A Reputation That Drives Results

I’ll ask you once more: Who ultimately cares about your values? Our immediate team members most certainly do. And so do the clients we serve directly as well as the community we’re a part of. But everyone else who hears about us will too, and all of that will impact the results we achieve in one way or another.

I often reference the eighteen month period where I hired 225 people for a net headcount increase of less than thirty. The work performed in any given area within that facility hadn’t really changed, it was always fast-paced and physically demanding. If anything, the working conditions had gotten somewhat better over time as technology improved. And even though there was a ton of mandatory overtime, that had been the case since the company started operating locally in 1961.The most significant change I saw in the final few years I worked in that organization was the interaction between the local management team and the rest of the workforce. Over the course of a decade or so, many of the longest tenured management team members had retired, left the company for other opportunities, or had taken roles elsewhere within the organization. While most of the changes happened one-at-a-time, there were several key changes within just a few months about two years before I decided to move on. Interestingly enough, those key changes occurred just before the most significant increase in turnover I had seen in the nearly two decades with the company. I can’t say it was a coincidence either…

In chapter nine of The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John Maxwell defines “The Law of Magnetism” by saying “Who you attract is not determined by what you want. It’s determined by who you are.” One of the new management team members who started in the short period served as the engineering manager. He was new to the area and, arguably, looking to use any success he could achieve at that location as a stepping stone for more prestigious roles in that company or wherever else he needed to go. He wasted no time in alienating nearly everyone he interacted with on the shop floor, but he didn’t need anything from them since he already knew more than everyone who had been working there longer than he had been alive. Since he only dealt with the production employees in passing, that only had a limited impact on their results. With his direct team though, it was a different story. The most senior salaried engineers tolerated him, but only because most of them were so good in their roles, he was more of an annoyance to work around. The hourly team members under his thumb had far less leeway. These highly skilled maintenance mechanics and diemakers were indeed critical to keeping the operation running so dependability had always been a core value the engineering team as a whole rallied around. Under his iron fist though, any discretionary time away from work was eliminated - regardless of the reason it was needed. The majority of the hourly team members had perfect attendance most of the time, and one of them maintained that for 35 consecutive years. Much of that waned during his tenure; be it a foot of snow, an ice storm, or a family emergency, nothing was excused.

The strict enforcement wasn’t a big deal. The attendance policy hadn’t changed. What had changed was the example those team members saw him setting. On his best days, he showed up at 8am and left around 5pm, and that was only Monday through Friday. If there was so much as a hard rain, you could count on him arriving late or leaving early. And you certainly could rarely catch him in the building between 11:30a and 1:30p; he wasn’t about to abide by the twenty minutes he expected his team to scarf their lunch down in… You can imagine how that variance between the values he modeled and what that highly skilled team had historically held dear spilled over into their feelings toward him! Think back to that Harvard Business Review article I’ve referenced here, throughout What’s KILLING Your Profitability? and a few times in Leading With A Clear Purpose… Do you think he earned the 57% increase in discretionary effort?

While that’s one specific example of how the values modeled (or in this case, not modeled) by someone in a leadership role impact results - and this example is limited to the hourly team members in his department at that time - the impact most definitely did not stop with his team. Nor was he the only new management team member walking a far different walk than what was expected by the rank and file who made up the rest of the workforce. That had an (almost) immediate impact on overall performance, and soon it spilled over into our ability to recruit quality candidates for the numerous open positions resulting from it. Eventually, those management changes, and how they did or did not exemplify the values that had been strong for decades at that facility, impacted what customers around the country experienced from that location. The change was substantial, but it didn’t happen overnight - and we’ll pick up with that thought next time.