Presentation Tips for Production Managers: The Daily Meeting
By Daniel Harper · Career & Business
How should a production manager run a daily performance meeting? Keep it short, standing, at the same board every day: safety, yesterday against plan, the top problems with an owner and a date each, and help needed from the level above. Spend the time on problems and decisions, not on reading numbers aloud. People prepare better when they know they will answer for their area in front of others.
Most production sites run a set of short daily meetings, sometimes called tier meetings: operators and team leaders first thing, supervisors after them, then the production manager with department heads, and sometimes the plant manager's meeting on top. Done well, they move problems up the chain within hours and decisions back down. Done badly, they are fifteen minutes of people reading numbers off a board.
The production manager usually runs one of these meetings and attends another. That makes it one of the most frequent presentations in the job.
Why the format works
Part of what makes daily meetings effective is accountability: everyone knows they will speak for their area, in front of their peers, every day. Jennifer Lerner and Philip Tetlock's review of the research on accountability found that one of its most consistent effects appears when people expect to explain themselves to an audience whose views they do not yet know: they think more carefully and more self-critically in advance.1
That is the point of the meeting. A supervisor who knows they will be asked about yesterday's scrap at 8:30 has already looked at it, found the cause and thought about a fix before arriving. The meeting itself can then be about decisions.
A structure that works
Run the meeting at the same board, at the same time, in the same order, standing:
- Safety. Incidents and near misses in the last 24 hours, and the one thing to watch today.
- Yesterday against plan: output, quality, delivery, each as a number against its target, green or red.
- Problems: only the red items, each with a cause, an action, an owner and a date.
- Escalations: what needs help from the level above, and who will take it up.
Fifteen minutes is enough for most levels. If it regularly runs over, the problems are being solved in the meeting instead of after it.
Talk about problems, not numbers
The board shows the numbers; nobody needs them read aloud. The value of the meeting is the conversation about the red items. Ask the same few questions every time: what happened, what is the cause, what are we doing about it, who owns it, when will it be done. Over time people start arriving with those answers prepared.
Close problems visibly. When an action is done, say so at the meeting and take it off the board. A board full of old actions nobody has closed teaches everyone that the actions do not matter.
Keep it safe to report bad news
A daily meeting dies quickly if people learn that reporting a problem gets them criticised in front of their peers. Thank people for raising problems early, especially ones that would otherwise have surfaced later. Save any criticism of an individual for a private conversation. The meeting needs bad news to be useful.
Presenting upward
When you present to the plant manager or the leadership team, the audience needs trends rather than yesterday: the week or month against plan, the persistent problems, and the decisions or resources you need. The weekly review format in presentation tips for operations managers works well for that level.
When a big change is coming
New product introductions, line changes and shift-pattern changes need more than a daily meeting. Brief the affected teams in person, with time for questions, and follow up at the daily meetings as the change goes in. For speaking to a whole shift, see public speaking tips for operations managers.
References
- Lerner, J. S., & Tetlock, P. E. (1999). Accounting for the effects of accountability. Psychological Bulletin, 125(2), 255–275. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.2.255