In our November Safety Newsletter, I wrote about Partner-Centered Leadership. This is the most effective way to improve safety performance. This way of leading also results in improvements in most other aspects of the business as trust and interdependence are built and the environment is safe for the open flow of information. A key aspect of this is working with the people.

When I was the Plant Manager for a big chemical plant in West Virginia, we wanted to engage with the people as effectively as we could. We helped the people to form teams around their own work groups as well as being on site-wide teams to help improve other things. There were site-wide teams to address:

• safety shoe quality, cost and fitting issues,
• environmental improvement and reporting issues,
• safety glasses purchasing and fitting issues,
• addressing and correcting the roomer-mill chatter,
• eliminating sexual harassment problems,
• contractor safety improvement and coordination of safety training and
• many other site-wide challenges.

As we moved to teams, we in management all realized that we had a lot to learn. For example:

• Many people were very cautious and skeptical. How do we overcome this?
• What did it mean to go to teams?
• No one wanted to be seen as cozying up to management.
• What extra work would be required?
• Would there be a lot of extra training?
• Would a person be required to come in during the day for a team meeting when they were scheduled for working at night?

In contemplating this shift in how we wanted to lead, it was clear that all of us had a lot to learn. For example:

• Who would be the team leader?
• How often should they meet?
• How was the work to be shared?
• Would the teams need a facilitator?
• What is the best size for a team to be?
• How do they keep track of their work?
• Do we pay overtime for the meetings if they were conducted in an off-shift?
• Do we pay for meals during the team meetings?
• And on and on.

A really important resource for helping us was the Association for Quality and Participation (AQP) located in Cincinnati, Ohio. They helped us to set up a Chapter for our site and invited our teams to national meetings to see other teams from other companies and learn from them. All of us could see for ourselves that many companies were shifting to teams and that they were effective and fun. This was at the time of the big excitement about the quality movements in the early 1990’s.

These engagements with AQP were a big boost to us and really helped us to learn how to work in a team environment. Then the AQP was merged with the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and the whole team movement seemed to fade away.

But at our plant, we kept the teams moving, building on all we’d learned. We kept improving and learning together about what it meant to be really engaged with the people. Month after month the teams got stronger and more effective. The people in the teams became better leaders and the whole organization became leaderful, that is, when someone saw a need to improve something, they took the lead to get it done. The move to Partner-Centered Leadership became a real strength for us helping to eliminate injuries by 98%, reduce emissions by 88%, improve productivity by 45%, and increase earnings by 300%. The people sustained our safety performance at a Total Recordable Injury Rate of about 0.3 for 17 years.

The move away from AQP to ASQ was part of the broader shift to emphasizing costs, earnings, profits, and using big data to try to solve problems. Moving away from the people reduces the organization’s capacity for real, sustainable success. (Is this what has happened to GE?)

We kept key business indicators before us, but we did not lose sight of the people who make all this happen. When we brought the people side of the business together with the people side, things really improved.

Bringing the people and the business together is a powerful and effective way to release the energy and creative energies of the people to achieve terrific, sustainable results.