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Case Studies: Team Culture

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Creating Team Culture in a Manufacturing Plant

The Challenge

The HR department of a manufacturing plant was struggling with a persistent set of complaints. The facility employed 1200 people and annually produced over a billion dollars of product. The plant was well-known for being "like a family" and for fostering open, friendly working relationships among the staff...

However, the inconsistent management styles of different groups within the plant had led to mismatched expectations and miscommunications between these different groups. There was a sense that the culture of friendliness did not support effective teamwork because staff were more inclined to be "nice" to each other than to make hard decisions or hold each other accountable. Various members of the HR team had tried to influence the plant manager to resolve these issues, but had not yet been successful.

The Desired Outcome

The Director of HR asked for our assistance in influencing the plant manager and his leadership team to address these issues and achieve two specific outcomes:

Create and present a vision for the plant that would give the staff a unified sense of the plant's direction and priorities.

Improve the teamwork of the leadership team itself.

 

It was expected that these two outcomes — a specific vision and teamwork behaviour modeled by the leadership team — would have a significant effect on the culture of the plant as a whole, setting the foundations for mutual accountability and a clearer sense of shared success.

The CPD Solution

Buy-In

After meeting with the Director of HR, CPD ascertained that the first step was to gain the full buy-in of the plant manager. CPD suggested carrying out an organisational Survey to collect information that might corroborate or further elucidate the suggestions the HR representatives were making. The plant manager supported this study and agreed to review the results as a guide to possible actions.

Organisational Survey

CPD interviewed the entire leadership team and a sample of other managers from throughout the plant. The interviews not only corroborated the conclusions that HR had been making, but also made a compelling case for change.

This survey results convinced the plant manager that it was time to act on the suggestions of the HR director and take the team off-site to work on these leadership issues.

Team Workability

CPD facilitated a TeamWorkAbility™ session for the leadership team in which we presented to them the aggregate feedback of the organisational Survey. They were shocked, and somewhat embarrassed, to hear these perceptions about their performance as a team. As part of the TeamWorkAbility™ session, we also facilitated a process in which the team members gave honest feedback to each other, and many members of the team were again very surprised to learn of how they were perceived. The team used the discomfort from these new learnings to motivate themselves to create a new level of teamwork and leadership together. They used the tools that CPD provided to them over the remainder of the four-day session to build the following:

• A new definition of their team
• A new set of operating agreements
• A new level of commitment to each other's success

The Results

Back at the plant, there was uniform feedback that something significant had changed. Staff noticed that the leadership team actually began to act as a team, that decisions that were formerly made by one of the directors without input from the others were now made as a team, taking into account each other's different interests. There was a noticeable commitment to ongoing improvement as well. The team made a commitment to regular follow-up sessions to hold themselves accountable for their new ways of working and shared publicly that they were doing so.

Obviously, one off-site couldn't solve all the problems, but there was a universal sense that a key foundation was laid in place for clarifying the direction and culture of the facility, and a long-term action plan was created for spreading the new ways of working and communicating throughout the plant.