The Learning To Lead Show with Mark J. Cundiff

"Trust Over Titles: The Reliability Leader's Playbook" Interview with Shon Isenhour Part 2

• Mark Cundiff

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Trust Over Titles: Effective Leadership in Reliability with Shon Isenhour - Part 2

In this episode of the 'Learning to Lead Show,' host Mark Cundiff continues his interview with Shon Isenhour, founder and owner of Eruditio, an education and training company. 

Shon shares insights on how influence is more impactful than titles in leadership, underscores the importance of engaging frontline leaders, and emphasizes the necessity of a proactive leadership approach. 

Through frameworks and storytelling, he illustrates strategies for ensuring sustainability in organizational reliability and discusses the significant role of effective leadership and communication. 

The episode also touches on the integration of AI in the manufacturing sector and its potential to enhance predictive maintenance and data analysis. Tune in to understand why leadership and process management are crucial for successful change initiatives in industrial manufacturing.

00:00 Introduction and Personal Reflections

00:43 Welcome to the Learning to Lead Show

00:57 Interview with Shon Isenhour: Background and Expertise

01:56 Key Learnings from Shon Isenhour

03:18 Leadership and Communication Strategies

11:11 The Role of AI in Reliability and Maintenance

14:14 Challenges in Maintenance and Reliability

16:53 The Importance of Process and Accountability

19:39 Book Recommendations and Final Thoughts

23:36 Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Top Quotes from Shon on Today's Episode:

  • "If you can't tell a story about why the change matters, no one else will either."
  • "Leadership without authority is influence—earned, not assigned.
  • "The front line can smell fake from 100 feet away. You don’t manage change—you lead it, shoulder to shoulder."
  • "Reliability isn’t a program. It’s a promise. A way of working that people believe in."
  • "Trust compounds. And in reliability work, trust is the currency of every decision people make on the floor."
  • "If your change initiative dies the moment you leave the room, it wasn’t led—it was announced."
  • "The people closest to the work often have the answers. We just need to make space for their voice to matter."


Key Topics Discussed Today:

1. The Challenge of Leading Without Authority

  • Why influence > title
  • Building trust over time with technicians and teams
  • Showing consistency through small, repeated actions

2. The Power of Storytelling in Driving Change

  • Using real-life examples to explain reliability concepts
  • How leaders can translate abstract models (like ADKAR) into human terms

3. Frameworks for Sustainable Reliability

  • Change management tools Shon uses: ADKAR, Kotter’s Model, Situational Leadership
  • Avoiding the “initiative of the month” trap
  • Measuring success beyond short-term wins

4. Engaging the Front Line

  • Why language and listening matter
  • Equipping supervisors with coaching, not just compliance tools
  • Creating ownership instead of pushback

5. The Long Game of Leadership

  • Why reliability is a culture, not a campaign
  • How to build momentum without burnout
  • The difference between ‘completion’ and ‘adoption’

Ways to Connect with Shon Isnehour

Book Recommendations by Shon:

