Simply acknowledging reality and accepting your role in creating your circumstances will achieve little if you fail to take action, solving real problems and removing real obstacles on your road to results.
To do so, you must exercise wisdom.
victim cycle. People were slow and lethargic when the company des- perately needed action. Ocelia Williams, then a sheet-metal worker recalled, “When I first came to Cin-Made, the place was like a circus.
There was a ten-minute break every hour, and people walked off the line anytime at all to go to the ladies’ room or get a candy bar.” People just did not “see it.” They didn’t understand the severity of the com- pany’s situation or the need to significantly change the way they were doing things.
Frey and his partner immediately set out to make the necessary changes to move the organization Above The Line and “solve” the problems the company faced. After some difficult negotiations and concessions with the union, people finally began acknowledging the dire circumstances the company was in. And for the first time, Frey began to openly share previously guarded information on the com- pany’s performance with all of the employees.
While Frey was making progress on moving the organization Above The Line, he still struggled to get employees to take the step to Own It and personally Solve It. He daily faced the realization that only with the help of the employees would he be able to solve the dilemma the company faced. Frey recalls some earlier thoughts, “I wanted the workers to worry. Did any one of them ever spend a moment on a weekend wondering how the company was doing, asking themself if they’d made the right decisions the week before? Maybe I was unreal- istic, but I wanted that level of involvement.” He continued, “After a bad start, I had begun to see that the workers knew more about the company and its operation than I or the new managers I’d hired. They were better qualified to plan production for the next day, the coming week, the month ahead. They had more immediate knowledge of materials, workload, and production problems. They were ideally placed to control costs and cut waste. But how could I give them some reason to care?”
In moving the organization Above The Line, Frey describes how critical it was to change the way people viewed their responsibility and accountability. He states, “change of any kind is a struggle with fear, anger, and uncertainty, a war against old habits, hide-bound thinking, and entrenched interests. No company can change any faster than it can change the hearts and minds of its people…” The key to change at Cin-Made was to get people thinking differently about their jobs and their accountability; to get them to see that they “could,”
and indeed, “must” solve the problems which they faced on a daily basis in order to “solve” the long term problems of the company.
To help create this personal level of accountability where people spontaneously acted in the Solve It mode, Frey implemented an inno- vative profit-sharing plan, “establishing a pattern of cause and effect”
that would link what people did, with what people got.
After realizing that his managers were used to a command-and- control, “tell them what to do” approach to the job, he found that
“the workers were not much better. My managers believed that man- agers should manage and that hourly workers should do what they were told. The trouble was, most of the workers were perfectly happy with that arrangement. They wanted generous wages and benefits, of course, but they did not want to take responsibility for anything more than doing their own jobs the way they had always done them…” He realized that such behavior kept people from doing anything more than just complaining about the problems of the company. They took no ownership for solving the problems. He knew that such a culture of “complaint” would spell the death of Cin-Made.
Frey continues, “It was bad enough forcing them to use new equipment, but I was also forcing them to change job descriptions, to change work habits, to think differently about themselves and the company. What my employees were telling me, in deeds and words, was, ‘We don’t want to change, and we’re much too old to change.
Anyway, we don’t come to work to think.’” Ocelia Williams recalls how the union president actually thought it was “nonunion” for em- ployees to take on so much responsibility. “That bothered me,” said Williams. “I kept asking myself if I was truly union. But I couldn’t see how we were going to protect ourselves and keep our jobs if the company went under. And I couldn’t see how the company could work unless we all took our share of the responsibility. A lot of people thought those ideas were off the wall.” Frey observes, “But which of us is ever eager to take on new responsibilities?” Relating how his people reacted, he says, “They never dreamed how much responsibility I wanted to lay on their shoulders, but they disliked what little they had seen so far.”
Coaching people into the Solve It mode was easy. Frey states “I made people meet with me, then instead of telling them what to do, I asked them. They resisted. ‘How can we cut the waste on this run?’
I’d say, or, ‘How are we going to allocate the overtime on this order?’
‘That’s not my job,’ they’d say. ‘Why not?’ I’d say. ‘Well, it just isn’t,’
they’d say. ‘How in the world can we have participative management if you won’t participate?’ ‘I don’t know,’ they’d say. ‘Because that’s not my job either. That’s your job.’ And I’d lose my temper. In the beginning, I really did lose my temper every time I heard the words,
‘It’s not my job!’”
