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Last Friday, Micron’s leaders, managers, and team leads went through leadership communication training built around the AcuMax Index — an assessment tool geared toward the workplace. Our goal was to take our knowledge from AcuMax, which we use in pre-employment job-fit assessment, and use it to communicate more effectively in our day-to-day interactions. Christopher McCollum, Chief Strategy Officer at AcuMax, led the session.

The Theory Behind the Profiles

The AcuMax Index measures what its developers call innate wiring, meaning how a person naturally takes in information, processes ideas, communicates, and makes decisions. Does someone want autonomy or direction? Do they think out loud, or work a problem through before speaking up? Some people move fastest under urgency, while others do their best work in a steady sequence. Some decide quickly. Others want to see all the data first.

This makes a material difference in the interplay between management styles and individuals. To strengthen that understanding, participants in this training looked at real interactions from our shop floor and asked a practical question: how could our understanding of the person we’re interacting with lead us to stronger communication?

One of those interactions started at a Swiss lathe.

Real-World Example: When Flexibility Slows Things Down

During a high-volume order on one of our Swiss lathes, an operator noticed a critical dimension trending toward the upper tolerance limit. His instructions were to use his judgment, work with Quality and Engineering, and keep everyone informed.

For many, open-ended instructions such as these would seem ideal: trust in the operator, minimal micromanaging, and cross-department communication.

In practice, these instructions placed an additional challenge on an operator whose wiring prefers defined parameters and sequential processes. The decision-making chain, the authority to stop the machine, and the order of actions were unclear. That combination introduced a feeling of obligation to keep everyone in the loop and seek input from all in the decision, putting the operator in the middle of a complex web of information and opinions.

The parts stayed in tolerance, but the decisions took longer than they needed to. Ultimately, the job still shipped on time. However, parts late off the machine meant that time had to be made up later in the process, and the machine was tied up longer than it should have been, delaying the start of the next job.

Same Protocol, Different Delivery

Micron already has a standard escalation sequence for a dimension on the move. Stop after the current part. Tag and hold everything since the last approved inspection. Bring the measurements to Quality, and hold the offset until Engineering approves. The gap didn’t come from the process itself, but from the way the instruction was communicated.

The leadership training group then identified a better way to address this situation based on the operator’s Acumax profile. For an operator with this kind of wiring, that means handing him the sequence directly, spelling out his authority to stop the job if the measurements keep moving toward the limit, and making clear that his manager owns scheduling and customer communication. When the instruction fits, the operator feels comfortable making the call that’s within his lane, Quality gets usable data faster, and machine has a better chance of staying on schedule.

Meanwhile, an operator who prefers autonomy and processes decisions differently may need only the goal and the boundaries. Both follow the same protocol, but the communication style colors how each individual processes it.

Seeing Yourself Through Another Person’s Eyes

Micron’s interest in AcuMax goes back to 2013, following a decade of rapid changes in our organization. Our lean work began in 2000 and earned the Shingo Silver Medallion for operational excellence in 2009. Additionally, our business model was in transition from a screw-machining platform to CNC machining.

The pace of change over those years was fast, and we wanted a clearer picture of the dynamics at play when we made decisions together. Micron started with personality assessments and ultimately adopted the AcuMax Index for its focus on innate wiring rather than personality.

Quality Manager Brian Hoff remembers the newly acquired insights as eye-opening. Most of the team were highly autonomous and liked to hash out decisions verbally, testing new ideas by debating them. The exception was company president Mike Preston, who preferred to work through ideas on his own before bringing them to the table.

“Once all that was laid out in front of us, you really started to understand what it was like for the other person to deal with you, not just what it’s like for you to deal with the other person,” Brian says. “[AcuMax] was a way to build an awareness of ourselves and each other. It helps you see that communication is a yin-yang. You’re not just waiting for someone else to ‘fix themselves’ for you.”

From Strategy to Shop Floor

That same idea shaped Friday’s training. We intend to bring what Team Strategy learned years ago about its own dynamics to the other teams throughout our shop. Essentially, the goal is to know each other better.

“Compared to other manufacturers I work with, Micron has a genuine interest in people development,” AcuMax’s McCollum says. “Mike Preston and others are always problem-solving for better ways to increase collaboration and communication. I hear that constantly from other clients, but I rarely see this level of follow-through.”

Communication, like lean, is a discipline that builds over time. Actively refreshing ourselves through this training is like the kaizen that keeps systems sharp as they mature. The next time an operator spots tolerance drift on a Swiss lathe, the guidance offered will take the person receiving it into account.