I know that I need to go to the gym. I know that I need to eat nuts and not Candy Bar. I know a lot of things, but hey buddy, I'm not exactly Mr. World Fitness here today, right? The ability to be able to execute, I think is where we really have to focus and make sure that our team understands that's where the rubber meets the road. Most, not all, but most of the stuff we talk about from a technical standpoint is not brand new earth shattering. It's the leadership. It's the communication, it's the risk management, it's the situational leadership. I think those are the things that a lot of folks don't understand, and without them, we can't move forward. Hello and welcome to the Learning to Lead Show. I'm your host, mark Cundiff Our goal is to equip busy growth-minded leaders by helping them grow on the go. Now in today's episode, you will hear from my interview with Shon Isenhour He is the founder and owner of Eruditio. They are an education and training company with a focus on project-based applied learning. Working in the reliability space for industrial manufacturing companies. Shon is a proud graduate of NC State University where he studied engineering. He has built on that with multiple certifications in the maintenance and reliability space, including being A-C-M-R-P. Shon has been a good friend of mine from nearly 15 years, and I've watched him grow and develop as a leader, taking on more and more responsibility during that time. He is a great teacher, mentor, and developer of leaders on the front lines in the industrial manufacturing space around the world. Today's episode is part two of my interview with Sean Eisenhower. Trust Over Titles the Reliability Leaders Playbook. In this episode, you'll learn how that influence is greater than a title. You'll also learn about the power of storytelling and driving change initiatives. You'll also learn some frameworks for making reliability sustainable in your organization. You will learn about the importance of engaging frontline leaders then you also hear from Sean talk about the long game of leadership, where he talks about the importance of culture not being a campaign where you need to build momentum without creating burnout, and he'll talk about the difference between completion and adoption. These are some great learnings that we'll get from Sean today. Stay tuned for a great part two of my interview with Sean Eisenhower. Are you a busy leader who struggles finding time to learn and grow? If so, I have the perfect resource for you, the Learning to Lead Newsletter that I publish weekly with five to seven minutes of quick leadership insights, book reviews, and tips to help you grow as a leader, you can get access by going to markjcundiff.com/newsletter. Again, that's markjcundiff.com/newsletter or by clicking the link in the show notes. Now let's dive in and learn from Shon today. Let's talk to the plant manager or the VP of ops who has those people in their organization that are trying to. Lead change how should they approach it? How can they put them in a position to be successful?'cause many times. In those realms of leadership, sometimes they don't understand what's going on and they actually stifle the investment that they just made in these people. Yeah. So what would you say to the folks that are at the more senior level, how can they keep that fire going, put gas on it instead of water, like you said? Yeah, man, there's so many different things I could tell you here. One of the things that we did is we developed. Six different curriculum in IBL. So there is an operations manager curriculum, there's a maintenance manager curriculum, there's planner scheduler, there's store room. So we have all these different flavors, right? Yeah. And the main reason we did that, and this is the point, the main reason was so that they were all talking the same language, and they actually understood the vision of where we were trying to get to. Alright. And I think that's the bigger piece, not to talk about the IBL curriculum, but to say, if you're a leader in the organization, you need to make sure that all of your folks are talking the same language to each other and have the same level of understanding. There's also some things you can do from a project management standpoint. One thing that, that I have noticed is there are certain things that work well in a reactive organization. We'll call them reactive best practices. Wink. All right. And then there's going to be proactive best practices. An example would be, I might centralize my maintenance group because it's so reactive until the maturity level of the organization is high enough that I feel comfortable diversifying, allowing other leaders to be. Involved in maintenance and reliability. So there are things like that we can do structurally from a project management standpoint. On the soft side, which is where we're talking on the leadership and communication side I'm gonna say, let's get'em speaking the same language. Hopefully maybe build, a clear vision of where we're going. That project plan that's going to tell that ops person what they need to do, but it's also gonna tell that maintenance person what needs to happen from their perspective. Those are all key elements to putting fuel in that engine as opposed to putting water on it. I'm curious if you would break it down in a percentage. I know that when people think about, okay, I'm gonna go get some planner scheduling training, or I'm gonna go get some reliability training or RCA training, you really think about the competence that you're learning these skills. So you go back and you're more competent. But how much. Percentage of the effectiveness is based on their ability to lead and influence the change versus just the competence. In other words, you can get fully competent and really know the, and get a hundred on your test, but go back and still not be effective. So what I. How much weight do you place on the effectiveness from a leadership standpoint? I think that's one of the times when we could talk a little bit about some of the industry certifications that exist. And two of them that come to mind for me. One is the CMRP from the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals, and the other is the RMI. C, which comes from the University of Tennessee. Those are almost two different ends of the spectrum. The