UNTRAINING™ EXAMPLES & APPLICATIONS

Issues

• Losing money
• 27% Turnover
• 87% late Delivery
• 23% Quality rejects

Our Solution

The management team invited us to identify root causes of the issues and develop a plan to address them. Our actions featured 4 elements over a 9-month timeframe –

1. Employee Survey – employees gave the company 37% approval rating overall, far lower than average, and 2 areas stood out as primary big issues:
   • Lack of trust in management, i.e. “they don’t know what goes on in the plant”
   • Ineffective Supervisors – didn’t know how to deal with conflict, shared incorrect information, micro-managed work, and didn’t take employee suggestions up the chain

2. UNTraining Actions – our coaches joined the company’s 9 Operations teams 1 day a week for 4 months. We joined every group’s regular weekly 1-hour team meetings. During our 15-minute timeslot, we asked employees their ideas for how to make the group run more smoothly. We helped the group select an idea to try that week and worked together to develop how they’d implement it. The next week we talked through how it went and worked on what to do better the coming week.

During these meetings, we saw the good, the bad and the ugly. Tempers, name-calling, negativity, conflicts, etc. As embedded coaches, we’d call time-outs and turn these non-productive behaviors into teachable moments. We provided real-time coaching that techs and supervisors took to heart together – resolving conflicts, bringing out the good in naysayers, clarifying communications, helping the group understand how their behaviors hurt the team and its productivity, and addressing these behaviors out in the open.

3. Supervisor Coaching Workshops – our same coaches brought the 9 Operations team supervisors together for a weekly workshop. We’d discuss things gone right and what to do better. We enabled supervisors to share what they learned with each other, and ask what they needed help with. We equipped the supervisors with new skills. They tried and learned. We talked emotional intelligence, agendas, coaching skills, team skills, conflict resolution, active listening, and much more.

4. Management Floor Huddles – we held management accountable to be visible on the plant floor. We facilitated management huddles in each of the 9 Operations areas, giving employees the chance to show off what they were doing, the first 2-way dialogue between management and plant personnel in years.

Results

One year after our project began, the company returned to Profitability, Turnover dropped in half, late Deliveries and Quality rejects were no longer a customer issue. Proof that UNTraining works, focusing on people instead of processes works, and UNTraining delivers measurable business results.