1. Communicate As Poorly As You Possibly Can
2. Pretend You Are on the Team
3. Keep Maintenance Successes a Secret
4. Ignore the Needs of Your Customers
5. Don’t Plan Anything, or Make Rotten, Useless Plans
6. Kill Off the Training Program & Other Excuses to Go to Florida
7. Make Sure Everyone Works 60+ Hours a Week
8. Never Say "Thank You"
9. Avoid Measurement at All Costs
10. If You Make a Mistake, Blame Others & Emphasize by Pointing and Laughing
11. Put Your Fingers in Your Ears if You Are Given Feedback
12.Walk Away From the Challenge

---

Walk Away From the Challenge (12 of 12)

Over the past 3 months, we have shared The Dirty Dozen: 12 Ways to Wreck Your Maintenance Program, poking a little sarcastic fun at the dark side of the maintenance profession. The idea for approaching maintenance excellence from the worst-case point of view came from our observations of extremely reactive maintenance organizations struggling, and often failing, to become proactive.

We wondered what would happen if we featured a model for bad behavior instead of the usual “This is what you should be doing” approach, exposing the damage that is viewed as normal just because it is familiar. Would it be possible to create an environment where it isn’t OK anymore to waste money, talent and production to fight fires continuously? Could we shout out that the emperor wears no clothes, and generate the energy to help the toughest cases become proactive?

Imagine being a person who has been a Master of the Dirty Dozen for years. Maybe you don’t have to imagine it? Everyone could see that your behavior was deadly to the well being of the operation, once they were made aware of it. This common vision would allow us to work together to learn and change. It’s not about firing people who made mistakes, or placing blame. Those who have damaged the process in the past have tremendously valuable insight into fixing problems in the future, once they understand the stakes.

The last of the Dirty Dozen ways that you can wreck your maintenance program is to walk away from the challenge to do something differently today. If you are dealing with equipment failures and emergencies on a daily basis, that is proof that your process is broken. It doesn’t have to be that way. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

---

If you remember back to the first tip in this series, we discussed the importance of communication to any healthy maintenance organization. Communication includes listening skills, and the destruction of the maintenance process requires you to completely ignore any feedback you receive.

People who care about their work, and want to improve their workplace will come to you with ideas and suggestions for changes that could be beneficial. Wave them off, close you door and forget about it. When they are talking, constantly look at your watch, and change the subject often. If someone says that they have something important to tell you, ask them if they would like to hear a story about your childhood, or what you had for dinner a few weeks ago. Make sure they understand that you don’t want to hear anything they have to share.

In the extreme case where you have to endure a person giving you feedback about your own performance, it is OK to receive positive comments, particularly if someone else is listening. If the feedback is negative, put your fingers in your ears and sing a song loudly until they give up and walk away. After all, negative feedback must be inaccurate, since you are invincible.

---

In order to remain in control of your destiny as a total tyrant, you must never allow yourself to be associated with any error. Even if you make a mistake, however unlikely, always have a backup plan to dump the blame on another person. Ideally, you should select someone you don’t like, or someone who can be easily discredited.

For example, you decide to have the maintenance technicians work dayshift only, and leave the plant without maintenance coverage for 16 hours per day. Even though you are dealing with massive amounts of emergency work due to your reactive culture, you persist in the belief that your plan will work. Upon implementation of this plan, you immediately shut down the facility, bringing it to its knees due to rampant equipment failures. Rather than being held accountable for this disaster, you kick your backup plan into gear.

You point your finger at your boss, and say, “Barney said it was a good idea. That crazy guy! I told him we would go down smoking, but he wouldn’t listen. I had to do what he said, but I am standing my ground now, and I am willing to take the reins. Barney, you are a fraud, and you must be dealt with harshly!” BINGO! You are the boss, and the power goes right to your head like a carnival ride. You wrecked the program, you wrecked someone’s career, AND you got a raise. If you can do this on a Friday, you even get a weekend of rest before you return on Monday to continue wrecking the program.

---

The saying goes, “You can’t change what you can’t measure”, and it’s true. So, if your maintenance program is limping along, and you are not doing much measurement, you might as well leave things alone. If you start to measure anything, it will either point the finger at a problem to be fixed, or identify you or another maintenance program wrecker as the culprit. This is not helpful to your cause.