SMRP is looking for you to be able to answer the questions. Okay. The University of Tennessee and the RMIC credential is looking for you to demonstrate that you've implemented those things. So those are the bookends of kinda what you're talking about. And I think you're a hundred percent right. I know that I need to go to the gym. I know that I need to eat nuts and not Candy Bar. I know a lot of things, but Hey buddy, I'm not exactly Mr. World Fitness here today, right? Yeah. The ability to be able to execute, I think is where we really have to. Focus and make sure that our team understands that's where the rubber meets the road. Most, not all, but most of the stuff we talk about from a technical standpoint is not brand new earth shattering. It's the leadership, it's the communication, it's the risk management, it's the situational leadership. I think those are the things that a lot of folks don't understand, and without them, we can't move forward. I may be wrong, but from my perspective, most I, I know a lot more about the SMRP. You hear more about that. Because they're working about the how to and you hear less about the University of Tennessee model. And so like you said, they're really two different pieces of the same process that need to be implemented. I see that many times organizations think, okay, if I teach'em how to do it, then it's gonna get done. But they also need to teach'em a little bit more on the effectiveness side, how you do a lot of equipping of other people and sharpening their saw. But in order to do that, you have to be. Continually learning yourself, both from a presentation standpoint, from a keeping up with what's cutting edge in the new technologies and how the computer systems and AI and all those impact what you're doing. How do you sharpen your saw? How do you make sure that you're staying ahead of the game so that you're fresh with content to move the organizations that you work with forward. I think there's probably three or four ways that I think I focus on. First would be learning from my own team here at iio. It's awesome to be able to jump on a quick text message with three or four of the guys and say, Hey, here's what I'm seeing. What do you know? What have you seen? What's your past look like? Give me examples. I've got some folks on my team who. Will lead with an example from past history. I've got others who will know exactly what book talks about that. Alright. Okay. And so it's, that's really cool because that then feeds my engine to say, okay, I need to go grab this book or that book, or I need to look at this or that. And I think that's a big part of it. I'm. Taking a pretty intensive dive into the psychology side of what we do right now. So I'm on probably my third or fourth book and I'm realizing this is an area that we don't do well. I. It's like we talked about communication and how we struggle there earlier. The psychology is almost like an enabler that most people just leave on the shelf. They don't even know about it, so they have to work extra hard instead of using that as a leverage point, if you will, to get further along than they want to go. So a lot of reading from that perspective. So the first two, first one obviously is with my peers and having conversations. And those peers can be here at CIO or it can be peers in the industry. I had a great conversation a couple days ago with doc Palmer. I. Who a lot of people will know from his planning and scheduling handbook. And it's just fun, right? Yeah. Because we don't all agree on everything, but we don't have to. We get to talk about it. And what's funny is the more we talk, the more we realize we agreed on most things. Yes. Those conversations allow you to sharpen that saw as well. And then the reading I think is very important. AI is its own world. You can't really read about AI yet because what you're reading is already old. Yeah. In fact, what I read yesterday is probably no longer valid today. AI has been a great tool for us because AI does understand ai. And while it's not perfect in every way. That can be another enabler for quickly pulling together large amounts of data and trying to understand, what it means or draw conclusions from it. So those are, that's three areas I'm sure. There's probably more that I could think of, but those are three that I think I hit pretty regular. Yeah. You touched on AI there. How do you have a feel about how that's going to in, in impact the manufacturing and reliability world? Do you have any kinda sense about that? I have a lot of opinions. I don't know that I am any more equipped than anyone else to say that this is what's gonna happen. But I do believe it'll be another enabler to understanding best practices. But I also know we've known many of the best practices for 50 years and we still haven't implemented them. Yep. So it's not like AI is going to change the implementation strategy, it just might enable you to have more information. Faster and that sort of thing going forward. I do believe that it will make changes to predictive maintenance tools and predictive maintenance in general. And anywhere you have vast amounts of data, I think that's gonna be huge. If you've got a data lake, you can almost turn AI loose on that data lake and learn a lot. Now you gotta be careful. Because, it'll also draw conclusions sometimes that maybe aren't so valid. Yeah. So you gotta, you always, at least for now, you have to gut check everything that AI does against your experience and your beliefs. But are there some tools out there, I'm ignorant about this. Are there some tools out there already on the marketplace for the reliability professional to help'em go in and do analysis of production data and maintenance data? There are. So there's a couple things, and like I said, what we talked about yesterday is no longer valid tomorrow. But we created something called the Reliability robot. Okay? And if anybody wants to get to it, they can go to www.reliabilityrobot.com. You will have to set up a chat GT account because that's the backend that we're running it on. But what we did is we trained the reliability robot on a lot of our. Blended learning curriculum, our IBL curriculum. And so it knows those kinds of things. So now when you ask it a question, it can take it and bounce it against what we know to be some of those best practices moving