Charged Up…

So today I got to sit through several presentations made by hourly personnel to upper management. Not plant management but… Vice President of Operations and the Director of Human Resources.

Now you may ask what type of projects could these hourly personnel be working on that would require the presence of the Business Leadership Team…

Here are just a few.
Vacation Scheduling Policy (which is a corporate policy)
Mandatory Overtime (again a corporate policy)
Optimization of Process XYZ (strategic assets for the business)
Operator Based Maintenance (yes driven by a mechanic to convince operators to take ownership)
and there were a couple others.

You may wonder how this plant manager got his hourly personnel (or for that matter the corporate team to let the hourly personnel) work on this project. He told me it was easy…

He set the business need and asked them to do it.

The results… simply stated… unbelievable!

It reminds me of a training exercise where two groups of participants were asked to take a marker and jump up and mark the highest point on the wall (there was a piece of paper on the wall!)

Now after the initial round each of the groups were given 5 lb ankle weights. Each group was also given a set of instructions.

The first group’s instructions stated:
Try to get back to the same height that you jumped before. If you do it, you have made a nice improvement.

The second group’s instruction stated:
5 lbs will have little effect on your jumping ability (and p.s. the other team will not have any weights). Good Luck and I know you can beat them.

Guess who won?

Team two.

We don’t ask enough of our employees or of ourselves. Great leaders set big goals and then get out of the way so that their employees can perform.