The Fabricator - November 2013

provement, you can strengthen team performance significantly by tweaking the team makeup and providing team-specific coaching.

Some situations, however, might be influenced only by casting a wider net that encompasses the entire company culture, leadership and communication styles, and the environment of accountability and feedback. Team performance is highly dependent on all these areas, and in most cases, you need to start with engineering and initiating a culture change in the leadership. As with so many other business practices, building and sustaining high-performing teams must start with the leader.

Dr. Joe Mayer is the managing partner of the Mayer Business Group, 7330 Royal Portrush Drive, Solon, OH 44139, 440-248-9070, www.mayerbusiness group.com. He is a certified business and executive coach with more than 25 years of experience. He also is a member of the Management Advisory Council of the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association International.

November 2013 The FABRICATOR 65

A Tale of Two Teams

The assignments for both teams were identical: Go through the orders in the evening to ensure all information needed to produce the part has been received and is complete; make sure material is available; and schedule the part for production during the night shift.

Before their production meeting, team A’s members had already checked the new orders. When the meeting started on time, members discussed that a critical dimension was missing in a customer drawing. Because the team member representing sales was on vacation, someone from operations volunteered to call the customer. After three tries he tracked down the responsible person and clarified the missing information. The part shipped, as promised, the next morning.

The delivery chart on the team’s performance board indicated that they had hit the 100 percent on-time delivery mark for the last four weeks. The suggestion and task follow-up charts showed that they were working on improvements to the order flow and a new order check list.

Team B’s meeting had another late start. Some members had to be paged several times. After 20 minutes of sitting around and waiting, everybody was finally physically present, unapologetic, and unprepared. Eventually they found the same problem as team A did, and with the sales representative on vacation, the team leader told the team member from operations to follow up with the customer. Getting sidetracked after the meeting, the operations employee left a message late in the day for the customer’s purchasing agent.

The next afternoon, when the customer called to inquire why his part
had not arrived, the operations person told the team leader that it was
not really his job to contact customers, and that he did the best he could
by leaving a message for the purchasing agent. “If sales would have done
a better job of checking the part,” he said, “surely it would have shipped
on time.”
The angry team leader yelled at the operations person in front of the
entire team and told everyone that this behavior was unacceptable, that
he was called on the carpet by the owner himself, and that there would be
consequences if they didn’t shape up. He took it on himself to follow up
with the customer and then told the team that they personally needed to
walk the part through production—or else.

When asked, the team leader did not know their on-time shipment performance, guessing it was somewhere in the 80 percent range. Yes, they had brainstormed improvement ideas months ago, and after some searching he located the list under a stack of drawings. Needless to say, all assignments were past due. His only comment: “I can accomplish only so much.”

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