SOURCE: Kay Sever | September 24, 2025
In 2025 we will focus on sustaining the gains achieved via the optimization process. Why spend a year talking about sustainability? Your optimization gains are at risk of being lost in future months/years unless certain preventive actions are taken. This risk is worth some investigation and contemplation.
The secret to sustaining optimization gains over decades is making strategic management choices that 1) preserve the gains already captured AND 2) maintain access to potential gains not yet discovered. The entire management team must unanimously agree to each choice and remain aligned each day to sustain their gains long-term… just as a sports team would all work to win during each season of play.
Through my work in this area, I have identified six action items that require unanimous management agreement and participation. These six items “align” your management system and team with optimization goals and principles.
- Incorporate a few new data-points into numbers-based decision-making.
- Communicate in a slightly different way about performance.
- Build a team with an “expanded goal” of achieving “best” performance, which makes budget easier to achieve.
- Adopt new standards for communicating about problems and involve the right people in solutions.
- Support each other so all team members remain aligned with a goal of “best possible” results.
- Design/implement a training plan for new employees and management personnel to keep your “optimization culture” going as new employees join your organization.
From June to November we are focusing on these action items in detail… why they are important and why these management choices are not optional. In October we are reviewing the importance of Action Item #5… let’s get started!
ACTION ITEM #5 – Support each other so all team members remain aligned with a goal of “best possible” results.
Two months ago we discussed building a team with a shared goal of achieving “best possible” results. If your management team has embraced “best” performance as a goal that can be achieved and consider “best possible” values when making management decisions, why is Action Item #5 important?
This is a great question! Here’s the answer: This series of articles is all about sustaining your optimization gains. Keeping anything going over the long-term (i.e., years) is a different challenge than achieving it for the first time. If you stop doing something that creates value, you stop gaining the benefits and you lose the gains.
If management team members adopt new ways of working together to achieve their optimization goals, then revert back to their old ways of working (i.e., backslide), they unknowingly put the optimization gains they worked so hard for at risk. They may see gains already captured start to vaporize and not understand why. To gain more insights into the link between management choices and profit, let’s examine the kinds of day-to-day activities every supervisor, superintendent, department manager, general manager and executive are responsible for.
I have listed eight categories of management responsibilities/activities here:
- Holding people accountable
- Supporting priorities
- Follow-through
- All employees treated the same
- Taking action
- Taking responsibility
- Dealing with change
- Communications
Management inconsistency with the workforce or “backsliding” in any of these categories reduces an organization’s chances to achieve “best” performance and causes financial losses which are seldom measured (including the loss of optimization gains achieved in the past).
Let’s focus on the interactions of crew supervisors with the workforce as examples of how inconsistent management choices can affect the sustainability of optimization gains.
INCONSISTENCY CREATES MISTRUST WHICH MAKES IT HARDER TO SUSTAIN GAINS
If supervisors have no guidance or no expectations for how they should give feedback or react in each of these groups of responsibilities/activities, supervisors will decide on their own how to communicate to their crews. When this happens, employees will hear different messages about priorities, problems and expectations.
Different or conflicting messages from management create tension between management and the workforce and three things happen:
- The workforce begins to MISTRUST the management team. Mistrust is not just a “soft” unmeasurable problem that happens in organizations… it has quantifiable impacts because it shuts down communications about problems that need to be solved and reduces the urgency to chase new profit opportunities. Mistrust in an organization can cause millions of dollars in hidden losses… losses that will never be attributed to an organizational weakness.
- Employees on different crews will compare notes about what they have heard. When supervisor messages and actions are different, the workforce believes the management team is weak, disorganized or not unified, none of which may be true.
- Employees will believe that consistency is not important to management and may assume that it’s not important for them either. The quality of their work may go down as a result.
CONSISTENCY – A CRITICAL “BEST” KPI FOR SUPERINTENDENTS
Management consistency in messages and actions is one of your most important KPIs for sustaining gains over the long term. To ensure consistent words and actions from supervisor to supervisor and shift to shift, there must be agreement on desired messages and actions that will prevent mixed messages from occurring and create/maintain trust between management and the workforce.
Superintendents can provide guidance on the best way to respond or act for each activity; however, superintendents across the operation must be in aligned in their thinking and in agreement on words and actions that will create the “best” result across the company. These guidelines can be simply stated and placed in a matrix for easy reference.
I have helped companies develop and format these guidelines for supervisors and superintendents. Plant performance and management credibility increased after the guidelines for aligned words and actions were shared and discussed with supervisors in a group meeting. As a result, supervisors quickly gained confidence in their ability to make value-added choices.
I structured the matrix to show what would happen within the team and workforce if supervisors reverted to old choices that could create mistrust or cause a loss of management credibility. By adding this feature to the matrix, it became a tool that could be used by superintendents and supervisors to
- Document new ways of communicating and working together to build trust.
- Keep communications open between supervisors and crews.
- Facilitate problem solving.
- Support and encourage each other to stay committed to their new choices over time.
- Make it easy to have conversations about supervisor growth and leadership skills.
- Prevent organizational barriers that make it harder to sustain optimization gains.
Next month we will explore Action Item #6 – an area new to most of you.
Thought for the year: Connecting intentional strategies to the sustainability of optimization gains is a winning combination. Your team can maximize the chance to sustain today’s gains (and gains yet to be discovered) with tactics designed for that purpose. Taking intentional actions to sustain gains is an overlooked strategy for “being the best” in your industry and maximizing shareholder value long-term.
Kay Sever is an Expert on Achieving “Best Possible” Results. Kay helps executive and management teams tap their hidden profit potential and reach their optimization goals. Kay has developed a LIVESTREAM management training/coaching system for Optimization Management called MiningOpportunity – NO TRAVEL REQUIRED. See MiningOpportunity.com for her contact information and training information.
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- About Us
Kay has worked side by side with corporate and production sites in a management/leadership/consulting role for 35+ years. She helps management teams improve performance, profit, culture and change, but does it in a way that connects people and the corporate culture to their hidden potential. Kay helps companies move “beyond improvement” to a state of “sustained optimization”. With her guidance and the MiningOpportunity system, management teams can measure the losses caused by weaknesses in their current culture, shift to a Loss Reduction Culture to reduce the losses, and “manage” the gains from the new culture as a second income stream.
