A Job Done Well - Making Work Better

Managing Work Effectively - Insights From Hugh Alley

• Jimmy Barber, James Lawther and Hugh Alley • Season 1 • Episode 26

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Were you taught how to manage the work? 
 
 We are all trained on the technical aspects of a job and the leadership of a team, but we are rarely taught how to manage the actual work. Managing work is vital whether you're a first-line manager or running the country! To provide valuable insights on the best way to manage and improve your teams and their work, we are lucky to have Hugh Alley, a successful author who has trained over 1,000 supervisors in his time, as this week's guest.
 
 Hugh shares the background and structure of 'Training Within Industry', which has the potential to dramatically improve team performance.
 
 Enjoy this conversation with Hugh, and you will join us in wondering why nobody taught us this before.

Find out more from Hugh's books, Becoming the Supervisor or The TWI Memory Jogger, or drop us a note at jimmy@ajobdonewell.com or james@ajobdonewell.com

Got a question - get in touch. Click here.

James:

hello, I'm James.

Jimmy:

Hi, I'm Jimmy.

James:

Welcome to A Job Done Well,

Jimmy:

the podcast about the world of work and how to improve the daily grind

James:

good morning. Welcome to A Job Done Well. Slightly different today. We have a guest speaker. We have gone international.

Jimmy:

Very exciting.

James:

So we have got Hugh Alley, all the way from Canada. Good morning, Hugh.

Hugh:

It took a long time to travel across the Atlantic, but I'm here and delighted.

James:

What are we going to talk to you about today then Hugh?

Hugh:

Well, I thought we'd talk about trying to be a good supervisor.

James:

So we were talking about this before and Jimmy is, not sure what relevance is. So go on then, Jimmy, just explain your.

Jimmy:

Yeah, I guess what we were discussing you is the interchangeability between, supervisor, manager, leader. So from your perspective, how would you describe a supervisor?

Hugh:

Well, I think I like the, definition that a supervisor is anyone who is responsible for or who manages the work of others.

James:

A first line manager is maybe the way we would discuss.

Hugh:

So I think that's right. It's it's first line managers. And, but, you know, the underlying skills at that level apply all the way up.

Jimmy:

It does. And I was saying to James, I heard a very interesting quote the other day that was about Tony Blair, who's a former Prime Minister of the UK for many years. And he, they were saying that he was a fantastic leader of the country, but he was a less good as a manager of the process of government. And I get your point. It applies with your first line manager in you know, any, organization where work is done and you've got to manage work, but it applies. And, a senior level and exec level right up to if you're the prime minister, you have to manage the work. So I think that's, you know, just good context for when we started talking. It was like, well, I don't quite understand why this is interesting to me or to our audience. And then you start to think about it. So, of course, it is. and Often, you're not really that well trained to manage work.

Hugh:

Absolutely. Jimmy, I saw some statistics, you know, statistics will, say like, as you have said in one of your previous programs.

Jimmy:

James is an analyst. He's used to manipulating statistics.

Hugh:

But the two that really struck me was that. 60 percent of frontline leaders have had no training in how to do their leading role. And of those that have, most of them didn't get it until they'd been in their job for 10 years.

James:

people get very excited about people management, but it's very rare that people talk about managing work.

Jimmy:

So it's very, very lucky to have you with us, Hugh. But for our audience, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Hugh:

Sure. So I'm an industrial engineer by training. I've had a pretty eclectic career. One workplace early in my career was really toxic. And it was an eye opener for me, how bad a really relationships could be And then I became a manager. And it turns out, I was a really poor supervisor. So bad that my staff weren't willing to tell me how bad I was.

James:

People tend to get promoted. Because they're good at their job, but being good at your job doesn't necessarily make you a good manager.

Hugh:

Well, exactly, James, because if you think about it, if you're a carpenter, knowing how to do framing is one thing. But knowing how to manage people is a whole different thing. You know, somebody's not performing well on the job, what do you do with them?

James:

Absolutely. So you started as a boss, your first job, first management job, and you came to the conclusion you weren't really very good at it.

