You know the moment. Mid-September, planning still looks civilised, but you can already feel in your bones what’s coming: orders are rising, deadlines are tightening, and in six weeks the shop floor will be running at full speed and won’t slow down until Christmas.
Most supervisors prepare for this with one tool: the schedule. Staffing, overtime, weekend approvals. The schedule matters – and the schedule won’t save your peak if the team goes into it unprepared. Because in the peak, it isn’t the plan that fails. It’s the things you can’t see in the plan: people don’t know what matters more when everything is urgent; new starters are left without support because their mentors are firefighting; and you become the dispatcher for everything.
What really happens: peak season doesn’t create new problems. It multiplies the ones you have now – it’s just that right now they are small enough to live with. September is the last month in which you can fix them more cheaply than in November.
Tactic 1: set the order of priorities for “when everything is urgent”. Sit down with the team and talk through, out loud, three priority-conflict scenarios that really happen in your area (quality vs deadline, client A vs client B, breakdown vs plan). Agree a rule for resolving them and – more importantly – who decides without asking you. At peak, people don’t have time to guess what you would say. They need to know.
Tactic 2: appoint a deputy for real, not as an honorary title. Not “Marek, if anything comes up”. Specifically: which decisions Marek makes on his own, when he calls you, what he signs. And test it IN September – step off the shop floor for two days and watch what happens. Better for things to grind now than in mid-November.
Tactic 3: protect the weakest link in your crew. Do you have people in the team with short tenure? At peak they are the first to crack – not out of laziness, but from overload without support. Assign each of them, by name, an experienced mentor with one simple duty: a ten-minute conversation every day. It’s the cheapest insurance against resignations in November.
Tactic 4: agree an overload signal with your team. Say it directly: “It’s going to be tough; if someone starts to go under, they tell me before they drown – and nothing bad will happen to them for it.” Sounds soft? In practice, it’s the difference between someone who raises a problem on Wednesday and someone who brings in a sick note or a resignation on Friday.
The most common mistake in September: preparing machines and materials for the peak – and assuming that people will “somehow cope, they always have”. They have. Just ask last year’s turnover after Q4 how much that “somehow” cost.
One action for today: use the checklist (below) for an honest 20-minute review of your team’s readiness. The points where you hesitate are your to-do list for September.