forward. Wow. Alright, so that's one example. I think when you get into the big data sets, you could arguably, if you're willing to put your data into the public domain, you could load it into any one of the large, they call them large language models, LLMs. So this is the chat, GBT, the gr, all the ones that are out there today. Those they can really handle. A lot of data, a lot more data than a human can really understand in short order. So that, that can be very helpful. And then there of course, are a lot of companies now that are incorporating or creating large language models that you don't have to put your data out in the public domain. Okay. And those can be really helpful for people that are a little more sensitive about the kind of information they might be giving out. That's good. You go into a lot of different industries, a l talk to people from a lot of different industries, speak at conferences. What, is there one or two key challenges that you see the maintenance and reliability professionals facing that just jumps out at you right now? I think, one of the problems that, that we face, and I can probably rattle off. Five or six of these, but I'll try to keep it short. I would say one of them is that we have a tendency to go after shiny objects. Okay. A lot of us are engineers or just gadget guys, right? And so we see some shiny new object and we go all in, oh we would be so much more reliable if we just had industrial internet of things, if we just had sensors on all of our assets. Yeah. No, you wouldn't. Because you'd do the same thing with the data that you've been doing with the data for the last 25 years, right? If you're reactive, throwing a bunch of sensors on the assets is not going to make you in itself less reactive. In fact, there's a study out of MIT that says technology implementations in general have a negative seven return on investment. That is not a good return. You can't make that up on volume, right? It's not that I'm anti-technology, please don't misunderstand, but what I would say is missing for a lot of these folks is they don't wanna do the process work. They don't wanna map the current state process and then understand the target state process, right? They don't wanna do the raci, whatever you wanna call it, responsible, accountable account. Responsible, accountable, consulted and informed or responsible, accountable supported, and information or inputs. People call'em different things. They all work the same. The idea is when you finish, I have every process step outlined, and I know who's responsible and what boss is accountable if it doesn't happen. Because that's probably the second problem that I think industry manufacturing as a whole has, and that's a lack of accountability. And we do a lot of maintenance assessments, reliability assessments, manufacturing assessments. And in those facilities, they'll always, not always, many times they'll say if they would just hold people accountable around here. Yeah. But here's the real dirty secret. You can't take someone who just came outta college and they're now in a supervisory role and expect them to know what a best practice planner looks like or what a best practice supervisor looks like. Or even, what an operator should be doing. Yeah. If they've never done it before. So if you haven't mapped your business processes and define the responsibilities and accountabilities. By role then how in the world can you expect a new leader in your organization to hold somebody accountable? It's impossible, right? So from my perspective, the two big things I would say is we tend to go after shiny objects. We don't tend to go after the business processes, and because of that, we don't understand who's accountable for what. Now, let me put a bow on this because here's the interesting thing. The same study that I mentioned had a negative seven return on investment for technology showed, and I think this is right. I feel pretty good with this number, that it was about a 27% return on just. Getting your processes right, the things we just talked about. Okay. And that's a pretty good return. I think right now with the stock market doing what it's doing, you and I both would take that one every day. All day. Yeah. But what I think is super interesting is that same study said that where both technology and processes were used together. So the processes are enabling the technology. The technology is enabling the processes. They had over a 75% return on investment. So this isn't an OR statement. This is an and statement, right? Yeah. We need both of those, but my belief is you've got to start with the processes, and if you don't, you'll have a whole bunch of shiny technology laying all around the facility collecting dust. You just really. Crystallized what Jim Collins wrote about, about 20, 25 years ago with the technology accelerators. Yes. He said, it's not that technology is going to be the savior of a company. It's only going to accelerate the good companies that have good discipline practices in place. And if you haven't read that, you need to go back and read Good to Great. Because it really talks about all the things that, that you're talking about there as, as well as a number of other paradigms. That's the one that's probably the least talked about outta that book. But it's a, it's, you just exactly nailed what he talked about. The companies that went from Good to Great, they didn't do it because they implemented technology. They did it because it was on top of good discipline practices that they already had in place. So that, yeah, that's a good point. I probably should go back and reread that book. It's probably been 15 years since I read it. I think it would be interesting'cause if I remember correctly, some of the case studies and companies in there have had a rough 15 years. Yeah. So I think it'd be a fun read from that perspective. Because as you and I both know, a lot of companies they lose their way and, things change and they don't keep up and, so that definitely would make that book probably pretty enjoyable. When I was running a plan, I used to read that every year and it's probably the book that I've used the principles out of more than any other book and what I've heard Jim Collins address those issues about the companies that have fallen. He says what has happened is they've gotten