Supply Chain and ManufacturingManufacturing

Leadership and Change Through the Lens of Manufacturing

Discuss practical ways manufacturing leaders can help teams adapt to change while maintaining performance, trust, and focus on the shop floor.

November 10, 2026 9:00 am - 12:00 pm CT

Virtual

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Description

Manufacturing provides a particularly useful lens for exploring both leadership and change. It is an environment where leadership is practiced every day, where results are visible, and where the consequences of decisions are often immediate. Safety, quality, delivery, cost, and people all matter, and leaders must continually balance priorities while getting work done through others.

At the same time, manufacturing organizations are always changing. New technologies, automation and AI, new processes, workforce challenges, shifting customer expectations, and changing business priorities continually reshape how work gets done. Operations still have to run while the organization changes around it.

This session will explore leadership and change as related, but distinct, challenges. We will learn from experienced manufacturing leaders about what they have learned about leading people and organizations, examine how manufacturers and their employees experience and respond to change, and spend time where those two subjects naturally intersect.

Drawing on the experiences of UWEBC member organizations and insights from respected subject matter experts, we will explore questions such as:

What have experienced manufacturing leaders learned about leading people and organizations?
What builds trust and credibility between leaders and the people they lead?
How does the role of leadership change as responsibility grows from leading a team to leading an organization?
How do people and organizations experience and respond to change?
What can leaders learn from questions, concerns, and resistance?
When and how should the people closest to the work be involved in shaping change?
What role do supervisors and frontline leaders play in both organizational performance and change?
How do leaders maintain performance while organizations and people are learning and adapting?
What happens when organizations ask people to absorb too much change at once?
Where do the lessons of leadership and change intersect?

Throughout the morning, we will connect leadership principles with the realities of manufacturing and learn from people who have led organizations, experienced significant change, made difficult decisions, learned from mistakes, and adjusted along the way.

Participants will leave with practical ideas about leadership, a better understanding of how people and organizations experience change, and perspectives they can take back to their own organizations.