In a previous blog, we offered examples of how teams helped the General Motors Tonawanda Engine Plant survive potential closure and solidify cooperation between union workers and management. We would like to expand on that topic with this blog by providing additional examples of how the use of teams enhanced the productivity of the plant.

Not every company starts out creating a healthy culture or decides to change its culture as part of a strategy for company success. Creating a healthy culture is not part of the usual entrepreneurial handbook, which is mostly dedicated to starting and growing a business. So, what is it that drives entrepreneurs and company leaders to create healthy cultures as an important strategy for company growth and sustainability?

This is our second blog post about i2 Construction, a successful general contractor in the metropolitan Denver area.

One of the attributes of a healthy culture is teamwork. Regardless of how passionate a leader is about developing a healthy culture, without teamwork, it is virtually impossible. We will use the experience of the GM Tonawanda Engine Plant to demonstrate the role that teams played in creating a healthy culture.

In this blog post, we will review the culture at i2 Construction, a successful general contractor that has experienced tremendous growth and success. We plan to follow this blog post with two additional posts dedicated to how the company leveraged its culture to grow and prosper, and how and why the company leaders created the culture that launched its success.

Patrick Lencioni, in his book The Advantage, makes a distinction between smart and healthy organizations.  Smart organizations are characterized as strategic, focusing much of their energy on marketing, finance, and technology.   He characterizes healthy organizations as having minimal politics, high morale, high productivity, and low turnover.

This website is dedicated to the relationship between healthy cultures and organizational success.  In our recently published book, Unleashing Human Energy through Culture Change, we make the argument that a healthy culture is the key to creating a workforce that is fully engaged and working in partnership with management to make the company successful. 

In our book Unleashing Human Energy Through Culture Change, we introduced two concepts to describe the “old” culture at the GM Tonawanda Engine Plant: “industrial warfare” and “industrial depression.” Industrial warfare refers to the level of negativity and mutual hostility that existed between management and workers at the plant. Industrial depression was the resulting condition that sapped human energy from the workforce.

One of the largest threats to a healthy culture is any transition of leadership.  We have witnessed how a carefully developed and nurtured healthy culture can deteriorate when a new CEO or plant manager takes over leadership.  This is why we have devoted this blog post to some techniques for ensuring a successful transition of leadership…

One of the major concerns for workers in manufacturing is job security. Manufacturers traditionally view workers as a variable expense, laying them off when business slows down.  Also, through outsourcing production and automating tasks, jobs are eliminated, posing an additional threat to job security.

In previous articles, we have proposed “the Golden Rule of Management” as a framework for changing an organization’s culture. The rule requires that the organization’s management have faith in its people, trust them to perform their jobs and support organizational goals, and treat them with respect.

In our book, Unleashing Human Energy through Culture Change, we describe how Don Rust and his management team shifted the organizational culture at the GM Tonawanda Engine Plant from one of hostility with its union and workers to a productive, highly energized work culture.

In our book, Unleashing Human Energy through Culture Change, we describe one of the more unusual changes that took place at the Tonawanda Engine Plant: involving the plant’s employees in selling cars.

In our last blog, we presented the planning that took place in preparation for a special day of engine production at the Tonawanda Engine Plant. The purpose for that plan was to determine what the actual engine production per day could be.

Question: In a union shop with a history of hostility, can management gain the cooperation of workers to test the maximum capacity of a manufacturing plant? Answer: Yes; read how in our latest blog post.

In our book, Unleashing Human Energy through Culture Change, we addressed the topic of top-down, authoritarian, supervision. At the Tonawanda Engine Plant in the early 1980s, many supervisors could have been labeled bully managers.

In this day of tight labor markets, many companies are looking to their culture as a way of attracting and retaining talented employees. The question is where to begin. For some, they will look to enhancing employee benefits and offering more flexible work rules.

In our last blog post, we discussed the hidden costs of an unhealthy organizational culture. As a follow-up, let’s take a look of what can happen with a culture that is energized and led by the Golden Rule of management.

Over the years, General Motors, based on its experience in setting up manufacturing lines, bought large pieces of machinery that would give it the ability to produce the volume of parts needed to meet forecasted demand.

Note: This blog was written by Jim Frost, a protégé of Don Rust. Jim is a retired GM operations executive who works as a change agent, executive coach, and leadership expert. We invited him to share his experience in transforming a failing company into a highly energized employee- and customer-centric company.