8.3 Leadership, Performance Management & SMRP Ethics

Leadership, Performance Management & SMRP Ethics

Quick Answer: CMRP Function 4.5 covers leadership development, performance assessment, cooperation, and communication. Effective leaders clarify outcomes and decision rights, provide resources, invite accurate reporting, coach performance, and follow the SMRPCO Code of Ethics. No single named leadership style is correct for every situation.

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Leadership Approaches in Asset Management

Leadership affects whether people surface abnormal conditions, follow controlled work, learn from failure, and coordinate across Operations, Maintenance, Engineering, and EHS. Three commonly discussed approaches emphasize different mechanisms:

Transactional leadership

Transactional leadership establishes expectations, monitors results, and links consequences or rewards to performance. It can be useful where roles, permits, specifications, and response thresholds must be clear. Used narrowly, however, it can encourage people to optimize the measured target, withhold bad news, or treat compliance as the ceiling. Leaders should pair accountability with fair investigation and measures that do not reward unsafe shortcuts.

Transformational leadership

Transformational leadership connects work to a shared purpose, challenges outdated assumptions, and encourages improvement. In reliability work, that may mean explaining how accurate defect reporting protects coworkers and production, supporting controlled experiments, and recognizing preventive contributions. Vision without resources, technical discipline, or follow-through becomes rhetoric, so implementation evidence remains essential.

Servant leadership

Servant leadership emphasizes listening, developing people, and removing barriers that prevent good work. A maintenance leader may secure correct material, resolve access conflicts, protect time for planning or training, and defer to qualified technical knowledge. Service does not remove accountability: priorities, limits, escalation, and performance feedback still need to be explicit.

Select behavior for the situation

These approaches can coexist. A leader may use clear transactional controls for hazardous-energy procedures, transformational communication for a long-term defect-elimination program, and servant behaviors to remove field constraints. The useful question is not which label is superior, but which observable behavior the situation requires.

Leadership quality should be assessed through results and behaviors over time: whether controls work, concerns are reported, decisions are timely, commitments are honored, people demonstrate competence, and performance improves without transferring risk elsewhere.

Objective Performance Management & Balanced Scorecards

A universal maxim in asset management states: "Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave." Flawed performance metrics inevitably incentivize perverse, destructive behaviors.

The Metric Distortion Trap

• Over-emphasizing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR): If technicians are evaluated primarily on how quickly they close emergency work orders, they will slap temporary patches on machinery, skip proper laser alignment, reuse worn gaskets, and fail to clean oil sumps. The machine restarts quickly (rewarding MTTR), only to fail again 48 hours later.
• Over-emphasizing Estimated vs. Actual Hours on Planners: If planners are penalized whenever a 4-hour estimate takes 6 hours in the field, they will pad job estimates to 10 hours. Schedule density collapses, technician wrench time plunges, and plant labor productivity evaporates.

Balancing Leading and Lagging Performance Indicators

To drive genuine equipment reliability, organizations must construct a balanced appraisal scorecard that couples leading indicators (controllable process behaviors) with lagging indicators (bottom-line results):

┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐      ┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│         LEADING INDICATORS               │      │           LAGGING INDICATORS             │
│       (Predictive & Actionable)          │      │        (Outcome & Consequence)           │
├──────────────────────────────────────────┤      ├──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ • PM/PdM Schedule Compliance (>90%)      │      │ • Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)      │
│ • % Planned Work Orders (>80%)           │ ───> │ • Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)  │
│ • Craft Wrench Time Percentage (>50%)    │      │ • Maintenance Cost as % of ERV (<3.0%)   │
│ • Technician Job Plan Feedback Rate      │      │ • Unplanned Downtime Percentage (<10%)   │
│ • Proactive-to-Reactive Work Ratio (4:1) │      │ • Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR)  │
└──────────────────────────────────────────┘      └──────────────────────────────────────────┘

Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS)

Objective performance appraisals replace subjective supervisor biases ("good attitude," "team player") with Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS). BARS evaluates personnel against specific, observable technical behaviors. For example, in assessing Precision Workmanship Adherence:

• Unacceptable (Rating 1): Tightens flange bolts with an impact gun without a torque wrench; ignores soft-foot checks; leaves equipment dirty.
• Competent (Rating 3): Consistently references job plan torque specifications; uses calibrated torque wrenches; documents initial and final laser alignment readings on the work order.
• Role Model (Rating 5): Verifies precision tolerances; coaches junior apprentices on dial indicator sweep methods; submits constructive CMMS redlines to improve job plan steps.

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Coaching, Constructive Feedback & Blameless Post-Mortems

Annual performance reviews are notoriously ineffective for developing technical craftspeople. In reliability cultures, feedback is continuous, timely, and developmental.

The GROW Coaching Model in Maintenance

Supervisors and reliability engineers utilize the GROW Model (Goal, Reality, Options, Will) to coach technicians through complex field troubleshooting, building diagnostic self-reliance rather than dictating solutions:

1. Goal: What precision tolerance, operating parameter, or assembly state are we aiming to achieve on this machine?
2. Current Reality: What symptoms, vibration spectra, oil analysis findings, or visual wear patterns are currently present? What diagnostic tests have been executed so far?
3. Options: What could cause this specific symptom? What failure modes in the FMEA match this profile? What non-destructive diagnostic techniques could we run next?
4. Will / Way Forward: What specific step-by-step action plan will you execute? What safety precautions and calibrated tools are required? When will we regroup to evaluate results?

