The Strategy that Wouldn't Travel

Jimenez was successful in Wichita not because of the monthly chats, weekly baseball games or Keller, but because she set up an environment conducive to attaining results she needed. This achieved two critical goals- it enabled the employees develop cross-functional solutions and fostered a sense of ownership and commitment. Jimenez misunderstood what made the Wichita project successful. Instead of trying to set up circumstances conducive to developing site-specific solutions in Lubbock, she simple imported the methods that the Wichita employees had created.

Before a group can achieve the synergistic performance Jimenez is looking for it must meet three preconditions. First, team members have to approach the task at hand with the motivation to work cross-functionally and the confidence that they can produce effective solutions. In Wichita, much of the motivation came from the evident crisis in performance. Everyone in the plant knew that it was underperforming and there is no stronger motivation for action than a survival crisis. The confidence came from Keller’s presence. His long history with the company his respect for coworkers and his reputation as a successful problem solver almost certainly reassured employees that a turnaround could happen.

Second, team members must appreciate one another’s perspectives and refrain from blaming one another for problems they may encounter. Before Jimenez’s team-based productivity project, the engineers and the operations workers at the Wichita site neither understood nor appreciated the other side’s contributions. Jimenez and Keller set up the monthly meetings to discuss problems and resolve them. That was an excellent mechanism for providing information on the different contributions and challenges of the various camps. Moreover, their active intervention during those meetings helped stop the blaming. Finally team members must create shared views of problems and shared approaches for resolving them. Those commonalities must be acceptable to everyone if they are to provide the core for new ways of doing things. The monthly problem chats represented the beginning of process if developing acceptable approaches. The company softball games provided a powerful way for the brains and the brawn to develop a shared picture if their plant and its goals, as well as to get to know individuals from the other side and to appreciate their perspectives.

Those changes set the stage in Wichita so that the SPITS teams were bound to make high-quality, innovative suggestions successfully though required employees who were highly committed both to the company and to the plans. That commitment came because employees were involved in the processes.