Our much revered manufacturing director, Alex, was headhunted six months ago and it’s like someone has put the handbrake on our improvement activity.
Morale has plummeted ever since he left and I’m working with his successor to rediscover our old mojo.
Under Alex’s leadership we created a bold ambition to become the top factory in a global group press – in terms of customer service scores, safety, innovation and employee engagement. We supplemented this vision with a sort of constitution that defined the core behaviours we expected on site like respect, humility and teamwork. Alex had this Churchillian-like style and you could see the hairs on the back of people’s necks going up when he addressed town hall meetings.
Pretty quickly, the passion shone through in KPIs. The factory went on a run of 1,000 days without a lost time accident (LTA) and recouped £1.5m in suggestion scheme ideas. Alex always made a point of publically praising, and financially rewarding, the shopfloor employees who made it happen.
Our new manufacturing director has come in and set a new direction. While, he praised our recent achievements, he also warned against complacency. His vision is to employ Six Sigma to improve our quality standards. And it’s symbolic of the man: a more measured, methodical style press – the ice to Alex’s fire.
There’s merit in his strategy, but the shopfloor won’t budge. If only I had a pound for every time I heard the objection: ‘I’m not sure Alex would have liked that’. The transition hasn’t been helped by our first LTA in two years, an event inextricably linked by many to the loss of Saint Alex. We’ve also scored an early own goal when the new director removed cash bonuses for improvement ideas and announced the decision by email. But at the end of the day, pining after Alex is a recipe for going out of business. How do we convince our people to give the new guy a chance?
CI Solution: Kevin Eyre [job title, company to come]
'How do we convince our people to give the new guy a chance?' Well, this is a loaded question. What chance does he want? What chance has he had? What chance remains for him to have? Perhaps it is this latter question that we should focus on.
Maybe it's the name, but the Churchillian Alex brings to mind the advice that Sir Alex Ferguson gave to his successor (David Moyes) at the time. 'Do what you like, but my advice is to hold on to the back room staff.' Moyes replaced them all with his own people. The rest is history.
Leaders (the clue is in the name) don't like to be followers. They like to set out a path of their own. But this is not good always a good strategy. Good leadership seeks to understand what the organisation needs and delivers this irrespective of whether they end up doing what their predecessor did or something entirely new.
Mr 'cool as ice' has inherited an operation that would be the envy of most. It doesn't need changing; it needs to evolve. That needs a leadership-style that is sensitive to the success and seeks to understand the conditions of that success before endeavouring to meddle with it. Besides, Six Sigma is not a solution to the problem of 'complacency'; it is a highly rigorous and project based improvement method that has a very mixed record of success as a standalone approach. And, what is this need to take away financial rewards from the shop floor? Providing them may not be someone's text book approach, but it seems to have been playing a role in the success to date.
So, what chance remains for your man?
Pushing on will fail. Perhaps he could work with the values established a little earlier and demonstrate some 'respect, humility and teamwork.' He could:
1. Hold back on a commitment to Six Sigma by announcing to the workforce that he wants to understand more about what has made the improvement agenda work so well under Alex. Create a small working team for this purpose to provide him with details and couple this with time spent in discussion with team members.
2. Show some humility by saying that he may have been premature in removing shop floor financial rewards. He might like to add that he personally does not favour them but is open to either their continuation or some better form of replacement.
3. Investigate thoroughly the cause of the recent LTA and put processes in place to avoid a repeat of this episode.
4. Finally, he could engage with Alex. It would mean a deliberate suppression of ego and a big chunk of humility, but he could seek Alex out as a mentor privately and let it be known that he regularly consults with him.
My guess is that 'your man' has three months before the only way he'll get things done is through command and control and we know where that leads.
The King is Dead. Long live the King!
