Libsyn Directory

Accountability for Frontline Supervisors: Understanding Emotions to Improve Behavior and Team Performance with Sara Westbrook #57

Release Date: 01/26/2022

Three Questions That Turn "We Told Them" Into "We Got It Done" | Manufacturing Team Leadership | Ep. 178

🎁 Free: 10 great questions to ask your leadership and drive engagement → Connect with Trevor: LinkedIn 👉 Website 👉 Have you ever walked past your visual management boards and still not been able to tell if your team is winning? Trevor takes you inside a global food company where executives kept saying "we told them the standards" and supervisors kept saying "we need more clarity." Both were right. Neither was fixing the board. Inspired by Shane Zutz's High Impact Leadership newsletter, Trevor unpacks why accountability is usually a clarity problem in...

The Unwritten Rule That Quietly Ran His Whole Plant with Ryan Forte │ Manufacturing Team Leadership │ Ep. 177

🎁 Free: 10 great questions to ask your leadership and drive engagement → Connect with Trevor" LinkedIn 👉 Website 👉 What if the hardest person to lead in your plant is you? Trevor sits down with Ryan Forte, Owner of Jefferson Metal Products, whose team had quietly built one unwritten rule: keep the boss happy. Ryan introduces the five-step curiosity model — a new way to think about manufacturing team leadership that starts with getting curious about yourself first. When Ryan made that shift, his culture changed, his people grew, and turnover at the plant dropped...

Why Write-Ups Break Trust and What to Do Instead | The Accountability Gap | Ep. 176

🎁 Free: 10 great questions to ask your leadership and drive engagement → Connect with Trevor: LinkedIn: Website: Have you ever written up an employee and felt sick the second they walked out of the office? Trevor unpacks the third gap in the Manufacturing Greatness framework: the Accountability Gap. He walks through what happens when leaders skip the conversation and go straight to progressive disclipine, and the three questions that turn pressure into partnership.

Culture of Ownership in Manufacturing: How Owners Stop Being the Bottleneck with Josh McKain | Ep. 175

🎁 Free: 10 great questions to ask your leadership and drive engagement → When was the last time you went on vacation and didn't check your phone? Trevor sits down with Josh McKain, founder of Throughput Mastery, to unpack why manufacturing owners get stuck putting out every fire, and the three-part framework for building a culture of ownership: create the environment, model the standard, install the system. Ownership isn't a personality trait. It's a structural condition you can design for. Connect with Josh: LinkedIn: Website:

When 'You Should Just Know' Stops Working | Communication Skills #174

Welcome to Manufacturing Greatness with Trevor Blondeel, where we work with organizations to manufacture greatness by leveraging resources you already have to achieve greater retention, productivity, and profits. To learn more, visit and to subscribe to Trevor’s monthly newsletter. Have you ever assumed your team should just know what you expected, and watched the project go sideways anyway? In manufacturing, the expectation gap between what leaders think is expected and what teams actually understand drives missed deadlines, rework, and six-figure mistakes. Most of...

Silencing Self-Doubt and Leading with Confidence with Jenn Donahue #173 I Labor Shortage in Manufacturing

Welcome to Manufacturing Greatness with Trevor Blondeel, where we work with organizations to manufacture greatness by leveraging resources you already have to achieve greater retention, productivity, and profits. To learn more, visit and to subscribe to Trevor’s monthly newsletter. Now, let's jump in! What if the biggest threat to your production efficiency, workforce development, and manufacturing productivity was not a supply chain disruption or a failed kaizen event — but the voice inside your own head? On this episode of Manufacturing Greatness, learn more with...

Workforce Development and Leadership Development: The Showing Up Gap That Is Undermining Your Manufacturing Productivity #172

Welcome to Manufacturing Greatness with Trevor Blondeel, where we work with organizations to manufacture greatness by leveraging resources you already have to achieve greater retention, productivity, and profits. To learn more, visit and to subscribe to Trevor’s monthly newsletter. Now, let's jump in! Most manufacturing leaders believe that if they were clear, the message landed. But there is a gap that almost no one sees — the distance between how you think you show up and how your team actually experiences you. In this episode of Manufacturing Greatness, Trevor...