Hugh:

That's right. And so some years later I was invited by a friend of mine to come and be the operations manager of his his company. And very soon into it, I realized that the supervisors and team leads that I had reporting to me didn't know how to do their job. And so I went looking around and got introduced to a program called training within industry. Often known as TWI. And that changed my world. I suddenly had a way. To articulate the skills that I needed those people in leadership roles in the facility to use. And I got a lot better and so did my team. We saw things like 10 percent productivity gains a year. across the company. Lead time going down by 25% in two years.

James:

and that's interesting hug.'cause one of the things that, I mean, Jimmy and I will, we'll talk about, transformational results without the transformational costs. What we see a lot of is, people thinking they have to invest in, IT systems and big projects. But we really believe you can get those sort of improvements without going into that level of investment.

Hugh:

Oh, absolutely. So, I've written a couple of books about being a frontline leader. And I divide my time now between training supervisors, frontline leaders, and coaching senior operations people on continuous improvement.

James:

And we will put a link to those things in the podcast notes. So if anybody's interested and wants to see your book, they should be able to do it.

Jimmy:

And how many leaders have you trained in your time, Hugh, roughly?

Hugh:

It's well over a thousand now.

Jimmy:

Wow. So In terms of your experience, you know what you're talking about in terms of training people, how to be good managers,

Hugh:

And so often what I see is. that people who've got 10, 15 years of experience, they learn these skills and they, they say, where was this 10 years ago or 15 years ago when I started my life has been so much easier..

Jimmy:

And in essence, you, that's kind of the reason why we invited you on to our podcast, like I say, it's not something that often is taught, if I think back, I, did various exec jobs, I'm struggling to think back to when somebody taught me how to manage the work

James:

So let's talk a bit about TWI then. Could you give, give us a little bit of history? What is TWI and where did it come from?

Hugh:

TWI started in the U. S. in just before World War II. The Americans were looking around at the world politics and saying, World War II is coming. And While the fight might not be on our soil our job is going to be to supply the material, the planes and tanks and ships and stuff. And the first pressing issue they had was that it takes way too long to train people using the conventional models for training. And so they needed to resolve that. And the second pressing issue they realized was that all the people who were currently leaders in industrial settings were likely to enlist.

James:

So the workforce would shrink quite dramatically.

Hugh:

Right. And so the people that were coming into the work for workplace to replace them had never been in an industrial setting before. Yeah. They had no skills. And not only did they have no skills. For the technical stuff. They had no leadership skills either.

James:

So it was your classic sort of staff shortages, but on a major scale.

Hugh:

Exactly. And, it was a pressing issue to solve because there was a war about to happen. And what they did is found four gentlemen who had been involved in the late part of world war one rethinking industrial training.. And they trained over 2 million superzo, supervisors.

James:

All right. So not, not a small problem. So the elements of TWI then, so there were what? Three parts to it. If I.

Hugh:

Three major parts. One is around, how do you train somebody? To do a job correctly, and they called that job instruction. The second major skill area was how do you supervise your people? How do you build the performance in your team? And that was called job relations.

James:

okay, which is the sort of classic HR stuff that we will be taught anyway or not?

Hugh:

Well, often not, because if you go onto the web and say, HR training for leaders. What you get is how to deal with grievances and with the union and all the legally required compliance things about safety and so on. All of which are useful, but they don't actually address the question of how do you create a workplace where there's a good relationship. Okay. third one was, how do you actually improve the work? And they called that job methods. So we've got job instruction, job relation and job methods. And the intent of job methods was to say, look, if you're a frontline leader, there's stuff within your sphere of command that you can change that makes the work go easier.

James:

I think that's really interesting because I think, certainly in the UK, that a lot of front line manager supervisor training really is about managing the status quo. Yeah. And we rarely talk about making it better.

Jimmy:

Well, I mean, it's one of the things you say a lot, James, which is you have two jobs. One is do your job and one is improve your job. And I don't think it's often. Yeah, he says that. I'm not sure that's because he was either A, listening or B, I'm very repetitive, but we'll repeat it enough times that he's got through. We'll move on and we'll start to talk about the three parts, but before we do that, we'll just have a word from our sponsors.

James:

We cover a whole host of topics on this

Jimmy:

Purpose to corporate jargon.