away, they've brought in new leadership that they went away from those practices and when they went away from those practices. It started to impact them. So it's a really interesting process there. What are some, we're talking about books here. What are some books that like your firing, equip you and excited you here lately? I think a topic that we really haven't talked enough about today from a leadership standpoint, and I'm not sure a lot of people talk about it and in fact I don't even know if some people believe in it, but I would say probably the body language side has been very fun for me. Now, this is not part of my psychology reading. This is something I dove deep in two years ago. But the body language thing became really good and I brought a couple with me. This is a great book. I've seen Vanessa speak multiple times. She does a wonderful job of really starting to explain what's going on when you're talking with other people. Because we all know, just like you and I or anybody else, it's hard to listen and pay attention to everything that's going on when another person's talking. Sometimes you honestly find yourself thinking, okay, what am I gonna say next? Or How am I gonna respond? And as soon as you start doing that, you're not hearing. Them anymore. You're hearing you just like we talked about with communication earlier, but the, the other side of it's that their body's telling you a whole lot more at the same time if you're willing to listen. And so that's called cues. That one's called cues. She has multiple books though I think this is her second one. Her first one I've finished and it's in pretty rough shape'cause it rode around with me for a while. But this is one of hers and either one of Vanessa Van Edwards books, I think would be good choices. This is another really good one. I've this gentleman, mark, he has a pretty good presence on the internet, so I've also listened to him quite a bit talking about some of the things and even dissecting sometimes things that are happening from a current event standpoint, which can be fun. The big takeaways in here for me. And that's winning body language by winning body language by mark Bowden. Okay. And there's a couple other body language books that arguably are even better or at the same level as this one. Is there one lasting thought that you would like to wrap us up with today that just the guy that's out there, maybe he's struggling from a leadership standpoint and a word of encouragement or inspiration you might give him? I would say try to become more of a proactive leader as opposed to a reactive leader. And I think that's a theme we've talked about here today, is. Doing the pre-work, right? Yeah. It's figuring out the risk before they happen so that you can be ready for them instead of having to react to them. Being intentional, focusing on success, all of those things are proactive. Things that we can do from a leadership standpoint. The reason I say it is. Because here we are trying to take an organization from being a reactive maintenance organization to being a proactive maintenance organization, but yet we go in and fight fires from a leadership standpoint every day. I think, if we're gonna preach that to our audience our people our folks that are following us on this journey, then we've gotta be proactive. And that's hard. It's not that I get it right every day, that's for sure. I find myself caught in the day to day and firefighting and responding. We need to step back from that, right? And try to be more proactive, more intentional, more success focused. That's really good. I really like to call it being s smokey the bear instead of the firemen. But what most cultures do is they reward the firemen and they give them the medals and the trophies, so to speak, but they do not really recognize the quiet guy over in the corner that's preventing the forest fires. We need to do better at recognizing the Smokey the bears. Absolutely that's that, that going back to selling what our good guys are doing. Absolutely. Thanks for your time today. This has been a great visit. Lots of gold in here today and I appreciate your time. Have a good day. I appreciate it, mark. Thanks. Part two of our interview with Sean Eisenhower was some more great content. If you did not listen to the first episode with him, make sure you go back and check that episode out as well. Some quotes that I got from him today that really stuck with me. If you can't tell a story about why the change matters, no one else will either. Another one was, leadership without authority is influence. It's earned not assigned. The third quote that got me was the front line can smell fake from a hundred feet away. You don't manage change, you lead it shoulder to shoulder. Another one reliability isn't a program. It's a promise, a way of working that people believe in. Again, he's there talking about trust. Doubles down with the trust theme. Here goes trust compounds and in reliability work trust is the currency of every decision people make on the shop floor. The last quote for today is if you change initiative dies the moment you leave the room. It wasn't led, it was announced. Those are some powerful statements by Sean. Some great leadership food for the leader out there on the front lines, trying to lead change initiatives and your programs there on your site. If you want to get in touch with Sean, we'll have his contact information, his LinkedIn profile, his website, his email address if you wanna reach out to Sean. His team has some great training available in the reliability space, some great leadership training. Reach out to him get in touch with him. If you're interested in working with Sean and their team. Thank you for listening this week. Make sure that if you've got value out of today's podcast to give us a five star rating on your favorite podcast player. Also looking to show notes for where you can subscribe to our Learning to Lead newsletter that comes out every Monday with great leadership, content insights, book reviews that help you grow as a leader. To help you go from being a good leader to a great leader, and as Craig Rochelle is fond of saying, everyone gets better when the leader gets better, so let's make sure that we go out and grow, we become a better leader, and that we influence our organizations in a greater way for greater results.