With persistent effort to coach people to step into the Solve It mode and help them understand that “solving it” is not an extra activity, but part of the job, Frey recalls that “gradually hourly workers in general began to take on some of the work of problem solving and cost control. I pushed and prodded and required people to help solve problems related to their own jobs. Sometimes I felt like a fool, albeit a very pleased fool, when they came up with simple solutions to problems that had persistently stumped me and my managers.”
Having moved the organization Above The Line and taken the Solve It step, Cin-Made is well on its way to prosperity. It is now a company with a highly differentiated product line that “is doing well in a de- manding market and making a lot of money.” On-time customer de- livery is at 98 percent, absenteeism is practically non-existent, tem- porary workers are now monitored by full time employees in an effort to reduce waste, productivity is up 30 percent, grievances are down,
“strict adherence to job descriptions is a thing of the past,” and people are making more money than other workers in comparable industries.
As the Cin-Made story illustrates, “solving it” requires a personal commitment to continually asking the question, “what else can I do to achieve the result?” Moving Above The Line and adopting the Solve It attitude is the ingredient that will help fledgling companies to be- come robust and thriving companies retain their leadership.
Michael Eagle, then president of IVAC corporation, a midsized medical instruments company, helped his senior team and people throughout the company take the Solve It step and stay Above The Line when they could have easily dropped Below The Line. The com- pany developed a new Model 570 set of instruments, composed of 70 different pieces of equipment, and promised Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Michigan, one of IVAC’s first customers for the new product, delivery before Christmas. On December 10, Mike learned that the delivery could not take place as promised because the new Model 570 instruments required last-minute changes in their printed circuit boards. Determined to keep IVAC’s commitment and to solve this
problem, he asked what else IVAC people could do to hit the target date. After intense discussion, a possible solution emerged. Could a concerted effort from an ad hoc project team close the gap? Some said, “maybe.” Mike said, “Yes!” Immediately he assembled the ad hoc team with representatives from product development, instrument operations, engineering, quality assurance, and shipping, urging them to invest every brain cell in effecting the circuit board changes within a week.
On Monday, December 17, the Model 570 instruments were ready for shipping, but suddenly a new obstacle arose: due to the holiday season, all the commercial shipping services were already overbooked.
Once again, the president asked, “What else can we do?” And the answer came, “There is nothing else we can do short of renting a Lear jet to get this product there on time.” Mike Eagle quickly responded,
“So why don’t we rent a Lear jet?”
Astonished at Mike’s “Get it done” attitude, the team enthusiastically went to work. The shipping department raced to rent a Lear jet and reconfigure its interior to accommodate all the packages that contained the Model 570. Then, at the last minute, it turned out that the company had miscalculated the size of the order. Even with the reconfigured jet interior, all the boxes simply would not fit. Unwilling to accept defeat so close to the goal line, freight packers opened each box and repacked all 70 different instruments. Finally, at 3:00 P.M. on December 17, the Lear jet left the San Diego airport for Lansing, Michigan.
In anticipation of any further problems and intent upon doing whatever else it took to get the result, a product manager from IVAC accompanied the flight. A few hours later, the jet arrived in Wichita, Kansas, for refueling. While taxiing down the runway to take off again, the pilot detected a broken altimeter. Able to fly but a short distance at low altitude, the pilot took the aircraft 200 miles to Lin- coln, Nebraska, where the product manager got on the telephone with the company’s Traffic Coordination Department to track down the faulty altimeter part, a task quite out of the ordinary for this depart- ment. After five hours of focused communications with airlines and manufacturers, the part was secured, flown to the airport, and installed in the Lear. At 3:30 A.M., on December 18, the shipment left Lincoln for Lansing, where it arrived at 5:45 A.M. Meanwhile, IVAC’s in-ser- vice and training personnel who were scheduled to instruct the people
at Sparrow Hospital in the use of the new Model 570 instruments had gotten stuck in a snow storm in Chicago on December 17 and had chosen to travel all night by car to arrive at the hospital on time the next morning.
At 7:30 A.M., on December 18, IVAC unveiled the Model 570 in- struments at Sparrow Hospital and commenced with its service and training operations.
Unlike the people at Cin-Made and IVAC, many in other organiza- tions do not ask the question, “What else can we do to rise above our circumstances and achieve the results we desire?” and ultimately fail to solve their problems.