Libsyn Directory

The Week-One Blind Spot Costing You New Hires | New Hire Onboarding | Ep. 184

Release Date: 07/15/2026

The Book Cover I Loved Wasn’t the One My Readers Needed | Change Management | Ep. 198

After four months of work with his publisher’s design team, Trevor had two book covers and a favorite. Then he asked the people the book is for. More than 60 people voted, and two out of three picked the cover he liked less. The split told the story. Newsletter readers and people who work in manufacturing chose the orderly cover, with puzzle pieces holding the title together. Marketers, speakers and authors chose the bold one. What does that mean for change management in your plant? Trevor’s answer: the change you love can still miss if the people it’s for see it differently. He shares...

Why Perception Isn’t Reality with Shawn Herbig | Plant Leadership | Ep. 197

As a young engineer on the Ford Explorer line, Shawn Herbig chased a strange complaint. Drivers said their radios were changing stations on their own. Dealers swapped the units, and every one passed the bench test. The cause: in cold-weather states, drivers wearing thick winter gloves were hitting two of the small buttons at once. Nothing was wrong with the radio, and to the customer, it was still broken. That moment started a career. Shawn founded IQS Research more than 25 years ago and his team runs the Kentucky Association of Manufacturers Wage and Workforce Study. He and Trevor get into...

Nobody Quits Over Onboarding | Manufacturing Employee Retention | Ep. 196

An HR professional in manufacturing told Trevor her onboarding program is strong for ninety days, and then it starts to dip. Her instinct was to extend it. The research says something else. Once somebody is past three months, lack of onboarding is the last reason they leave. Toxic culture, unsafe conditions and feeling disrespected are at the top of that list. And on the stay side, job stability and competitive pay are almost tied, with a cluster right behind them worth nearly a third of first place answers: feeling valued by your manager, a positive team culture, and clarity of expectations....

Your Best People Are Burning Out on Work They’re Good At | Frontline Leadership with Greg Harrod Ep. 195

Greg Harrod noticed something strange partway through a career leading cross-functional teams in manufacturing. He was getting more and more of the work he was best at, and enjoying it less and less. That is not a workload problem. It is a sorting problem. We hand out work based on two things. Is this person good at it, and are they available. We almost never ask whether the work gives them energy or takes it away. So the most dependable person on the floor gets handed more of what they are dependable at, and nobody notices what it costs until they quit. Greg is a business coach, a Certified...

Your Veterans Want Clarity More Than Your New Hires Do | Frontline Leadership | Ep. 194

Walk into most plants and you’ll hear the same thing. The new, younger people need everything spelled out. The veterans just go do it. New research says that’s backwards. Seventy-six percent of Gen Z expect clear expectations of their performance and responsibilities. Among Boomers it’s 98 percent, and it climbs through every generation in between. The longer someone has worked, the more certain they are that clarity is the leader’s job. Trevor’s take is that the quieter half of that finding is the one to worry about. The veteran who isn’t clear will push back and ask. The new...

Silence Is Not Agreement | Psychological Safety and Manufacturing Team Leadership with Dr. Sunita Sah | Ep. 193

Dr. Sunita Sah asked nurses in a large hospital what stopped them from speaking up about medical errors. They gave her two answers. They were afraid of the repercussions, and they had learned that speaking up changed nothing. Then she asked their managers the same question. The managers did not name fear or effectiveness. They said the nurses were not taking responsibility, and did not have the skill set. Same floor, two completely different stories. That gap is why near misses go unreported in your plant. Sunita is a physician turned organizational psychologist, a professor at Cornell, and...

It Was Due Thursday and It’s Still Sitting There | Manufacturing Accountability | Ep. 192

You walk in Friday morning and the material is still sitting in quarantine. It was supposed to be relabeled and moved out Thursday, and you need that space today because corporate is walking the floor tomorrow. What happens in the next ten seconds decides the whole conversation. Trevor takes one real scenario from a manufacturing leader he was working with and runs it through all three gaps. How you show up, because how people feel determines how much they can engage with you. Whether Thursday was ever an agreement or just a date somebody said out loud. And what a real accountability...

Be Curious Rather Than Furious | Manufacturing Team Leadership and Culture with Karin Lindner | Ep. 191

Karin Lindner has spent fourteen years trying to make manufacturing attractive to the people who work in it, and she says it is still not there. Her new book, Making Manufacturing Sexy, argues that most manufacturing leaders are not leading. They are surviving, stuck in a system that rewards firefighting. Karin and Trevor both worked at Magna. In this conversation they get into what actually changes a plant, and it is not the equipment. Karin shares the coaching tagline she uses with every client, be curious rather than furious, and the story of a general manager who described himself as...

You Cannot Recruit Your Way Out of This │ Manufacturing Recruiting │ Ep. 190

What if the reason nobody applies has nothing to do with what you pay? In new research across the United States and Canada, concerns about physical safety ranked as the number one barrier to even considering a job in manufacturing. Pay came in fourth. Trevor assumed that was a perception problem, an old black-and-white picture nobody had bothered to correct. So he went looking for proof, and could not find any. The people closest to the industry name safety right alongside everybody else. What he found instead was a gap inside the plant. Employees named physical safety at forty percent....

Why Nobody Pulls the Cord with Dr. Michael Gillespie │ Leadership Decision Making │ Ep. 189

When was the last time somebody stopped your line and you thanked them for it? Toyota built the andon cord into the line decades ago and most plants still treat pulling it as a failure. Dr. Michael Gillespie, organizational psychologist at the University of South Florida and co-author of Distancing with David Marquet, studies why the person closest to a problem is often the least able to see it. Being locked inside your own point of view is the default setting, not an occasional lapse, which is how five people can walk up to one stopped line and each honestly see a different problem. Nobody is...

More Episodes

What if your newest hire decides whether to stay in their very first week? Trevor opens a new solo series built on a national study of 1,250 manufacturing workers, run with Crossover Solutions and The Center for Generational Kinetics. The frontline wants a first-week mentor far more than the leaders who sign off on one, and that blind spot is feeding turnover. He names the Expectation Gap and shares the near-zero-cost move in manufacturing team leadership that closes it before your next hire walks in the door.

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