Second place with a paper on leadership

SECOSAFT International Conference · Timișoara, Romania · March 2019

In the last year of my bachelor’s I wrote a research paper, Raising the performance of workers by effective leadership, and presented it at the SECOSAFT international conference. It won second place.

In numbers

• Time: 6 months of production data, and 4 months of research and writing.
• Money: for these 120 workers, the gap in output was worth roughly €200,000 a year.
• Errors: a scrap rate of 2.1% in the best-led teams against 3.4% in the rest.
• Adoption: second place out of 40 papers, and the findings went back to the management of both factories.
• Scale: 120 workers in 14 teams at 2 factories, and 8 team leaders interviewed.

The question

Factories spend fortunes on machines and very little on how people are led. I wanted to know how much the way a team is led changes what it produces.

What I did

• Surveyed 120 production workers at 2 factories in Timișoara about how their team leaders worked.
• Compared the answers with each team’s output, scrap rate and absences over 6 months.
• Interviewed 8 team leaders to understand the numbers behind the numbers.

What I found

Teams whose leaders explained why, gave feedback every week and asked workers how to fix problems produced 12% more and missed 3.1 days per worker in 6 months instead of 5.6. The difference was bigger than most of the process changes the factories had tried that year.

Why it’s on this page

Every technology project I’ve done since has proved the paper right. Software doesn’t fail because of the code; it fails when the people who have to use it weren’t asked. That’s why “Understand” is the first step of how I work.