When Tom Willis took over as president of Matco Tools in May 1996, he entered an office that had been empty for 18 months.
In the absence of a president, Matco, a subsidiary of Danaher Corp., was managed by the company’s CFO, who came in to work about one week per month.
“It was every man for himself,” Willis says. “The functional walls went up, and people were not working very well together, if at all.”
Instead of focusing on what was best for the company, each division was simply concerned with taking care of its own business — not necessarily taking care of the customer.
“The challenge was to break down those barriers and get the team starting to work together,” says Willis.
He needed to find a way to improve Matco’s culture in a way that would get employees to take ownership of their jobs and commit to making the customer their top priority. But solving that challenge
was difficult, because departments were squabbling over resources and adhering to a me-first attitude.
By instituting processes that foster a culture focused on listening to ideas from both employees and customers, Willis now has his 600 employees working in synch toward common goals at the $350 million company, which manufactures and distributes automotive equipment and tools.
Listening to employees
No one wants to feel like they are moving a rock from one pile to the next every day, so when Willis took over as president, he wanted his employees to know that they had the power to make their jobs
better.
He turned to the Danaher Business System (DBS), a process with a proven track record at Danaher Corp. with which he was intimately familiar. Through the system, employees report ideas for improving work efficiency. It uses lean manufacturing tools to eliminate waste and maximize employee productivity.
“We let every employee know that when they come in to work, they have an opportunity to make a difference every day,” Willis says. “You have an ability to help us advance the ball down the field every
day. If you see there’s something in your job, if there’s something you feel is archaic, if it’s wasting your time, if it is nonvalue-added, you have the ability to raise your hand and let us know.
“If you think there’s a better way, you and some of your associates who may be sharing the same frustration, you can go in and drive that improvement.”
Willis says it’s not easy to get employees to believe that you are serious about a commitment like that, especially at the lower levels. So it’s important to reward people for bringing improvement ideas to
the table — even if those ideas don’t end up being implemented.
He says people have to know that they — and their ideas — are appreciated. And employees who aren’t interested in taking an active role in the company are not a good cultural fit.
“Those people are here to work their eight hours a day and their 40 hours a week,” he says. “We don’t want that; we want people to be active. So we challenge them. Every department is given a productivity goal every year. They have to work with their team to find out how to help drive our productivity.”
In the beginning, Willis’ staff had to go out and find projects to challenge employees to work on. Now, it’s not uncommon for an employee to bring him a value stream map or a variation-reduction kaizen
— two DBS lean manufacturing tools used to improve productivity and limit wasted time and resources.
That’s why Willis looks for workers who want a little more out of their jobs than just a paycheck, and the ideal Matco employee is willing to step into the boss’s office and offer a better way.
“We try to get people who want to come to work and not check their brain at the door,” he says. “We always try to find the people who are curious, who want more responsibility — those people who are
willing to step up and lead and challenge us.”
As the frustrating aspects of work are removed, the corporate culture gets healthier. And Willis says the extra communication makes employees feel more valued, which helps the culture, too.
Of course, not all employees are going to thrive in a culture such as Matco’s. Willis has a mixture of young upstarts and seasoned veterans working for him, and he says it is important to take the time to
find out how younger members of the team learn and develop.
“We’ve got some people who take more hand-holding than others,” he says. “That’s OK, because I used to be one of them. I understand some people have more need for pats on the back. We spend a lot
of time coaching and counseling, talking through issues with people.”
However, if an employee has irreconcilable problems with the culture and its systems, sometimes cutting your losses is the best thing to do.
“You can’t afford to have them,” Willis says. “I don’t have anybody on my staff that’s difficult. Sure, some take more of my time than others. We don’t have time to waste with people who are difficult.
“If they’re difficult, that means they don’t get it. We don’t need them here, so they can go do something else.”
As your company gets larger, it gets harder to keep up with every minute detail of the business. That’s why it is so important for employees to open up, because in a large company, the CEO may not know
what the problem is.
