In 1939, Highway Equipment Company was founded, making high-quality road maintenance equipment. In 2024, New Leader Manufacturing is celebrating our 85th anniversary making innovative nutrient applicators for the ag industry, like our brand new, award-winning NL720.
What happened in between? A lot. New Leader Manufacturing is in fact the same business as Highway Equipment Company, and we still make a robust line of road equipment alongside our industry-leading fertilizer spreaders. As our business and the world around it have evolved, we’ve learned some valuable lessons. Here are five of them.
Encourage ownership
It’s no secret that people are more willing to innovate when they feel like they own a project. We believe in hiring high-caliber people, giving them the right tools, and allowing them to take control of their work. By doing this, we encourage them to discover more effective ways to solve problems. We’ve achieved this by cultivating a culture in which our people feel empowered to take an active role in their growth and development.
Start with engagement
When solving a problem, you’re running against the wind if you’re not personally invested in both the challenge and solution. Taking an active interest in the issues you face will energize your efforts. Agriculture has a long, long history. While much of this legacy is still of value today, we believe in evaluating every idea on its own merits, which means asking questions, staying engaged, and finding new ways to do things.
Look within
Creating change is key to our success, and the most important changes are usually internal. Being a leader in our industry requires that we make an active effort to identify opportunities. We strive to ensure that our team has every opportunity to improve.
For example, NLM hasn’t always had the kind of culture that we do today. In years past, we were too rushed to fix the things that were wrong with our company. We didn’t have time to mentor our teams. As we’ve grown and reflected, we’ve seen there is a better way to do business and changed how we operate. I wish we could have learned that lesson earlier, though it is difficult to take the time we didn’t have. We went through tremendous growth in not only our products but our distribution chain as well. Time was something we simply didn’t have enough of.
Listen
Simply put, you can’t learn new things if you aren’t listening. Seeking out new perspectives is vital to the kind of innovation that New Leader Manufacturing is known for, because if you’re only looking for ideas in the same old places, you’ll only get the same old ideas. By keeping our ears open, we can also identify solutions we might not otherwise have noticed. That doesn’t happen if you’re not listening.
Don’t fear failure
This is a tough one. No one wants to be the person who messed up at work. But we’ve learned that fostering a culture that fears failure doesn’t prevent it from happening; it merely discourages risk-taking. In the past, we were too quick to point out mistakes, and it didn’t help make us better. We spent too much time assessing blame and not enough time addressing the problem. We would have benefited from being more patient. It’s a case study in learning from past failures, as we know better now. NLM employees can forge ahead knowing that any failures will be treated as learning opportunities.
Reflecting on 85 years
NLM has accomplished quite a lot since 1939, owing much to the hundreds of people who have worked here over the years. As we look back at our company’s history and ahead to our future, we can acknowledge our mistakes, take pride in what we’ve learned and look forward to the chance to learn even more. After all, you have to learn in order to grow, and perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a maker of farm equipment believes in cultivating growth.
Rocki Shepard is the CEO of New Leader Manufacturing.