Pro Tip: Leaders must work to change the ineffective patterns that exist in a bakery.

We all learn a lot over the course of a career. Sometimes we stay at the same place for a long time. That is not a terrible thing; it simply requires us to fend off complacency and open our eyes to diverse ways of operating, cleaning, maintaining and producing.

When you choose not to open your eyes to new ways, you create paradigms that can hold you back and prevent progression in whatever you are doing.

What is a paradigm? The original Greek meaning was “pattern.” Translated for the purpose of business, this simply means that you see a certain set of facts and concepts as the best or only way to complete a certain activity. You find yourself focused on that one way of doing something and fail to look “outside the box.”

In a bakery, this could relate to staffing a production line, cleaning a machine or lubricating an oven.

Production, sanitation and maintenance workers become indoctrinated to the ideas right in front of them and focus on what they were originally taught.

Newer employees receive training in their early days of employment. Many times, that training on the production floor becomes all they know. Since they want to be productive employees, they do what they were shown.

Most times these newer employees work hard to learn and want to impress their supervisors. How they do these things becomes normal to them even if there might be another way to do a task, or care for an area in a bakery.

It is up to management to open everyone’s eyes to alternate ways of thinking and doing. Employees across all departments see supervisors and managers as their leaders. Leaders must decide that what they see is not normal.

This can be exceedingly difficult because they, too, have been indoctrinated in the ideas and what they see and how they usually do things. They must lead others in changing the paradigms that have taken hold and become the pattern across the bakery floor.

So how does this paradigm shift happen in a circumstance like this? It is not a big challenge. It simply requires one to look around and think about what they see as their own. 

If they owned this place, is this how they would care for it? Is this how they would staff the line? Is this how they would clean an area? Leaders must decide that they do want things to be better.

They want to impress upon others that just because there is always water on the floor in an area, that condition is not necessarily normal. You must act on that issue and make the problem go away. From there you repeat.

Workers are the key to success in a semi-automated or even a fully automated bakery. We think that if we buy the best equipment, it should be good. It is our people that assure us that this new equipment will last a long time and perform and produce as designed. You want to keep your people engaged, energized and forward thinking. When you shift your paradigms, your people will do the same.

Jeff Dearduff is owner of JED Manufacturing Services who provides “Bakery Guy Tips” to those everyday people working in production, maintenance and engineering. Connect with him on LinkedIn.