The only way I get the equipment or maintenence time that I need to do my job efficiently is if I make my immediate superiors strategically miserable on occasion. If I did what the article insists is the ideal, I’d be doomed to silently perform the same temporary, time-wasting fixes every week forever.
You can’t count on your work to ‘speak for itself’ if the company isn’t specifically examining your contributions in the first place. They will happily presume that your work is exactly interchangeable with everyone else’s because most middle managers aren’t experts at data collection and analysis and don’t spend 8 hours a day seeing what floor workers do.
It’s even worse if they’re an outside hire, with potentially no relevant experience to compare it to. I swear companies do this on purpose to avoid elevating people with institutional knowledge and any sense of ownership in their area of expertise: they might end up accidentally paying someone what they’re worth.