In 2000, Micron landed on a discovery that chopped our average setup time by 47% over the course of a year, without even modifying the machines. It wasn’t a new technology or facility upgrade. It was the realization that our goals are only as good as the processes we use to achieve them.

Where Goals Fall Short

Conventional wisdom says SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound — are the fix. Set the goal properly and change follows. Most people know from experience that this doesn’t always work. And yet, we see examples where heroic goals are achieved even while modest ones fizzle.

James Clear wrote the bestseller Atomic Habits on exactly this gap. He argues that winners and losers have the same goals, so the goal can’t be what separates them.

What separates them, Clear says, is the processes underneath. When the work under the number is sound, the number moves. When it isn’t, no amount of recommitting to the target fixes it. That’s systems thinking, and it’s the part conventional goal-setting advice skips.

Reducing Setup Times

Micron’s need for change started with a shift in the industry climate. We noticed, over time, that our orders began trending toward smaller batch sizes and a broader mix of parts.

More orders meant more setups, and our Acme screw machine setup time averaged 32 hours. Without doing anything worse than we had before, our setup time was swallowing a growing share of every job. We needed better agility.

In 2000, we set a goal: reduce Acme setup time by 25% in six months.

Discovery

We assigned a team of seven employees to work on this goal and blocked out four hours for this project every Thursday afternoon. The team mapped our machinists’ setup paths with spaghetti diagrams, timing each task and tracing every trip across the floor. From there, we developed a color code for the distance traveled from the setup: green for within arm’s reach of the machine, yellow for 10 to 15 feet, and red for everything beyond that.

The map surprised us: roughly half of a given setup happened away from the machine, in external tasks like hunting down collets, holders, and pusher pads. The red zone swallowed up 21% of all tasks and 48% of the travel time.

We had spent years working on the machines to make them faster, but the real opportunity was outside of the machines.

Action

Once the analysis had shown us where the problems were, we set to work fixing them. The team applied 5S principles to tooling storage, built cam racks, shadow-outlined setup carts, and wrote a cart checklist so nothing rolled to the machine incomplete. We made sure all setup tools (wrenches, etc.) were available at point-of-use at all times. And finally, we put standard practices into place to make sure that everything was in ready-to-use condition by the time it was needed — tools sharp, tool holders complete with all nuts and bolts, gages pre-set, paperwork on hand.

Results

After six months — the timeframe for our 25% reduction goal — our setup time was down 34%. After a year, setup time was down 47%. After 2 years, 61%. The goal that had once seemed daunting looked modest in hindsight.

This was the moment that solidified a core principle we still operate by today: Improve the systems, improve the outcomes.

Goals are the North Star, Systems Are the Map

Goals still matter. They set the target and keep everyone honest about whether it was hit. But goal-setting advice skips the part that actually gets you there. Our setup team didn’t outperform the goal because the target was well-written. They hit it because they blocked out time, mapped the workflow, and fixed the inefficiencies they identified.

Once we made this connection, the pace of change accelerated. Our work on setup time continued throughout the 2000s, eventually resulting in an average setup time of 3.6 hours by the end of 2007. We also applied the lean lens to sales, estimating, and management, improving processes wherever we found slack. In 2009, we decided to pursue the Shingo Challenge and received the Shingo Silver Medallion for Operational Excellence. A lot has changed since then — CNC turning centers have replaced screw machines and our workforce is largely of a new generation — but our process orientation remains.

Next time your organization sets a goal, take it one step further and outline the process that gets you there.

From a Fortune 500 giant to a 35-employee CNC shop, the size difference is hard to overstate. Last month, seven continuous improvement professionals from Archer Daniels Midland toured Micron’s shop floor to find the parallels between the lean discipline ADM manages across a global footprint and Micron’s.

ADM is a global food processing and commodities trading company with over 270 plants. The bridge between this company and Micron is Dan Vermeesch, former Plant Manager at Micron. Dan was a champion of Micron’s lean transformation — a push that modernized our production machining systems and eventually earned us the Shingo Silver Medallion for operational excellence. He’s since moved into a continuous improvement role at ADM, which ranks No. 58 on the Fortune 500 and landed on Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies list. When he wanted to show colleagues from several ADM divisions what disciplined shop-floor systems look like in practice, he brought them back to Micron.

We were happy to walk this group through our lean systems — and happier still to know, after a lean journey that began almost 30 years ago, that they hold up well enough to be instructive to a company operating at ADM’s scale.