Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a plant manager and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A Plant Manager is responsible for planning, organizing, directing and managing all daily plant operations with overall responsibility for production, maintenance, quality and other production-related activities that exceed the customer's expectations.
Essential functions of this position include directing, managing plant operations for production, maintenance, quality and shipping and receiving, coordinating plant activities through planning with departmental managers to insure the total manufacturing objectives are accomplished, developing and controlling profits, plans and budgets, implementing cost effective systems of control over capital, managing capital asset maintenance, establishing and monitoring overall plant performance for production and quality standards, controlling and minimizing labor overtime, repair expenses and premium freight.
Core Skills Required to be a Plant Manager
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
A plant manager should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Inspiring others:
Inspiring is encouraging one to be their best in contributing to the vision of an organization where they are placed and entrusted to work.
A Plant Manager must create a culture where the staff can use their professional prowess and aspire to be the best by giving them a clear vision and purpose through decisive leadership that motivates and inspires them.
Decision Making:
Decision Making is the art of making choices by identifying a decision, gathering information and assessing alternative resolutions before settling on one.
A Plant Manager cannot afford to make poor decisions, that's why he ought to develop a systematic approach to decision making that allows him to make every decision with skill, confidence, and wisdom producing a final choice of competence in the workplace.
Participative Management:
Participative Management is also known as employee involvement is the participation of all stakeholders at all levels of the organization in the investigation of problems, development of strategies and implementation of solutions.
A Plant Manager should include the participative management in the enterprise to create open and honest communication, freedom and transparency solicit survey feedback and form self-managed teams that are easy to work with.
Appraisal and Evaluation Skills:
Appraisal and Evaluation Skills are services that allow employers to assess their employees? contributions to the organization for the period they have been working with them.
A Plant Manager must creatively develop a robust evaluation process that includes the standard evaluation form, approved performance measures, guidelines for presenting feedback and disciplinary procedures to promote staff recognition and rewarding following a fair assessment and appraisal process.
Cooperation with colleagues:
Cooperation is the process of working with groups or teams for a common mutual benefit as opposed to working in competition or for selfish ambition.
A Plant Manager should learn the art of creating a mutually beneficial exchange among the employees that dwells much on cooperation for the same mutual benefit with adequate resources for all to use rather than creating a spirit of competition.
Emotion Management:
Emotion Management is the ability to realize, readily accept and successfully control feelings on oneself and sometimes in others around you by being in complete authority over your thoughts and feelings that are generated whenever your values are touched.
A Plant Manager must be able to manage his emotions as well as assist the staff to control their emotions to ensure that the professional reputation, the efficiency, and productivity is not compromised.
Consistency and Reliability:
Consistency and Reliability are the ability to be trusted to do what you do best all the time with or without supervision and without failure to produce results.
A Plant Manager is liable to maintain a high level of consistency and reliability by engaging with employees and treating them with respect deserved which produces excellent results in various kinds of reliability coefficients.
Persuading Others:
Persuading others is making sure your best ideas get a fair hearing without manipulating others or using trickery.
A Plant Manager needs to creatively learn how to introduce new ideas that will boost growth for the company without managing the staff or put them under pressure with more work but with manageable goals that the employees will delight working on and grow as they do.
Intercultural Competence:
Intercultural Competence is the knowledge and skills to successfully interact with people from other ethnic, religious, cultural, national and geographic groups.
A Plant Manager should have a high degree of intercultural competence that enables him to have successful interactions with people from different groups as well as train his employees to be sensitive to the cultural differences and be willing to modify their behavior as a sign of respect for each other.
Process Improvement:
Process Improvement is the creation of new processes or improving the existing ones that will work and take your corporation to the next level.
A Plant Manager must maintain the continuous improvements in the workplace that are favorable to the current investors, potential investors, and stock owners while working with methods that can serve as a foundation for future business decisions causing a profitable growth.
Hard Skills Required to be a Plant Manager
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
A plant manager should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.