The most fun I ever had in leading organizations was when we had all learned to work together in self-organizing ways using Partner-Centered Leadership ideas and the Process Enneagram to guide our inquiries.
People were full of creative energy, coming up with good ideas about how to solve their problems and do better work. We shared information about all that was going on – feedback was straight forward and useful. We all learned together through teamwork, became more resourceful, and better able to handle the chaos and complexity of the world around us.
In the old days, when I was driving the people from the top down, the work was hard and not a lot of fun. Many days I was just worn out with all the negative energy bring sucked out of me.
As we all learned to work this new way, my role shifted to being a cheerleader for all the great work that people were doing. The gift of their energy above the minimum made a huge, positive contribution.
Why Teamwork Works
Everything that happens within an organization depends on the agreements that the people co-create together about how to self-organize and do their work. Every part of the organization lives within these bounds and standards. In using the Process Enneagram, the people talk together, listen, share, learn and do the work. The people at all levels are engaged and participate in this work. They build together on their shared values.
Every part of the organization, including those at the top, those in research, sales, manufacturing, maintenance, purchasing, human resources, etc., have these ways of working together.
If someone tries to develop separate ways of working, the organization begins to crumble. For example, if I try to do things differently in safety that conflict with these shared ways of working, people get confused and trust drops. Over time this can lead to the sorts of dysfunctional organizations many of us know so well.
We all have a shared responsibility to nurture and develop this way of working together because the results that are achieved are so much better than dysfunctional organizations can achieve.
At one level, each part of the organization is engaged in different sorts of work, but at a deeper level everyone is engaged in this same way of working and building together. Trust levels got a whole lot better. Interdependence among the various groups became stronger. Disagreement and arguments were fewer because we had learned to talk together and listen for the best ideas.
Our organizations are full of people who are quite intelligent. As we worked and learned together, the collective intelligence of the entire organization got stronger, problem solving got stronger, cooperation and helping each other became more common. As we became more successful, we celebrated each other’s successes.
The Payoff of Teamwork
In one plant of over 1,000 people, in working this way, we went from one of the poorest performers to one of the best of all the 150 plants in the company in just four years.
That was a lot of work, but it was so much fun and satisfying. People are still talking about the experience 30 years later.
Path Forward
If you want to learn more about this way of working and learning together, please give me a call at 716-622-6467 between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm EST.
When I was transferred to the DuPont Belle, West Virginia plant in 1987, the Total Recordable Injury Case Rate (TRC) was about 5.8 and emissions to air, water and ground, as reported in the EPA Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) annual report, was over 6,000,000 pounds/year. Within three years, both of these had dropped by about 95% to a TRC of about 0.3 and a TRI of about 275,000 pounds/year. Emissions to the environment is one way to measure how well the process safety is working; the better the process safety work, the lower the emissions to the environment.
The process safety management collapsed in January of 2010 with major, accidental releases to the air and river and they had a man get killed with a phosgene release. When the US Chemical Safety Board investigated in late 2010, they reported that while the occupational safety and health performance was the best in the DuPont Company, the process safety management had fallen apart and the plant was not even using the DuPont standard procedures. This was a sad commentary about how far things had fallen.
Artificial intelligence and robots, block chains and bitcoins, the opioid epidemic, political strife, and workplace violence, international worries and potential conflicts are some of the challenges facing all of us. There is a critical need for people, in all walks of life, to come together to openly and honestly talk about our challenges, share our thinking and learn together. We do not have to be blindly swept along. We can make decisions and do the things that we need to do to help to make the world a better place.
When I talk about safety. my thinking goes well beyond the traditional safety numbers, training and procedures. It includes ideas about respect and how everyone has agreed to work together. It includes ideas about personal responsibility, integrity and dedication to helping everyone improve. It includes openness, honesty and sharing information abundantly. It includes ideas about the deeper, often hidden patterns of behavior which have a profound impact on the work environment and drive much of the behavior. It includes the fact that the managers and leaders have the largest impact on their organization’s performance. It includes the understanding that managers focus on reliability, stability, predictability and control as they try to maintain the status quo and that leaders focus on the people, change and the future sharing information abundantly, treating people with respect and helping people find meaning in their work. Both good leaders and managers are needed.
A wicked question is one where it is so complex that there is no final answer. We work to the best solution we can, which works for some period of time, then we have to revisit it again as conditions change. (The wicked question keeps repeating, sometimes reminding us of a bad penny – that keeps showing up at inopportune times!)
We need to approach this from the whole systems perspective since everything is connected to everything else. Experience shows that if we try to just fix one part of the system or another, we will wind up making other parts worse.
Consider the Golden Gate Suspension Bridge (San Francisco) built between 1933 and 1937, an architectural marvel, thought to be impossible because in order to bridge that 6,700 ft. strait, in the middle of the bay channel, against strong tides, fierce winds, and thick fog, meant overcoming almost impossible odds. But it was built, with a grand opening in May of 1937, deemed, at the time of its completion, to be the tallest suspension bridge in the world as well as the longest. A man named Joseph Strauss engineered many new ideas, including developing safety devices such as movable netting, which saved 19 lives; though in all, there were 11 men lost during this construction. Thousands of men – workers of varying ages and from varied ethnic groups – came together to complete this project. (They had to listen and learn to be successful together.)
Consider the feat of building the monumental Hoover Dam (1931-1936) – a miracle of technology and engineering. No dam project of this scale had ever been attempted before. There were 21,000 people working at that site with approximately 100 industrial deaths. The walls for this structure – that would uphold the weight of the dam – required workers called “high-scalers” who excavated the cliffs, dangling on ropes from the rim of the canyon. Can you even fathom this?
Consider the great Niagara Power Project (1957-1961). During construction, over 12 million cubic yards of rock were excavated. A total of 20 workers died. When it opened in 1961, it was the Western world’s largest hydropower facility. Many people, including from the “greatest generation” and the “traditionalist generation,” worked together on this project. It was a 24/7, multi-year project.
In many of our newsletters, I have talked about helping organizations co-create their safety future using the 
