Why “Engage”?
Engage is a rather odd name for a consulting company, but there is a story behind the name.
My first corporate job was with General Electric’s healthcare division sourcing components for a revolutionary new CT scanner. The business was counting on a successful launch, but we were having great difficulty manufacturing it. The head of the business unit called us together at the plant for a day-long Work-Out to figure out how to get the weekly production numbers up.
Work-Out is a methodology Steve Kerr developed at GE for rapid problem-solving and decision-making. Senior leadership first assembles anyone and everyone who could have an impact on the root cause analysis or solution development, then kicks off the event by defining the problem and setting a goal for a successful solution with a deadline. Most Work-Outs are same-day affairs, as this one was, with the kickoff first thing in the morning and the report-out to leadership later that evening. At the report-out, leadership only has two options when evaluating recommendations: Yes or No. There is no deferral; decisions are to be made on the spot. The team is accountable to figure out actionable solutions on a very tight timetable; leadership is accountable for making decisions based on the information presented without delay. This makes for an intense, focused, and highly effective session.
GE Healthcare (then called Medical Systems) was a union shop. As part of a global sourcing team deeply committed to outsourcing internationally, I didn’t have much change to work with the production labor force as my mere presence on the floor would trigger union grievances as everyone assumed I was looking for more parts to outsource. One of the benefits of participation in this Work-Out was the chance to work alongside the folks who put these massive, extremely complex machines together.
After a very draining day and a highly successful report-out, we went around the room with each participant providing their perspective as to how the event went. When the time came for one of the production workers to speak, what he said changed my life forever. He said, “I’ve worked for this company for 25 years and this is the first time you realized that when you hire my hands, my brain comes with them.” It pulled us up short in the room, a perfectly-formed truth.
We were all trying to accomplish the same thing: to sell as many scanners as possible to make as much money as possible. All the rest was noise and nonsense. Why wouldn’t we take advantage of the proffered knowledge of everyone involved in the production and sales process given that objective? Snobbery? Condescension? Fear of conflict? Or worse—-the fear that once we saw our blue collar workforce as people and partners rather than as adversaries, we might need to change our course as a business?
My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were bricklayers. I spent many a weekend and summer day in my youth lugging blocks or mixing mortar to help my old man out. It is a backbreaking business, but offers the deep satisfaction of building something which lasts. My father would sometimes take detours as we drove somewhere to show us what he’d built nearby; this chimney, that wall, this building. He usually quoted the year he’d built it and many were twenty years or more old, yet looked as though they were constructed yesterday. It was a source of tremendous pride for him. The notion that the foreman of a construction project would view him as simply a bricklaying machine made me angry; he was an artist, a craftsman. And so were the folks who built the CT scanners which saved so many lives.
From that day forward, long before I’d heard of Lean and its gemba walks, I made it a point to reach out to the people doing the real work on the floor and to build a working relationship with them. Often, this meant coming in the night before an improvement project launched to hang out and find out what was really going on. Sometimes it meant learning how to do some part of the operation myself, so I could better understand the challenges they were facing. No one ever rejected my presence or refused to talk with me, which I found remarkable because I was intruding in their world. Many times, they would tell me I was the only management person who had ever come to talk with them about what they were doing and why, which is an absolute indictment in my opinion of our leadership style in the United States.
My company is called “Engage” because any lasting improvement can only come from engaging every mind involved in the process. The name serves to both differentiate me from the horde of other consultants out there working problems and to remind me that the most important person in any business process improvement project is the one doing the work at the bottleneck or at the most significant quality control point. My job is not to solve the problems a client places before me; it is to help their people solve them. My role is to be the catalyst of a wonderful chemical reaction, not to be the key ingredient. My superpower is that I know how to solve very complex business problems quickly and for good; the solutions themselves invariably come from the minds of the personnel who live the process day in and day out. This sometimes gets misunderstood as “Consultants only tell us what we already knew.” The fact is, knowledge isn’t enough—-you need to get everyone to see what that one person spotted first, then to take effective action to use the information. “Engage” is therefore the best one-word definition of what it is I do.
If you doubt the truth of this, I have an experiment for you. In your job or in your daily life, take a moment to talk to a person doing their job and ask them how they do it and why. A good lead-in question is, “What’s one little thing that makes you successful at this job?” Push for more detail. If you’re not impressed with the amount of thought that goes into the performance of their duties and their pride in what they do, no matter how mundane the job may appear to others, then feel free to ignore my advice to reach out to all hands within a value stream when trying to improve it. I bet you’ll find that our frontline workers are an untapped goldmine of potential improvements, just waiting for someone to pick up a shovel and start digging.