Minimize conflict
One of the best ways to keep employees from being distracted or drawn into tangential conflicts is to keep their task simple. It’s something Cornwell has made a priority at DRS-SSI.
“It may seem strange that I would mention this in the concept of teamwork,” Cornwell says. “We have a very complex business. We have over 150 products that we’ve manufactured in recent history, anything from a ground surveillance radar, which is a very complex piece of electronic equipment, to a water bottling machine that is used on the battlefield, and everything in between. … Trying to manage that can be very challenging.”
It becomes less challenging if you overlay the work that your employees do with a basic idea, a core competency that defines what your organization is all about.
“When you can define your business with one core competency and then pursue it, you will move forward in simplifying the business,” Cornwell says. “There are certainly support functions that you must have in the process of doing that. But if you can define one core competency, you can have employees rally around that specific opportunity.”
In the case of DRS-SSI, Cornwell felt the best core competency to rally around would be providing great customer service.
“We’re very fortunate that we can group or categorize our customer into one very important category,” Cornwell says. “It starts with rallying around that. That’s a wonderful opportunity in terms of customer focus.”
The idea is that no matter what department you’re in or what product you’re making, you all are working toward the goal of getting your customers what they need.
“One day we’re working on this program in support of the Navy,” Cornwell says. “Another day we’re working on another program in support of the Army. At the end of the day, we’re all working together under a standard set of expected rules of engagement.”
As a means of promoting the team concept, Cornwell and his team tasked a group of employees to come up with an idea to recognize teams who exhibited strong performance in support of the customer and worked together to do it.
“I personally recognized a couple years ago that I wasn’t sure we were treating one another in a respectful way,” Cornwell says. “I wasn’t quite sure if we were recognizing employees for good behavior and good things. And I certainly wasn’t sure about the reward system we had in place.
“They created what we call the R3 initiatives: respect, reward and recognition. We’ve used that as a basis to try to establish standard practices of what’s acceptable behavior and this idea of customer focus, but at the same time, working together as a team. That’s probably been one of the most significant successes associated with this concept of empowerment holding all levels of the organization accountable.”
The reinforcement and reward encourages employees to do their best to support the team concept. So what happens when people show that they don’t want to or can’t work with others as part of a team?
“I’ve made it very clear relative to what’s acceptable and what’s unacceptable relative to working together,” Cornwell says. “In those instances where individuals were incapable of working together, we’ve made changes.”
