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Inc., a nearby (East Hartford, CT) man- ufacturer of seamless commercial and industrial flooring systems, which had adopted the approach earlier in the decade.
Seeing the Light
After Pelletier and a small group of coworkers visited Dur-A-Flex, he read a book on the subject of SWDTs titled, “Leading Self-Directed Work Teams: A Guide to Developing New Team Lead- ership Skills,” by Kimball Fisher. Wide- ly cited as the SDWT “Bible,” the book provided Pelletier with a much-needed road map to help him break down the approach into steps and guide the company’s efforts. He had “seen the light.”
Pelletier then began to work with a pilot group—the company’s auto-loop team of 11 employees that manufacture extension springs and complicated wire forms—to test the approach. As one of the more self-contained of CSS’s work groups, the team does not rely on many of the other departments within the company, making it easier to effect change by their own efforts.
Management’s job in getting SDWTs going: Set the initial objectives, and then provide all of the resources the team requests to accomplish them. The team also is free to develop its own sub-tier objectives—basically, steps it wants to take to attain the overall objec- tive. Each SWDT team meets frequently to decide on achievable goals, and keeps working toward continuous improvement to accomplish the goals.
Management must provide each SDWT the necessary authority to do whatever it takes to improve the process and reach new heights in terms of delivery performance. It then must step aside.
“This is definitely the biggest step we have taken on our lean journey,” says Gaston. “We involve all of the shop- floor people to the ultimate level, and remove management from the picture.”
Coaching That First Pilot Team
For CSS’s initial foray into SDWTs, Pelletier himself served as a coach,
initially guiding the team but ceding more and more latitude as the team got rolling. He notes that the team members immediately embraced the idea that they could make their own decisions and take charge of their own destiny.
Once they got going, they held numerous brainstorming sessions and the ideas began to flow. The shop-floor workers had always found that there
was not an effective feedback mecha- nism between the shop and the front office. This often caused a variety of problems and issues, resulting in reduced performance. For example, the team often lacked sufficient detail on the jobs it processed. It did not always know which jobs should be run on which machines. As a result, jobs that required the same tools were scheduled to be set up on the same
A Ball
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