An Example of Trust

I have recently been reading a wonderful book called Contagious Success by Susan Lucia Annunzio. Ms. Annunzio and her colleagues surveyed 3000 knowledge workers across the world (including some from Intel and Motorola), and have several conclusions on how to build high-performance teams and spread that culture across the corporation.

Some of Ms. Annunzio’s key findings are that in order for knowledge workers to work at peak performance they have to be treated well and trusted and that they have to have input into how their work is structured. Seems obvious to me, how about you? How true it sounds, but how rare that really is! According to Ms. Annunzio, only 10% of knowledge worker teams are managed in a high performance way.

I was musing on just how true this has been in the projects I have been involved with when I remembered a funny story that illustrates some of this from when I was a co-op student in a South Carolina paper mill while in engineering school at Clemson University. Co-op is short for cooperative education, wherein a student alternates semesters at school with real-world experience. I spent four semesters at this paper mill.

This wasn’t just any paper mill that I worked in. At the time it had the largest (widest) Fourdrinier in the world. Per Wikipedia, the Fourdrinier is “the basis for most modern papermaking. The Fourdrinier accomplishes all the steps needed to transform a source of wood pulp into a final paper product.” These machines run verrry fast and are very wide, generating huge economies of scale. Fourdrinier’s are the microprocessors of the paper mill world!

But one of my first tasks was not with the sexy Fourdrinier; it was to design the new control panel for a totally different part of the paper mill, the wood-sorting yard.

I was a 19-year old college sophomore. I had been to a sum total of six states at that time. I had never even flown in a plane. My best friends from the time may disagree, but I am pretty sure I’d had one girl friend by then. And I certainly did not know how to design a new control panel for the wood-sorting yard.

The wood-sorting yard in a paper mill is the front end of the mill, the area of the paper mill where all the logs are sorted by size, quality and whatever other criteria are used. The logs are dumped in the top of a bunch of conveyor belts and then it looks like the log ride at Six Flags or any other amusement park, except these are real logs that would easily crush you if you somehow fell into the sluices. I honestly used to have nightmares about that kind of thing while I worked there. And we won’t even talk about the wood chippers…

But anyway, how to approach this job of designing the new control panel? I started by finding the sorting operator. Sorting operators in wood-sorting yards are pretty much about half crazy. Imagine eight hours per day, five days per week of sitting in a noisy, scary and wet environment, with head phones on to prevent deafness, hitting buttons constantly sorting huge logs all day, occasionally having to use huge gaffe hooks to untangle jammed logs.

The sorting operator acted like he didn’t see me for a while, but eventually got somebody else to take his task and followed me into the quiet room right off the sorting floor. He glared at me, clearly not at all impressed with this “college boy”.

“I’m here to design your new control panel,” I started hopefully.

“Uh huh,” my start clearly not improving his attitude about me.

I showed him the current drawing from the engineering files. “This is the current drawing.”

He glared down at the drawing. “That ain’t riht,” was what it sounded like he said.

“Oh.” I said.

With the most dismissive and derisive tone possible, he said, “Follow me,” and he went back out to the floor. He picked up a broom and I thought quickly of the movie “Deliverance” but I managed to maintain my professional demeanor.

He stood in front of the current control panel, rusted as it was. The panel was several feet across, with one hundred or so buttons. “I have to take this here broom and start the GD thing like this.” He used the broom with his right arm to simulate pushing a button far away from where he was pushing other buttons with his left arm. “That’s what the last college boy left me,” he said with another glare. “He dint have the furst idea how to design GD anything anybody could use.”

I don’t know why I said the following, but it made total sense at the time (even more so now). “Well, how would you like it designed?” I asked.

“What?” he yelled.

“Why don’t you tell me what you want it to look like,” I said.

Another glare, and a jerk of the head back towards the control room. I followed him and we started designing his control panel. After a couple more sessions, it was done. A few weeks later he had a brand new stainless steel control panel. And no more broom.

The moral is amazingly simple to me. Just trust your people. Please! Good things will happen. And they can’t be any harder to work with or trust than that guy was!

Enjoy your Memorial Day holiday.

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