Lean Manufacturing Leadership for Plant Managers: Why Kaizen Fails Without Curiosity with Dr. Debra Clary #171

Welcome to Manufacturing Greatness with Trevor Blondeel, where we work with organizations to manufacture greatness by leveraging resources you already have to achieve greater retention, productivity, and profits. To learn more, visit and to subscribe to Trevor’s monthly newsletter. Now, let's jump in! What if the biggest obstacle to your lean manufacturing results isn't the process at all? It might be the person leading it. In this episode of Manufacturing Greatness, learn more with Debra Clary, author of The Curiosity Curve, about one of the most overlooked blind...

Manufacturing Leadership Development: The 3 Conversations That Fix Accountability, Alignment, and Results #170

Welcome to Manufacturing Greatness with Trevor Blondeel, where we work with organizations to manufacture greatness by leveraging resources you already have to achieve greater retention, productivity, and profits. To learn more, visit and to subscribe to Trevor’s monthly newsletter. Now, let's jump in! If you’ve ever thought “I already explained this” but still are not getting the results you expect, the problem may not be effort, it may be alignment. In this episode, Trevor Blondeel explores how gaps in communication skills and unclear expectations impact...

Manufacturing Leadership Development: Why Connection Drives Productivity and Retention with Morag Barrett #169

Welcome to Manufacturing Greatness with Trevor Blondeel, where we work with organizations to manufacture greatness by leveraging resources you already have to achieve greater retention, productivity, and profits. To learn more, visit and to subscribe to Trevor’s monthly newsletter. Now, let's jump in! In today’s manufacturing environment, the biggest barrier to productivity, talent retention, and employee satisfaction isn’t equipment or process, it’s connection. Organizations may invest in lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and process optimization, yet engagement,...

More Episodes

Welcome to Manufacturing Greatness with Trevor Blondeel, where we work with organizations to manufacture greatness by leveraging resources you already have to achieve greater retention, productivity, and profits. To learn more, visit www.manufacturinggreatness.com and click here to subscribe to Trevor’s monthly newsletter.

Now, let’s jump in!

Is it really okay to lose it sometimes, or are we just making excuses?

In this episode, Sara Westrook joins the podcast to talk manufacturing leadership, emotional intelligence, and accountability for Operations Managers, Production Managers, Manufacturing Managers, and Shift Supervisors.

We go deep on owning your behavior, building communication skills, and treating emotions as a leadership skill. Sara shares practical strategies to shift mindset, strengthen self awareness, and show up with authenticity so you can improve trust, engagement, and performance on the shop floor.

1:45 – Leave your emotions at the door like a backpack, NO they are still coming in with you, so how do you move with and through them in a healthy way

3:02 – Do not want to make an emotionally based decision, can lead to regret

4:15 – Allowed to sit with that emotion, not going from emotion to choice, allow it to have room, move with and through, and have your own character based choice, bounce back and move forward

6:13 - emotional awareness, emotional management, and ultimately emotional resilience

8:00 – teams want to be emotionally intelligent, yet they do not know how, like going to the gym, how do you build those muscles? Not by watching videos, by putting things into action, habits

10:57 – first exercise has the end in mind, what's the circumstance, or what are circumstances that you feel hold you back or really trigger you, and what emotion comes out of you

13:08-learn to think and act beyond emotion to honour that the emotions there, but to start to use the emotion as information and even motivation

16:08-how we engage other people matters, the art of communication and that takes being very emotionally aware

19:15-why are emotions sometimes hard to talk about, you could have one group of people say well they're hard to talk about because I feel like i'll be seen as weak and another because of being seen as dramatic

20:13-self care starts to take a big plummet it also can decrease company morale you know just keep shoving emotions down pretending they're not their

20:30-breaking down the boxes, shifting a greater role for women in manufacturing

24:12-when you can start to see emotions is information your brain now knows that oh it's something that I can do something with it doesn't completely have to overwhelm me

26:40-sometimes you have to lean into that discomfort

27:05-doesn't mean you're an anxious person, it means you're a person that's experiencing the emotion of anxious and that's uncomfortable and awkward but it's part of the journey

28:48-emotions are a reason for a behaviour, not an excuse

30:00-Sara’s company 3E Emotional Development is about really honing in skills on emotional awareness, emotional management and emotional resilience

Connect with her here;

Instagram: @iamsarawestbrook

Twitter: twitter.com/SaraWestbrook

LinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/in/sarawestbrook

YouTube: https://bit.ly/3Asvqps

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