A good analogy for running a maintenance organization without measurement is driving a car down the highway with the windshield painted black. You can’t see where you are going, you can’t tell if you are going the right way, and you can’t see any obstacles that might be in your path. The interesting thing is that no one would ever drive a car this way, but people are willing to blindly operate a maintenance program with no measures for decades.

Get out your paintbrush, avoid those measurements, and put your maintenance program in the ditch today!

---

People like to be recognized for their efforts, so you should avoid recognition at all costs, starving our personnel of the basic human need to be appreciated for something. Completely ignoring people when they are doing good work is a wonderful way to undermine them, and create an environment for failures to thrive. Even a pay raise is not as powerful as being thanked for a job well done. If you have ever been to a facility where no one is ever thanked for anything, you could make someone cry if you thanked him or her. People are nasty little crybabies.

One variation on this tip is to find a way to twist a situation so that you can actually reprimand someone for doing a good job. For example, let’s say a maintenance planner does a fine job of planning a major project, and the work is executed perfectly. Jump on the opportunity to speak to the planner in front of others, and say, “Well, Clem, you seem to have pulled off a miracle. I heard that you planned a job well. Maybe you can do that again some time, but I doubt it”. Mission accomplished.

---

It’s thrilling to know that there are so many ways to manipulate and mold the lives of others when you know the tricks for wrecking a maintenance organization, or any organization for that matter.

One popular method for driving morale down and creating an environment of distrust is to establish an unwritten rule that people who want to succeed will work at least 60 hours per week. You can establish some fictional starting and ending times for the workday (say 8am – 4pm), and these are an essential part of your system. Anyone who manages to organize and plan well enough to go home "on time" can be easily identified and reassigned to night shift, weekend duty, or given more work to do until they break.

The company does not need people to work unnecessarily long hours in most cases. In fact, we know that it doesn’t increase output, and results in more mistakes and stress. The system you are building should be designed to create an environment of competition, so everyone feels that they must outlast each other in order to survive. People will create tasks for themselves to look busy, and remain at work for hours after their real work is done. It is in your best interest as a wrecker to ensure that each person regularly misses important family events, and feels compelled to work when they are ill just to please you.

---

Training is something that can disrupt the wrecking of a maintenance program if you are not careful to avoid it. In the high technology world we live in today, people need constant access to new methods and techniques, or they quickly fall behind. In just a few months, one can completely hobble a maintenance organization by simply turning off the funding for training.

Try your best to strangle your training budget down to the bare minimum. Provide no value, and include ample amounts of vendor training aimed at selling equipment. Best practice companies usually budget 80+ hours of quality training per year, per employee. When your budget accidentally contains money for training, squash this by fabricating urgent tasks that will not allow anyone to go to the training. Or, schedule the training, pay the trainer, and then cancel the class to waste more money.

If you are lucky enough to have no training budget, keep you mouth shut about it. The last thing you want is your maintenance team spending their time in Florida or Las Vegas attending training or a good trade show. When they come back, they will be full of all kinds of wild ideas about how to fix problems and save money. It will take you months to shut them up and make them disgruntled again.

---

It is a proven fact that good planning reduces costs, improves quality and increases productivity by as much as 90%. We do not want any planning to interfere with our wrecking project. In order to interrupt the planning process, we can do a number of things that can be combined for maximum results:

• Do not assign anyone to the role of planning. Everyone will be so focused on fighting emergency breakdowns that virtually nothing will be planned. If you must have planners due to somebody meddling in your affairs, select inexperienced people to do the job, and personnel who have not earned the respect of their peers. Proactive organizations select planners who are the finest craftspeople, and are highly respected by their peers. You can’t have that.
• Make certain that anyone who is trying to plan is saddled up with as many distractions as possible. Make them chase parts for emergency work, have them supervise work, or even assign them to perform the repairs if you can! Planners are supposed to have their mind focused on the future, so distracting them with activities occurring in the present is a fantastic diversion.
• Set the expectations for planned work as low as you can. A well-planned job will completely destroy your efforts to wreck the maintenance program. We do not want job plans that contain detailed descriptions of the job, good estimates, clear instructions, drawings, digital photos, accurate parts lists and scheduled tasks. Encourage everyone to pencil-whip his or her plans, and just give a crude description of the job. A rotten, useless plan is even better than no plan at all, as it undermines the program, and makes people mad. You want that, right?

