Make employees part of the solution
When Kaniuk stepped into the maelstrom of problems at Zircoa,
he didn’t start yelling rash directives at his crew. That, he says, is
an urge you must fight in a high-intensity turnaround situation. To
get everyone paddling in the same direction, you must first gain
trust by consciously following through on everything you say.
“The first thing you need to do is to get people to trust you to
go down this path,” he says. “There’s no magic way to get people to trust you other than being very, very diligent on whatever you say you’re going to do. When you’re in a tight situation,
for people to believe in you, you have to be very diligent in
keeping every little promise you make, even if it’s just a side
remark. That’s the first step.”
Kaniuk says such diligence is a long-term objective. In the short
run, one of the most beneficial things you can do to gain trust, get
buy-in and address a number of ills is involve your employees in
nearly every aspect of the turnaround process.
“Instead of me coming in and saying, ‘We need to do this, this and this,’ we formed teams,” he says. “Each department solved their
things. We must have had two dozen teams out of hundreds of people. Everybody was on three or four teams working on different
things.”
Forming these teams isn’t as simple as asking certain employees
to solve a given problem. Kaniuk sought outside help from consultants to give his employees the skill sets to better identify areas
in need of improvement and to better work within groups to
address them.
“Everybody at Zircoa goes through three days of facilitator training so that they know how to run meetings, how to communicate
and solve problems,” he says. “The first year, we did 6 percent of
our total work hours in training. A huge amount of facilitator training, communications, listening skills — all those kinds of things so
that people could talk, communicate and decide which problems to
solve, what’s the priority and get them done.”
Once employees have the necessary training, the committees
they form will typically fall within departmental lines. The fabrication department at Zircoa, for example, formed a group, identified
85 things that needed to be improved, and then spent six months
working on them.
For companywide initiatives, such as incentives, workplace rules
and health care plans, committees weren’t so easily defined. In those
situations, Kaniuk met with union officials to identify what employees were best suited for each task.
“If it has significant monetary value, such as gain sharing, health
care or job evaluations, we work with the union to decide on the
group,” he says. “The plant manager and/or I will talk to them and
make sure they understand the assignment.”
While consultants and front-line supervisors may be brought in
to oversee larger projects, Kaniuk and his direct reports are decidedly absent from the proceedings.
“We can approve it, but we won’t be involved,” he says.
Granting such freedom ensures that each project is the employees’ own, which then leads to buy-in.
That’s not to say that Zircoa’s 140 employees operate with complete autonomy. Kaniuk sets careful budgetary restraints for every
initiative.
“I usually go to my (chief financial officer) to see the value of
an initiative to determine the right amount,” he says. “The
guidelines are, ‘We’ve got this much money.’ Other than that,
it’s pretty open.”
An authoritative executive may have a hard time relinquishing
so much control. Kaniuk certainly had his doubts at first. When
a committee first presented their gain-sharing plan for the entire
company, for example, he was very hesitant to approve it.
“I was pretty adamant that we had made a big mistake, and
they had made a big mistake in setting it up, and I went in and
was very vocal about it,” he says. “They said, ‘Yes, we understand your problems, but this is the plan for us.’ So I said, ‘OK,’
and we went ahead and did it. Two years later, I realize they
were absolutely right.”
Kaniuk says the success of this strategy and the resulting buyin it yields will ultimately depend on your ability to take your
ego out of the equation.
“The only pitfall you can have is your own thoughts of what’s
the right way to do some things,” he says. “Even when I said I
trusted them, I had my own reservations. I found in the end
that you’re much better off trusting their judgment. I went
ahead even though sometimes my gut told me no. In the end,
you’re better off trusting their judgment.”