EMS Leaders, Please Don’t Be This Person

In a 47-year EMS career, the author has encountered leadership styles that can undermine companies, from micromanagement and indecision to poor accountability and siloed thinking.

I’m pretty sure this will stir some emotions in the EMS crowd. Some will think, “I’ve been through similar circumstances.” Others might think, “He can’t be talking about me.”

Over 47 years in the EMS industry, including the past seven as a consultant, I’ve worked with many great leaders. I’ve also encountered my share of poor leadership. Certain behaviors show up again and again, and none of them do a company any favors.

Some leaders operate in silos. Many leaders in our business come from operations or finance backgrounds, and sometimes they concentrate so heavily on those areas that they neglect sales, marketing, HR, IT or other critical functions. A successful business needs attention across what I call the “four-legged stool of success”: stakeholders, shareholders, customers and vendors. Ignore one leg long enough and the stool gets pretty unstable.

Then there is the “title bully.” I don’t need to explain this one because we have all seen leaders use their titles to make up for, or mask, their own self-doubt. I spent much of my career battling these types. Constantly operating at DEFCON 4 makes for a hard path, and I don’t recommend following the one I walked. Sometimes the best decision is to leave and find a company that doesn’t treat every disagreement like combat.

Narcissistic leaders create a different problem. They believe they sit at the center of the universe, spew hubris at everyone around them and take little direction from people who know more than they do. They often treat everyone below them like menial workers while behaving very differently toward those above them.

Believe it or not, I’ve also encountered leaders who seem to hate their customers. Yes, they are out there. They forget that EMS is a service business and convince themselves that OEMs must do business with them to survive. They approach every customer as though that customer is trying to “get one over on their business.” Eventually, that attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the business disappears.

A lack of accountability can cause just as much damage. Some leaders refuse to recognize their own mistakes, let alone fix them. When they finally acknowledge a problem, they find someone else to blame. We used to call this “walking point,” with direct reports taking turns absorbing the blame for the leader’s mistakes.

Micromanagers create another kind of dysfunction. Remember a simple thought: “If everything is important, then nothing is important.” When leaders micromanage every detail, workers feel undervalued and start treating their careers like jobs instead of adventures. Everyone arrives just before 8 a.m. and stands ready to leave by 4:55 p.m., regardless of the critical work still sitting on the table.

Indecisive leaders create the opposite problem. The EMS industry moves at a speed rarely seen on the OEM side of the business. Time kills deals, loses business and costs companies customers. Endless meetings and studying an issue ad nauseam create stagnation. Get the details and make a decision. If you make the wrong call, you’ll learn that faster and can change direction toward the right path.

Some leaders surround themselves with friends instead of people who will make the company better. You have to hire “players” who contribute to the company’s success. You can’t fill the organization with “bootlickers” who spend their days complimenting you instead of proposing solutions or challenging bad decisions. But I bet they have pretty overhead slides.

Dishonest leadership needs little explanation. Leaders who rely on half-truths or believe they can achieve success through lying, cheating and stealing eventually fail.

Low emotional EQ also makes leadership incredibly difficult. Leaders who act on impulse, lack empathy, dismiss others and struggle to think strategically can make an organization miserable. I once worked with an incompetent “owner/president” of a turnaround who thought he could price a complex PCBA by simply looking at it for 15 seconds. He refused to let facts interfere with his flawed judgment. I still wake up remembering dismissive comments like, “Don’t worry about it slick; I got this.”

Then there are leaders who manage from dashboards rather than out in front. These “CRM Masters” let high-level CRM details drive company decisions. They expect everyone else to arrive early and stay late while doing neither themselves. They rarely acknowledge the employees who actually get the work done. Instead of spending time on the manufacturing floor, you find them in spacious offices surrounded by administrative staff who answer only to them. They ask CRM-based questions whose answers generate three more questions, often with zero effect on the business, yet they convince themselves that this activity constitutes hard work.

I’ve also worked under leaders struggling with alcoholism. They weren’t necessarily bad people, but their illness created an environment where we needed to make critical decisions before lunch because afterward they could no longer effectively run the business, much less drive an automobile. We used to try to become the last person to make our case before our director left for lunch. If we secured the last sober agreement from him, our plan won. God help them, please.

I’ve encountered plenty of other characters throughout my career, but these behaviors account for much of the poor leadership I’ve witnessed. One beauty of working as a 1099 consultant is that I no longer have to suffer leaders who consistently demonstrate them.

I should also admit that I have displayed some of these crappy behaviors myself at times. Ignorance played a role, as did receiving more responsibility than I was probably prepared to handle. Experience taught me a lot. I hope those of you whose careers have crossed mine feel that, over time, I did more good than harm.

Fortunately, the poor examples don’t define my 47 years in EMS. I’ve also had the privilege of working with many great leaders whom I highly respect – the kind of people I would happily have as my next-door neighbors.End of article content 

Jake Kulp is founder of JHK Technical Solutions; jkulp@cox.net. He assists OEMs and EMS companies with optimizing demand creation offerings and deciding when and where to outsource manufacturing. He previously spent nearly 40 years in executive roles in sales and business development at MC Assembly, Suntron, FlexTek, EMS, and AMP Inc.