Blameless After-Action Reviews (AARs) & RCFA

When an unexpected breakdown occurs, the natural human reaction in low-maturity organizations is to find someone to blame. However, as human performance pioneer Sidney Dekker notes: "Underneath every seemingly obvious 'operator error' or 'mechanic mistake' lies a complex web of organizational vulnerabilities, contradictory incentives, and flawed design."

A blameless post-mortem culture differentiates between:

• Human Error: An inadvertent lapse, slip, or mistake arising from cognitive saturation, ambiguous procedures, poor labeling, or fatigue. The leadership response is systemic redesign (e.g., visual management, Poka-Yoke error proofing, procedure revision).
• At-Risk Behavior: Choosing a shortcut because past shortcuts were ignored or tacitly encouraged to meet production deadlines. The leadership response is coaching, removing operational disincentives, and reinforcing standards.
• Reckless Conduct: Intentional, conscious disregard of known, substantial, and unjustifiable safety or operational risks. The leadership response is administrative corrective action.

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Psychological Safety & Cross-Functional Trust

Harvard Business School professor Dr. Amy Edmondson defines Psychological Safety as "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking."

In physical asset management, psychological safety is not a soft human resources concept—it is an absolute technical prerequisite for operational reliability and process safety:

• In a psychologically unsafe plant, an apprentice who spots a hairline crack on a boiler feedwater line or accidentally adds the wrong synthetic grease to an electric motor bearing will stay silent to avoid being ridiculed, fired, or disciplined.
• The minor defect remains hidden until the bearing seizes, trips the plant, or causes a catastrophic explosion.
• In a psychologically safe culture, technicians and operators speak up instantly without fear of humiliation. Abnormal symptoms are addressed while they are small, low-cost anomalies.

Dismantling the "Maintenance vs. Operations" Silo

Organizations can reduce Operations-Maintenance conflict through structural integration:

• Joint Ownership of Asset Health: Equipment is not "owned" by maintenance; Operations owns the equipment asset, while Maintenance acts as the expert asset healthcare provider.
• Shared Morning Operational Huddles: Operations and Maintenance supervisors meet for 15 minutes daily to review the frozen schedule, verify operating windows, and resolve equipment access hurdles.
• Autonomous Maintenance (TPM Pillar 1): Operators are trained and certified to perform daily cleaning, visual inspection, basic lubrication, and minor fastener tightening. This cross-functional partnership fosters mutual respect and uncovers 75% of machine degradation before functional failure occurs.

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SMRPCO Code of Ethics in Professional Practice

The Candidate Handbook separates obligations for examinees from continuing obligations for people who pass a SMRPCO examination. Use the published wording and do not import canons from a different engineering society.

Obligations of every examinee

Every person who sits for a SMRPCO examination must:

• maintain the confidentiality of examination content and never disclose it;
• attest to being the registered examinee rather than impersonating another person; and
• attest that the work and selections on the examination are their own.

Photographing, recording, copying, removing, or otherwise transferring examination content violates those duties. The confidentiality obligation continues after the session.

Obligations after certification

Certificants pledge ethical and honorable representation of the profession. The handbook says detrimental conduct can lead to revocation and gives dishonesty, misrepresentation of professional qualifications, and certain illegal acts leading to felony conviction as examples. It also provides a right to appeal revocation through due process.

The published duties require certificants to:

1. represent qualifications honestly, including education and affiliations, and provide only services they are qualified to perform;
2. maintain and improve professional knowledge and competence through assessment, education, and training;
3. conduct business and professional activities with honesty and integrity and respect the inherent worth of all persons;
4. refuse unjust discrimination against clients;
5. safeguard client information unless disclosure is required by law or court order or is absolutely necessary for protection of the public;
6. avoid interests, activities, or influences that conflict with obligations to a client or the profession;
7. refuse gifts or benefits that are purely for personal gain and intended to influence a referral or decision; and
8. follow SMRPCO policies, procedures, guidelines, and requirements.

The Code also states that certificants must refrain from acts of moral turpitude. When teaching an ethical scenario, connect the decision to the actual duty and to applicable employer, legal, engineering, or safety requirements rather than inventing a Code clause.

Applying the duties

Competence: If a professional is asked to approve a pressure-equipment repair outside their qualifications, the honest response is to disclose the limitation and obtain the qualified review required by the organization and law.

Integrity: If test evidence shows a protective device has not met its acceptance requirement, do not falsify or conceal the result. Record the condition, use the authorized escalation path, and apply the controlling operational and safety requirements.

Confidentiality: Do not send client failure histories to another organization without authority. If law, a court, or an immediate public-protection necessity requires disclosure, follow the applicable process and document the basis.

Conflict of interest and gifts: Disclose an ownership interest in a bidding supplier. Refuse a personal vacation or other benefit intended to influence a sourcing decision. Preserve an impartial, documented selection process.

Continuous competence: Certification does not prove competence for every specialized task forever. Maintain current knowledge, recognize limits, obtain training or specialist support, and provide only services for which competence can be demonstrated.

Ethical leadership in daily reliability work

Leaders make ethical conduct practical by protecting accurate reporting, separating investigation from automatic blame, controlling conflicts, defining escalation routes, and verifying competence. Psychological safety does not eliminate accountability. It enables people to report conditions and mistakes promptly so the organization can distinguish human error, at-risk choices, reckless conduct, and system weaknesses and respond proportionately.

A strong decision record states the observed facts, uncertainty, applicable requirement, qualified decision owner, action, and follow-up. That discipline supports both reliable assets and honest professional practice.