James:

but always focused on one thing, getting the job done well.

Jimmy:

Easier said than done. So, If you've got Unhappy customers or employees Bosses or regulators Breathing down your neck

James:

of control and your costs are spiraling and that big IT transformation project that you've been promised just keeps failing to deliver. So

Jimmy:

Can help if you need to improve your performance, your team's performance, or your organization's. Get in touch at jimmy at jobdonewell. com

James:

Or james at jobdonewell. com.

Jimmy:

Job instruction then so explain that to us.

Hugh:

So if you think about most training that you see happen in the workplace It amounts to the supervisor coming along to this staff person who needs to know the needs to know this new job. And they say, Oh, one of two things happens. They say, Oh, there's Jimmy. Go watch what Jimmy's and then have at her.

James:

But if you do that Then of course you get the trainer training the trainer training the trainer training the trainer and it's a bit like taking a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy and the whole thing just disappears.

Hugh:

And any of Jimmy's bad habits, and I'm sure you don't have any, but maybe

Jimmy:

God forbid, Hugh.

Hugh:

Yes, but, but somebody with your name has some, and they just passed on, right? And any of the mistakes that Jimmy regularly makes, The person learning is going to make those and Jimmy may actually be a really good worker and may make no mistakes. But maybe a lousy teacher, and so the details get lost don't get lost on the other possibility is that the supervisor so the problem is that You Anytime we're starting a new thing, we don't get it right at the start. The evidence in the industrial engineering literature is that you need eight to 10 repetitions or something like that. What job instruction does is organizes the information in a very specific way. It says you've got important steps, what you have to do next. And then you have key points, how should you do that step to succeed. And then you have reasons. And so now you've got some structure to, to do that.

James:

but a lot of this presumably who is actually going to the effort of understanding what those key steps are. Reasons are.

Hugh:

Yes, absolutely. Because. If we go out and watch three people doing a particular job, we'll probably see three different ways of it being done. You got to say, well, which one is the best one

James:

so, job instruction then is a framework for being very clear about what it is that people need to do, but going through the, and this is what our current best way of doing it is.

Hugh:

It is, and you do it with repetition, so the first time you show the job to somebody, you just show it to them, and then the second time you show it to them, you show them and tell them the important steps, and the third time you show that to them, it's, Important steps and key points. Yeah. And you can guess the last time through showing them important steps, key points and reasons. Yeah. So now they've seen it four times. That helps. Yeah. And they've had it build up and then you get them to do the same sequence. Okay. Show it to me once. Now show it to me again and tell me the important steps. Now, do it again. Tell me the important steps and key points. And then the last time, tell me the important steps, key points, and reasons.

James:

But it's a bit like that whole thing about the best way to learn how to do something is to teach it.

Hugh:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

James:

So that's job instruction. What about job relations?

Hugh:

So job relations has two parts. One is how do you create a workplace that the relationship is good? And it is things that you've talked about on your podcast before. Simple things like tell people how they're doing. You did did a whole episode, I think, on feedback. And tell people how they're doing good and bad. Second thing, give credit where it's due. And you've talked about the, that on your, on your episodes. Third is let people know in advance what's going to affect them, the changes that are coming. And the fourth one is make best use of everyone's skills. So, if you have a frontline leader who does those things, on an ongoing basis, and they don't take a lot of time, right? It's not, it's not an onerous thing. But if you do that, you build a situation where people feel like they're recognized, they know what the score is, and they know that they're going to have opportunity.

James:

You know, I don't think I have ever And I've been on a lot of training courses. I've never been on a training course where somebody said to me, do you know, James, it's a good thing to say thank you to people when they do something. so for all our courses, we kind of miss out on some of the really basic stuff.

Jimmy:

And that's the thing is we go into advanced models, psychological models about how you lead people and how you deal with some of these things are so basic. We just skip over them. Well, actually, you know, like you say that just thanking people for doing a job. Well, that's so basic. It's just good manners. We'd all think it, but I bet you could go into most workplaces and find it doesn't happen. I have plenty of managers who don't say Anyway. So, but it really is. So it's a little bit of basic people skills, but if nobody's taught you, you don't know. Yeah, because it's easy for me to say, well, that's really flipping obvious, but it is really flipping obvious 33 years later. Yeah. I've been around that loop, but it wasn't obvious in my first, second or third year.

