When Terry Taylor joined Wright Tool Co. in 1969, the era’s confrontational managerial style was becoming an impediment to
success. A pervading “us versus them” mentality lingered between supervisors and employees at the tool manufacturing
company, and progress was inhibited by inadequate channels of communication. In the late ’70s, Taylor hoped to change all of
that. He envisioned groups of people working together to better understand the company and how to achieve success. More than
30 years later, the leader’s vision has become a reality. Taylor, now president and CEO, mandates that each of his 160 employees
participates in quality systems, sounding-board meetings and the continuous improvement of the company. This team-based
initiative has led to revenue growth of 10 percent in each of the past five years. Smart Business spoke with Taylor about internal
auditors, Six Sigma and how to end meetings on the most positive of notes.
Stress interpersonal skills training. It’s difficult
to be participative, listen and use good
interpersonal skills.
It takes more skill to do that than to be
autocratic and say, ‘Go do this and that
because I said so.’ It’s difficult to get people
and have them train properly and have
them actually do it.
Management has to be trained in good
interpersonal skills, and they have to
demonstrate that. The CEO or president
has to support that by using some of the
same skills and techniques.
Today, there’re a lot of great resources
out there to utilize. Universities today offer
a great education in the Six Sigma method
of continuous improvement.
There’re also some really good things
through ASQ [American Society for
Quality] and ASTD [American Society for
Training and Development]. Those are
groups that your human resources, your
quality person and, certainly, the manager
need to get training on.
We do put our supervisors through interpersonal skills training. There are definite
behavior patterns that people can say, ‘This
is how you respond in this situation.’ You
can role-play and practice and do those
things.
Once you get them using this behavior
and see the results, then the feedback is
positive and you get a good circle going.
Once you’ve trained employees, retrain them. Periodically, you need to go back and
retrain. Anybody can say, ‘I trained him, and I’m
done,’ or, ‘I got trained myself, and I’m
done.’ You need to go back and retrain
yourself and retrain people and make sure
(to cover) anything new or anything that’s
kind of fallen by the wayside.
I’m kind of a behaviorist. I believe that,
if you behave in a certain way, you’ll get
certain results. And as you behave in that
way and get those results, then your feedback is positive, so you, in turn, want to
behave in that way more than you have in
the past.
Keep communication open. Your goal is to
continually improve your process. You’re
looking for ideas and ways and things that
are going to help you improve in your efficiencies.
By allowing people to be more participative, typically they will respond by helping
you be more effective and more efficient in
your processes. And you reduce the ‘we-them’ situations that companies had for
many years.
There’s not a lot of walls that we want to
create between people because of their
particular title. We want to have it more
open, so that our VP of finance can talk to
anybody, our chairman can talk to anybody, and they do.
When I’m in the facility, I do ‘walk the
rounds,’ as they used to be called. I think
it’s good to do that. Say ‘hi’ and talk to people and let them see you. It’s real important
to have impromptu meetings with the managers. Sit down and talk with them. How
are they doing? Review their numbers.
It’s great because people know you and
can talk to supervisors and to managers.
It’s very open and very honest communication. They feel comfortable with saying
things that in other facilities you might not
be able to say. That’s really healthy to do
that.
End on a positive note. We have sounding-board meetings with the employees. At the
sounding-board meeting, we try to use
some of the aspects of appreciative inquiry.
At the end of our meeting, we like to say,
‘OK, let’s think about what’s really great
about here, what we really like about here,
what we need to continue to do here, and
what can we change to make our lives better?’
There are little aspects of things that can
help us recognize what a good thing we
have and how to keep it good and how to
keep it improving.
Stress the big picture. In part of the training,
you need to take the person through all of
the processes that are related to their
process. It could be an office process. I’m
not just talking about manufacturing.
They need to understand how the things
that they receive and their output affects
others in the company, their suppliers and
their customers, and how that overall
affects the vision of the company.
Have internal auditors in (the) quality system. That really helps people learn more
about the company, and it gives them an
opportunity to come and sit down in front
of the president and CEO and other people
and ask them questions about the quality
systems in the company.
Internal auditing is really good because
now you have a person that’s been working
on their particular process for a few years,
and now they have an opportunity to go
out and audit once they get some training
to audit other processes.
We give them direction in what they ask,
and we rotate that so people have opportunities to be an auditor. They have to learn a
little about what’s done, and then they have
a checklist of asking how it’s done and is it
being done.
It’s allowing them to see more beyond
their own and ask some questions. They’re
learning more about the business.
HOW TO REACH: Wright Tool Co., (330) 848-0600 or
www.wrighttool.com