Stories From the Book

Retooling the Boss
From Tim Wallace

There was one superintendent who was considered so 'old school' that people had warned me he would never change his ways. He had been with the company for over 20 years and he was very proud of our cars. Whenever a customer would want a change in the product or how we made it, this man would get his back up against the wall. He felt we were giving people a great product and that they were too picky. When someone would suggest something, he would respond in one of two ways: we tried it and it didn't work, or we thought about it and decided not to try it. It seemed to me he was basically a good man, a talented man, and a man with a lot of valuable experience who was stuck in an old paradigm. He just couldn't see it from the customer's point of view. Once, it became so tense that one of our best customers said we needed to replace Joe. I didn't like the idea of terminating an employee who probably thought he was protecting the company. So I thought about it and then said to the customer, 'let's do something different which might help both of us.'

We asked if this manager could go to work for them for 6 months at our expense. He would work at a different place and have a different boss. To help make this happen, we agreed to pay his salary. We further said that after six months we would bring him back into our company as a customer's representative, inspecting our products for that customer. This would be a different job than he had before, but an important job. The idea was to convert the guy from being an obstacle for others into someone who would actively help us.

This manager's boss thought the plan wouldn't work, may have thought it was nuts, but he agreed to go along with it. The manager himself was at first also very reluctant to accept the idea. He said 'I have my own job to do and I don't want to do something else.' I told him we really needed his expertise at the customer facility so that he could tell us what was really going on when our tankers arrived at their facility. This guy was a real hard rock. He looked at me and said he didn't want any part of this plan. So we had his boss tell him that he couldn't have his existing job anymore, that he could take our offer or leave. 'If you don't want this job you are out on the street.'

He went into a different world. His new job was to be a Quality Inspector at the customer's plant. I don't know how difficult it was on him at first, but he had to change to survive. He had to learn about a new job, about a new company, and to look at our products from that customer's point of view. If he didn't, he failed.

Well, he didn't want to fail, so he tried to do the new job. All of a sudden, he finds that an old product of ours, that he thought was very good, doesn't meet the customer's needs. He finds that they bought this product because they didn't have much alternative and switching would be costly. He finds that the quality of one other product, that he also thought was very good, is not seen by the customer that way because of how they needed to use it. He finds that our delivery on another product creates additional problems.

So he comes to us and starts to say 'this is no good. You don't understand that by doing this, you are hurting the customer. We've got to move or we risk losing the business.'

Joe ended up being the best inspector the customer had ever had. They loved him. When he came back to us he was a new man. The 'old school' barrier, the won't-change resistor, became one of our managers.

It was the same with one of our plant managers who was also wedded to the old style and a real problem for his people. We took him off being plant manager and made him one of our customer representatives. He experienced first hand what the customer was asking for and why. He started off having to inspect defective products for customers, so when he saw the same kinds of defects again and again he made the connection between the problem and what his guys were doing in the plant. He saw the connection between 'the old ways' and a product that was not what it should be.

I suppose there are many people that you can't do much with. Or people that you can't afford the expense of doing much with. But I think you need to be very careful when you hear people saying that so and so is hopeless. It might be true, or it might not.