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Industry 4.0 conversations tend to orbit around connected machines, smarter software. But every transformation is carried out by people, and the leaders who will drive the next decade of manufacturing are often already inside our organizations, waiting for a door to open.
According to an Industry 4.0 Club webinar featuring hosts Carol Mitchell-Lin and Grace Donovan with guest Kristen Dickinson, Project Management Supervisor with Ulteig, the questions are:
How do we open those doors on purpose and how can we as high potential people push them open ourselves when nobody else will.
Opening doors means having a voice – including being an unfamiliar one. In manufacturing, this can have a powerful impact on your company’s products, as one beneficial example.
Picture a typical new product development meeting. Engineering is there. So are marketing and commercialization. What gets forgotten is that a product such as an industrial machine has a long life after launch, and someone will have to maintain it for years. Sometimes decades.
Consider a large air compressor, a machine that can approach the size of a two-car garage. Shrinking its footprint is a legitimate design win because factory floor space is valuable. But compress the layout too far, and a technician can no longer reach a critical component. Suddenly a routine air filter change means partially disassembling the machine, and a small consumable turns into a large service bill.
Catching that problem early takes a voice design teams aren't used to hearing. Field experience grounds a meeting that might otherwise live entirely in CAD, and the design starts accounting for the machine's whole life instead of just its launch.
Whoever your organization's missing perspective is, the product gets better when that person has a seat at the table.
Getting that seat rarely happens by invitation. When a function has never been part of a meeting, nobody thinks to add it. The first job is hunting down where the decisions actually get made and asking to be included, then reminding people until the invitation becomes habit.
The second job is showing up well. Listen before talking, especially when others in the room have deeper technical backgrounds. Ask the questions you don't know the answers to; there is real power in admitting you're coming from the outside and need something explained. And make the relationship two way. “Your design is great, and here is what you may not have considered” lands far better than criticism alone. Trust built in one-on-one conversations carries into cross functional meetings, where people begin to vouch for you before you speak.
Nobody will ever be an expert in everything. The people who make themselves heard own what they know and admit what they don't. They also treat their own perspective as just as valuable as anyone else's at the table.
Traditional mentorship advice says find a mentor. Better advice says find several and give the group structure. Think of it as a personal board of directors: a handful of people from different backgrounds who hold you accountable and see the things you can't see yourself.
Diversity is the point. A leader from an inclusion network, an engineering leader from outside your function, a hiring manager who turned you down for a role you weren't ready for yet. Different seats bring different insights, and conflicting advice is a feature rather thana flaw because it shows you the range of ways a decision could play out. Aboard like this is never finished either. People rotate off as careers change, new seats get added through new experiences, and that evolution is healthy.
One underrated benefit, a good board teaches you when to say no. Protecting your time is one of the hardest leadership skills to learn, and having a trusted advisor back up your judgment makes holding the line much easier.
Formal programs are wonderful. They are not a prerequisite. Some of the most effective development networks in manufacturing were built by volunteers with no funding at all, launched in the middle of corporate restructurings and pandemic lockdowns because a handful of passionate people decided a network needed to exist.
Mentoring circles, monthly lunch and learns, partnerships with professional organizations, even a full mentoring program that began life as a spreadsheet on SharePoint. Start scrappy, find the other people who care about what you care about, and if you're the only one, connect with an outside professional organization and borrow what already works.
Volunteer passion is a renewable resource, and connections made this way tend to outlast any single program.
None of this works if people burn out first, and burnout is common, especially among women balancing careers with caregiving. A useful mental model is a box of sand. You start each day with a finite amount. The day job drains it, and so do worry and guilt over the things you didn't get to. When the sand runs out, that's burnout.
The counterintuitive part is that some efforts refill the box even while consuming energy. Work you're passionate about, especially work that builds up other people, can return more than it costs. Physical activity does the same. Even something as small as taking a standing call while walking the block.
High potential people are usually the first to say yes to everything, so learning what to decline is part of protecting the energy that growth requires.
Doors rarely open on their own. They open because someone keeps showing up and asking questions and refuses to be afraid of being the only one of anything in the room. Your voice is as valuable as anyone else's at the table. The industry gets better the moment you use it.
Want to learn more? Watch the full webinar, Opening Doors for High Potential Leaders in Manufacturing.
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