Hugh:

And, and what's interesting, I remember last year I was training some people in job relations and The supervisors were actually nervous. They were afraid of what would happen when they gave people feedback. And I, and I said, okay, just find one person who's done one thing that you like, just a little thing and tell them. And they came back the next session, they were gobsmacked at how well it had been received. People's faces lit up because they, somebody said, Oh, we liked the job you did. They changed the workplace. That particular company went from 60 percent turnover a year to 10 percent turnover a year in five months.

James:

And that's big money. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not just about dealing with people. There is a process, isn't there, for when you've got an issue, how to address an issue.

Hugh:

Right. So that's the second piece of it. So there's a four step method for it. Get the facts, weigh and decide, take action and check results. And there's more detail to it. the effect of having that methodical process for a supervisor, most of them don't know how to do it. what I see consistently when people learn this is these frontline leaders have this huge sense of relief.,

Jimmy:

I'm just going to agree that I think when you're, a leader and you've got teams to manage and problems arise, quite often people don't deal with them quickly. Because they don't know how to, and so what they find is that instead of dealing with a small problem that could be managed quite easily, you're dealing with something that festers away, and I've seen organizations and teams go on massive restructuring programs just because they let some behaviors fester, and then they become a big deal, and the only way of dealing with it is With a big solution. Whereas I think your point about it, get the facts way up and decide, take action, follow up and check that that sort of stuff. That's just really straightforward. And everyone can get their heads around those steps and that will have a better output for them.

James:

All right. And then so the final bit job methods then so what's that.

Hugh:

So, that said, the approach there is to recognize that the current way of doing things. has emerged from a whole bunch of choices and decisions over time. You know, the products change, the suppliers change, the parts change, volumes change, people have changed. And so the current way of doing things Is has sort of emerged rather than been thought through. then the question is, well, can we do it any better? And the answer is inherently yes. But how do we get there? And so, it's around looking at the job in really excruciating detail. And then you, so now you've got this list of details, and now you can say, well, what's the purpose of this particular detail? Yeah. Like, what are we trying to accomplish from it? Is this the best place to do it? It's the best sequence place in the sequence. Is it the best? Are we using the best tools for it? Is it the right person? Yeah, it could be somebody else in the line doing it. And so you ask these questions of all these details. And typically what you find is about anywhere from 10 to 20%. You can just eliminate and eliminating work is good, especially when it's not helping. Yeah, and and then there's another 30 or 40 percent that, Yeah. On a first blush, ordinary people can say, Oh, there's a better way to do that.

James:

And to be honest with you, I really buy this because we find a lot that people don't question what they do. It's the, all you have to do is stick it. Well, I'm a big fan of a brown paper and post it notes. It's effectively the same thing. It's been very clear about what is it that you are doing and does it make sense or not?

Jimmy:

I think the other thing that we've, we observe a lot is when you go into organizations. Everyone has a different way of doing it, so you don't figure out the one best way of doing it, and then share that, and then improve on that, and share it, it's, there'll be 30 different ways, 100 different ways, you know, depending on the number of people, that's the number of ways there are of doing a job.

Hugh:

Pretty much,

James:

You develop a new way of doing it. The thing I Struggle or have struggled with quite a lot is a lot of managers don't let people do that. They're sort of scared of what the outcomes are. Does TWI address that or is that just

Hugh:

So, a key point in the process is to you find low cost ways to try something. I have a very good friend who talks about, in a, a physical plant. It's cardboard and duct tape before wood and screws, before steel and welding.

James:

Ah, yeah, but we have that, in the service industry, which is you've got to jump to forcing an all dancing IT solution, yeah, where you should be much better off with a tick sheet or maybe a macro, which is exactly the same principle. Yeah, totally get that.

Hugh:

So, so you try it to see if it works. And then if it works, okay, now let's build it. So it's a little more permanent.