“It’s not OK for you to go home frustrated,” Willis says. “But if that’s what you choose to do, I can’t stop you, because I typically don’t know what’s going on. You have to come to us and tell us what’s going
on.
“If you don’t at least tell us what the issues are, we can’t affect them, because I don’t do your job every day. If I did, I might know those issues as well. Even the supervisor, in some cases, doesn’t know
what he or she may be doing to the group by saying, ‘I need these things done this way,’ without going back and saying, ‘Is there a better way to do this?’”
Willis says the number of suggestions has increased dramatically the last few years, which shows that employees are embracing the program. That’s good news, and he hopes the changes keep coming.
“We don’t want people to feel like they’re backing up or wasting their time when they come to work,” he says. “We don’t want them saying, ‘Why in the heck are they making me do it that way?’ They have
the ability to change that at any point in time.”
Rebuilding the culture at Matco was a means to an end — better customer service.
“Everything we do here impacts our customer, either positively or negatively,” he says. “If we can affect them positively, when they get up, they are highly energized to make a difference in their job.”
Listening to customers
Getting employees to focus on customers was one part of the transformation, but the only way for anyone to really know what Matco’s customers needed or wanted was to ask them.
Matco Tools reaches the general consumer through a network of distributors, making them Matco’s primary customers. To help keep them satisfied with his company’s service, Willis uses an
organization called the Matco Distributor Advisory Council.
Elected representatives from each distributor attend regional councils and discuss ways to improve business.
“They talk about the things that either slow them down, cost them money or sales, and the things that frustrate them,” he says.
At the regional council, these representatives whittle down their list of grievances to 10. One representative is elected from each regional council to travel to the national council for another
discussion session, this one with Matco’s leaders.
Willis says the election of representatives is an important step in fostering trust.
“If I look at my competition, they typically appoint people to these councils,” he says. “They don’t elect them.”
As a result at those companies, distributors feel that only the favorites get attention and so don’t challenge anything.
“We don’t think like that; we want them to come in and challenge us,” says Willis. “Because five times out of 10, we don’t even know we’re doing it to them. It’s little silly things we do without
realizing it that create work for them, that makes them call us five or six times to find out where the information is. As a result, we have to find a way to streamline that process so it will be
more accurate the first time out.”
At the national MDAC council, representatives carve out a list of the top 10 problems. Willis and his management team work on the top two or three first, then work their way down the list.
This list serves as a focal point for the efforts put forth by the teams at Matco. Employees see they are working directly on issues that are important to customers, which helps give purpose to
the work they do, and management knows it’s focusing on things that directly affect customer service.
Communication is key
From the top 10 list to the suggestion rewards, restoring communication has been Willis’ top priority for Matco Tools and a key factor in rebuilding the company’s culture.
In fact, he uses the term “overcommunication” to show just how seriously he takes the driving home of his message. Hammering home the company’s goals and accomplishments via seemingly endless
repetition is something Willis picked up during his time working with Jack Welch at GE.
“You need to set that vision and overcommunicate it,” Willis says. “That was one of Welch’s biggest strengths.
“Whether it was talking about ‘bullet train thinking’ or ‘work out’ or whatever his theme was for that year, he talked about it incessantly, to anybody who would listen. Whether it was to the press or his
direct reports, whether it was somebody on the shop floor in one of the many factories he had around the world, he talked about it all the time. If there’s anything I learned from that, it’s that I’ve got to talk
about it all the time.”
Willis says that eventually, if they are constantly reminded of it, the message will reach your employees. You just have to keep talking about it until every employee, from the top to the bottom, understands it, because if the culture is strong, employees will want to know how to participate in the grand plan.
“People will say, ‘It’s great that you have this vision, Tom, but how do I play? How can I help?’” Willis says. “At the end of the day, everybody wants to be part of the success. If they don’t see how they can
help, they don’t think about it every day. And we want them thinking about it every day.”
HOW TO REACH: Matco Tools, www.matcotools.com or (866) 289-8665