough. What someone is good at and what someone enjoys are not the same thing. You get rewarded for what you’re good at, so you get handed more of it, and you can be sliding toward burnout in plain sight while everyone around you says you’re doing great work.

I told Greg about Miguel, who came to us pushing a broom, became an average machinist, and kept quietly fixing processes nobody asked him to fix. He’s on our management team now as our lean champion. He hasn’t touched a machine in a year, he’s making more money, and our operations run better for it. That only happened because we paid attention and then had the conversation.

If you’ve been sitting between a million and a half and two and a half million in revenue for a few years, Greg’s first question isn’t what to hire. It’s whether you’ve actually optimized the people already on your payroll, and what you’re optimizing for in the first place. Growth isn’t automatically the right answer. Staying where you are is a legitimate choice, as long as you make it on purpose.

We also get into org charts, why job descriptions go obsolete, how I’ve been mapping responsibility across our entire value chain, and the question Greg closed with that I’m still chewing on. How long should a dropped ball stay dropped before somebody picks it up?

What’s Covered in this Episode

• (0:00) How long should a dropped ball stay dropped before somebody picks it up
• (2:05) Greg’s focus: helping leaders stop doing the work their team is ready to own
• (2:48) The grit that got you here is the same thing that turns you into the ceiling
• (4:31) Some of the work you do energizes you and some of it quietly drains you
• (5:56) You can stay on the shop floor and hire the business functions you don’t enjoy
• (7:11) Separate what someone is good at from what they enjoy, before you lose them to burnout
• (12:13) Repeatability, accessibility, scalability and the rest of RASRAM work holding from SMW Autoblock
• (12:56) The best leaders are the most self aware leaders
• (14:28) The WIDGET framework: wonder, invention, discernment, galvanizing, enablement, tenacity
• (18:06) Don’t tell me no, tell me how, and tell me what it costs to say yes
• (20:17) Get specific with your verbs, because own it can mean six different jobs
• (22:56) The simple signs that you have become the bottleneck
• (25:35) Lead with curiosity: have you actually optimized the people already on your team
• (29:34) Verdant Commercial Capital fits equipment financing to your goals and your cashflow at verdantcc.com/numbers
• (30:06) Give yourself permission to do the things that you enjoy (and delegate when you can)
• (32:33) Miguel went from saw operator to lean champion because somebody paid attention
• (40:12) Hire MFG Leaders is built by current and former shop owners at makingchips.com/hire
• (40:42) Job descriptions go obsolete—a shared language about how your team is wired doesn’t
• (47:37) Mapping responsibility across the value chain from quote request to invoice
• (54:26) The person who brings the right answer instead of the first answer

Resources Mentioned

• SMW Autoblok
• Verdant Commercial Capital
• Hire people who have actually run a shop with Hire MFG Leaders
• Find your own gap in about five minutes with the Leadership Clarity Scorecard
• The 6 Types of Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

Connect with Greg Harrod

• Greg’s website
• Leadership Clarity Scorecard
• Connect on LinkedIn