The Throughput Mastery Framework part II
This blog was originally published in the Throughput Newsletter on 2/4/26
Last month I shared the Throughput Mastery Framework, a tool to help manufacturing leaders run better businesses - professional businesses, even - that get better results than companies flying by the seat of their pants. (As a quick aside, a great proxy for if your'e running a good business or not is "Would someone pay you to buy your business?" In other words, are you building an asset or do you just own your job? Even if you don't plan to sell it, building a business that can run while you're on vacation is way more fun than building one that depends on you being physically or mentally present at all times.)
In that introductory email, I described what I believe is the most important segment of the framework - the Direction of your company. Without a clear vision, mission, and core values, nothing else will work quite right.
Today, we're going to look at the top-left quadrant: Your Team.
There are a million ways to measure if your team is productive and going to help you achieve your goals. I've got three primary methods of measurement.
Right people, right seats. (Oh wow, did you come up with that yourself, Josh?)
Ascension ladder. (While this sounds more proprietary, I borrowed it from Mike Fritz and Kirk Phelps. Still not original.)
360° assessments. (Again, not original to me.)
As you can see, I didn't reinvent the wheel here. The Throughput Mastery Framework is useful because it's borrowed from proven ideas and frameworks I've learned over the years. It's unique only in that it's packaged the way I think is right.
Today, I want to focus on the first goal of building out a strong team: Right people, right seats. Instead of telling you how to do this, I think it's far more interesting and useful to ask some questions and let you think about it.
What are you doing to regularly review your team in a structured way, to make sure you have the right people?
What does it mean to be the right person at YOUR COMPANY? The right person at McDonald's is different from the right person at Chick Fil-A.
Which seats in your company are the weakest? Do you have internal talent to fill those seats? Do you need to train the existing team member in those seats? Do you need to look outside?
The exact structure of your performance reviews, org chart evaluations, and hiring practices will vary greatly, but you should have a plan and a cadence that team members know and expect.