David Altena has 30 years of tech industry experience and is a founding director of The Better SMB Limited. david@altena.solutions

 

 

Rob Bull, Director of the New Zealand Lean Academy rob@nzla.nz

 

 

 

Connecting The Dots

Everyone’s busy, capable and pulling in different directions

Most manufacturers know what they need to do, but they’re doing it in pieces, with strategy, people and operations moving separately instead of together.

The result is a growing list of sensible initiatives, moving in different directions and quietly cancelling each other out.

We have explored several of the pressures facing New Zealand manufacturers – the cost of doing nothing, the investment gap many businesses create for themselves and the disciplines that separate the top performers from the rest.

For some, that may have translated into a familiar feeling: we know what could be better here.

The harder question is this: are those improvements connected inside your business, or are they sitting in different conversations, owned by different people, progressing at different speeds?

Because when effort isn’t aligned, even good decisions create friction. The business stays busy, capable people work hard – and progress stalls.

Direction without traction

Most manufacturers have a strategy of some sort, even if it lives largely in the owner’s head. There is usually a clear sense of where to take the business, what needs to change and what success should look like.

The problem is not ambition. It’s translation.

Strategy often moves in one direction, while day‑to‑day decisions move in another. It doesn’t change what gets reviewed weekly, what leaders spend their time on, or what behaviours are rewarded or tolerated. The strategic intent exists, but it never reaches the work.

When that happens, people make sensible decisions based on local priorities, not enterprise direction. No one is doing the wrong thing – but they are doing different things, for different reasons, under different pressures.

Strategy only creates value when it shows up in behaviour. If it doesn’t reach the floor, it creates motion without traction.

Capability without leverage

The same pattern shows up in people investments.

Many manufacturers genuinely invest in their teams – leadership development, training, recruitment, succession. Capability improves. Expectations rise, then those people are sent back into systems that haven’t changed.

You develop leaders and ask them to operate inside processes that shape old behaviours. You hire strong capability and surround it with measures and routines that cause frustration. You invest in people and then give them no room to apply what they have learnt.

The issue isn’t the quality of the people. It’s that their effort is now pulling in competing directions.

People strategy and operational strategy aren’t separate questions. The real one is: who do we need, to do what, in a system designed to let them do it well? Miss any part of that, and capability leaks away.

Acceleration without alignment

Technology is where this misalignment becomes most expensive.

Software is often brought in to solve coordination or visibility problems – planning tools, ERP upgrades, shopfloor systems. Sometimes they help but more frequently they simply accelerate whatever already exists.

Technology doesn’t fix unclear priorities, broken processes or inconsistent leadership. It amplifies them.

When systems are implemented without shared direction, they add speed without alignment. Reporting improves, but arguments increase. Data flows, but decisions don’t improve.

Cynicism sets in, not because the technology is wrong, but because the problem it was meant to solve was never technical.

Technology follows process. Process follows clarity. Clarity comes from leadership. Start at the wrong end of that chain and you spend a lot to move sideways faster.

What alignment looks like

The manufacturers who avoid these traps don’t have better people or better ideas. They are simply more deliberate about alignment.

Direction is translated into a small number of clear priorities – usually no more than three to five. Those priorities shape what gets measured and reviewed.

Measures drive the conversations leaders have with their teams. Those conversations surface what processes need to support. Technology decisions follow last, not first.

Nothing here is complex. What’s hard is resisting the pull of the urgent, while creating a regular forcing function that asks a simple question: are we pulling in the same direction?

That’s what a good external benchmark provides. Not just a score, but a diagnosis of where effort is misaligned – where strategy, people and execution are working against each other instead of together.

A strong strategy score alongside weak execution isn’t a mixed result. It’s a clear signal: the connection is missing.

The road ahead

Next month this column turns its focus to people — because this is where misalignment becomes personal. The biggest disconnect in many manufacturing businesses isn’t between systems or technologies. It’s between what leaders say they believe about their people and what those people experience every day.

We’d like to leave you with one task:

Get your three most senior people together and each of you – independently – write down your top three business priorities.

From that establish if your alignment is very close, unsure or probably not that close.

If you answered very close, congratulations, you’re likely to be ahead of most.

If you didn’t then you don’t have a strategy, people or technology problem, you have a connection problem and that’s entirely within your control to fix.