Manufacturing leadership has fundamentally changed over the last 10 years. According to McKinsey and Co., in the past, leaders have had to manage roughly four or five critical issues at any one given time. Today, leaders face about double that daily.
CEOs have evolved from distant figureheads to hands-on visionary leaders who must look ahead, drive execution, and foster cross-functional collaboration. This increased involvement across diverse areas demands greater nimbleness and agility to achieve high performance.
Leaders are finding themselves in a sink or swim situation. As the industry continues to change at lightning speed, moving beyond Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0 and with different generations presenting different ways of responding to change and prioritising different values, manufacturing leaders must adapt to remain competitive.
Tomorrow’s agile, data-driven leader is for the people
If agile leadership acts as a lever of success and drives innovation, growth, and resilience, then data-driven insights empower executives to choose their strategy and investments in these areas and throughout the business. Effective CEOs and C-Suites recognise that they cannot succeed alone. The classic manufacturing leadership style that used to be autocratic and siloed simply doesn’t work anymore. Forbes reports that this laissez-faire management style can be a career killer because it allows for the leader to make all major decisions with little input from employees. And this is what we have also witnessed.
Challenges leaders are experiencing
It is widely reported that workforces are more stressed, anxious and fatigued than ever, but a recent study revealed that leaders are also experiencing greater levels of stress. According to the Development Dimensions International, Inc. (DDI) research, 71 per cent of leaders report heightened stress, and 54 per cent of this group worry about impending burnout.
So, what’s keeping these business leaders up at night? Finding and keeping talent remains a top challenge for industry leaders and another top concern involves data management. According to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) latest whitepaper, the vast majority of manufacturers (86 per cent) that leveraging it will be “essential” to their competitiveness.
Change fatigue is also a massive obstacle to success; it greatly affects teams, meaning that CEOs and all executives must ensure their teams are safe from burnout. But informed CEOs who use advanced analytics can see exactly where their business needs to improve, allowing for greater control over change management.
The core three pillars that define today’s manufacturing leadership excellence
The good news is that leaders can turn these core challenges into opportunities; they just need to focus on the following three key areas:
1. Data-driven decision-making; leveraging insights to transform performance
In today’s hyperconnected world, manufacturing operations have become much more technologically advanced and connected. On the one hand, technology has been an enabler of business transformation and growth; however, on the other, making sense of the influx of new data often creates additional complexities.
Leaders are struggling to unlock critical insights because they don’t have the right solutions or advanced analytics to help them see business vulnerabilities. But leaders can now access robust advanced analytics, which can help them to overcome these obstacles. Data-driven insights separate businesses from mediocrity and outstanding performance, which underscores that leaders who embrace data-driven decision making as one of their core strengths will do well in the years ahead. Now, they can uncover inefficiencies, hidden problems, address bottlenecks or issues surrounding an unprofitable production line, seamlessly with the right solutions in place.
2. Promoting a people-centric culture; ensure that talent is developed and retained
Although the industry is becoming more digitised and technologically advanced, manufacturing leaders need to direct as much care and attention to their people decisions as to their technology decisions. This is especially important given the industry’s widening talent gap and deepening talent and skills shortages that are being felt across the globe.
According to a recent Deloitte study, 3.8 million net new employees are required by 2033 to meet labour demands. Smart manufacturing will be pivotal in addressing this gap by fostering a people-centric approach – creating more engaging, higher-skilled jobs and using data to inform decisions with tools like XIRI-Analytics. Most manufacturing professionals (85 per cent) surveyed believe that adopting smart manufacturing can help and that these initiatives will attract top talent, as reported by Deloitte.
To build a people-centric culture, honing communications skills is critical. According to Staffbase, a global communications platform provider, to effectively engage your manufacturing employees, two-way communication is essential as is modernising communication channels while promoting leadership visibility to boost trust. Embracing cutting-edge technology, like advanced analytics platforms, will also help attract workers, especially tech savvy Gen Z, who prioritises technology use.
3. Adopting an agile mindset; adapting quickly to market, tech, and environmental changes
Agile manufacturing has been an effective tool for the industry for over 20 years. However, the agile mindset is becoming a non-negotiable in leadership.
According to Forbes, while agile leadership drives innovation, growth, and resilience, it can be hard to master. As a case study, Lior Pozin, the 29-year-old Co-founder and CEO of AutoDS, used this leadership style to build his drop shipping automation platform business, which processes over $200 million in transactions annually. He said that “calculated risks and experimentation are the backbone of innovation,” but in our experience, businesses can only take these risks if they have the insights and argument to ensure the risk will pay off in the end.
Modern manufacturing leaders recognise the value of advanced analytics
In the new world order of manufacturing, top-performing organisations will be data-driven. Manufacturing leaders cannot afford to wait to leverage advanced analytics, particularly in a sector that is one of the top data-generating sectors globally. Through analytics, they can drive transformation, address inefficiencies, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. This new knowledge can also be used as a “why” when informing the workforce of new initiatives, ensuring your team is empowered and that your business makes facts-based decisions.
INCIT’s XIRI-Analytics platform was crafted to solve this key challenge for manufacturing leaders. With INCIT’s solution, they can transform their manufacturing business by unlocking new data points once hidden. The new deep insights they gain can be used to identify core inefficiencies and can be used within the platform to see how they benchmark globally against industry peers. To learn more about how manufacturers can leverage advanced analytics to unlock data-driven insights through INCIT’s XIRI-Analytics, visit our INCIT-website.