James:

So you've got these three things, job instruction, job relations, and job methods, but isn't it really just management 101. Yeah. Tell me something. I don't know what why does it take people so long to get to this point do you think?

Hugh:

We'll go back to your comment that people get their job because they were good at doing the work

James:

but it is, yeah, it is interesting. We do talk a lot about leadership skills. Teaching technical skills, but we don't actually teach people how to manage the work.

Hugh:

Well and and think about our What we get I don't know about the UK but in Canada where I live When you go to public school, it's all about getting the right answer. Yeah about Figuring out how you could do the work better.

James:

No, you're absolutely right. It's interesting you say that. My daughter's doing her GCSEs at the moment, which is the exams you do when you're 16. And they teach to the test. Yeah, exactly that. There is a right answer.

Hugh:

Right. And so, if you're in a world where there's a right answer, you've been trained for, well, 10 years, 12 years, To do produce the right answer. You've not been trained to think about how you might do something better. Better answer is

Jimmy:

there is one answer. It's the right answer. And actually, I'm actually worse than that because in schools in the UK, they teach you that there's a right answer and there's a right method for figuring out that answer. And if you find a different method, even if you come up with the right answer, they will still criticize you do that for many, many years, you lose the ability. And the desire and the instinct to improve things, because that's just not how you're taught.

James:

So this is all very straightforward. What sort of benefits do people see when they put this into practice then?

Hugh:

So there was a study done of 600 companies that used the training within industry model. All of them saw 25 percent reduction in their training time. Okay. Yeah. All of them saw at least a 25 percent reduction in their grievances. Yeah. Over 85 percent of them saw at least a 25 percent improvement in both production and productivity. Yeah. Wow. So, so not just that they produced more, but they produced more with fewer people.

James:

Right. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So double whammy on it. Yeah. Yeah. Right, so you're talking almost, so if so, because most managers they get very excited about cost, but you're almost talking about 50 percent cost reduction there. Heading that way. Yeah. Yeah. That's just about managing the work properly.

Jimmy:

Yeah, which is still amazes me, back to the point, mate. So this is some basic stuff. We're not taught to manage the work. When you manage the work and you've provided us with a really, great structure for you for thinking about that, you get results that you can't get anywhere else. But yet still, we don't teach people how to manage the work.

James:

So if we wanted to find out more, Where would we find out more? Where should we go looking?

Hugh:

Well without wanting to be too self serving,

Jimmy:

You've written two books, Hugh, let's hear you go on.

Hugh:

Yes, I've written two books. One's called Becoming the Supervisor and it is really, it's written as a novel and, and describes a young supervisor's learning these core skills. And the other is a book called the TWI Memory Jogger, and it's a more detailed sort of granular analysis of all the elements of using it. There's a fellow in the the UK who runs something called the Supervisor Academy. And so Dennis Becker is pretty competent fellow and and he would be somebody that your, your local audience could reach fairly easily in the US. There are a whole bunch of people appointed the TWI Institute and there's a website which we can maybe put in the show notes that would be a link to their information about training within industry.

James:

And presumably, if off the back of this podcast, we can get you a multi million pound contract, you would fly over, would you? It doesn't even have to be multi million. It's a single million. Excellent.

Jimmy:

But in fairness, I really appreciate you going through this stuff with us, Hugh, because I know when we started talking, I was questioning, like, I've not been a supervisor. I don't, why do I need to know this? And then, like you say, you do figure out, actually, this is about managing work. And actually, we all do that, whether we're a first line manager or the Prime Minister of the UK, you have to manage work. We're not trained in it. You've given us some really simple ways of thinking about it and it yields stunning results and it's, it's definitely an underutilized capability that people can build.

James:

Yeah. Very good. Thank you very much. Very helpful.

Hugh:

It has been my pleasure. So I think that's the end of that episode. Thank you very much for your time, everybody. I hope you have a super week. Thanks everyone. Speak to you soon. Goodbye, Hugh. Goodbye, James. Goodbye, Jimmy.

Jimmy:

If you'd like to find out more about how James and I can help your business, then have a look at our website at ajobdonewell.Com.

People on this episode

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James Lawther

Co-host
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Jimmy Barber

Co-host
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Hugh Alley

Guest