---

As maintenance professionals, you interact with other departments and personnel who depend on you to keep their equipment and processes in good condition. If you ignore them, they are helpless, and it can be really funny to observe them jumping around in frustration when they get nothing from you. They may treat you like a servant, but you do have some power over them.

There are many ways to ignore the needs of your customers, but here are a few gems:

• When you get a call for help because some equipment failed, drink one more cup of coffee before you amble down to assess the situation. It’s not like they can call someone else, right?
• When you work on equipment, don’t waste your time communicating that the job is done. If you do, all you are going to get is a bunch of questions, somebody checking your work, and they’ll probably ask you to stick around to assist with startup. No thanks. Fix it fast, and then beat it back to the shop.
• Stay off the floor as much as you can. Someone will call you when they need help. Otherwise, stay out of sight, and keep your head down.
• It's best to avoid learning at all times. If you gain new skills, the next thing you know, people will expect you to use them. Pretty soon, they will be bothering you constantly. In fact, it’s a good idea to pretend you know even less than you do. That way, if you get a request to help, you can just say, “Sorry, I don’t know much about this. Maybe someone else would be a better choice.” It is a masterpiece if the whole department can do this in unison, so nothing can get done.

---

The last thing anyone wants when wrecking a maintenance program are success stories from the proactive maintenance effort. When the maintenance department does something right, any self-respecting team wrecker will do whatever it takes to bury the news, and keep it from being shared.

Good news gets people thinking that they might be able to fix the reactive maintenance mess, and then you will have a real challenge on your hands to get them to give up and accept defeat. Keep in mind that your goal is to erode trust between the maintenance and production personnel, and steer them toward making poor decisions. If everyone is rushing around in a panic, and there is no time to plan their actions, you have them in your grasp. Be negative, and when something good happens, make sure to say it was just luck.

Another excellent approach to crushing any success that is achieved is to broadcast as much bad news as you can. This is an old political trick, and it works like a charm. People love to hear about bad news and scandals. It makes them feel better about their own situation. When people make mistakes or the process fails to work, make it into a major issue. It takes a LOT of good news to offset just a little bad news. Use this leverage to your advantage. The secret to your success is to keep all successes a secret.

---

Pretending to be a supporter of good maintenance practices is an excellent way to wreck your maintenance organization. If you can master the art of appearing to be an honest team member while tearing down the program behind the scenes, you can stealthily avoid confrontation.

Some handy examples to get you started:

• A maintenance manager says he supports planned and scheduled work, but fails to defend the process. Instead, he happily supports breaking the schedule and doing unplanned work so he can gain points with the operations managers, who do not understand proactive methods.
• A maintenance technician is fully trained to use modern laser alignment equipment, but when no one is looking, he aligns a coupling by eye to save time.
• A maintenance supervisor supports proactive strategies in the Maintenance Improvement meetings, but afterwards criticizes the program to his crew, telling them that it will go away if they just ignore it.

Seek out the other Pretenders in your organization, as you will find strength in numbers. If you can assemble a strong core group of Pretenders, it is possible to engineer the dazzling derailment of all efforts to increase reliability.

---

Poor communication is one of the most effective ways to destroy a maintenance program. At all levels of an organization, each of us has valuable information that can be used to solve problems and improve the maintenance process. By withholding that information, you can do spectacular amounts of damage. If you are serious about wrecking your maintenance efforts, include poor communication in your arsenal.

In your next maintenance team meeting, withhold information that could help others solve a problem or make improvements. Hoarding of information can give you a feeling of power, which is a nice side benefit for you. No matter what your role in the organization, there are ample opportunities to keep information to yourself, so don’t assume this tip is only for managers. If someone challenges you about your poor communication, an effective response is to say that the information was confidential or sensitive, and the questions will usually go away, just like magic.