TWO
Use Information to Build Responsibility

How do you move your team to the Next Level? The change begins as you learn and apply Next Level skills. This chapter will get your team started as you learn how to use information to build responsibility.

DECISIONS REQUIRE INFORMATION

In any process of change, there has to be a starting point. Let’s pretend that you are an architect and have been asked to design a house for a family. You need to know a few things first before you can develop a concept of what the house should look like. But let’s also pretend that you have been told you cannot speak with the family about their wants and needs. You must design the house based on your own assumptions.

Puzzled, you proceed to design a house for the “average” family of four, located in a moderate climate. When you finally meet the family, you learn that there are seven children and that the house will be located in a coastal village in Iceland. Needless to say, you are surprised. You are also disappointed because you will need to do the work over again. You did your best but still wasted valuable time and energy, and the house you designed does not work for the family. 20

Under normal circumstances, you would have asked questions at the beginning of the project, such as,

• How large is the family?
• How many children are there and what are their ages?
• Does an elderly parent or someone else also live with the family?
• Where will the house be located and what is the climate like there?
• What style of home is wanted?
• Does the family have any special needs?
• Is the house to be in a town or in the country?

Of course a house would never be designed without first gathering all the relevant information and giving it to the architect. The point of this example is to emphasize the importance of information in making good decisions.

How does this relate to your team and your organization? Let’s look at a real-world situation.

EXAMPLES

Next level teamwork in action

The management team on a construction project decided to begin sharing information with the crews about productivity rates for various aspects of the work. These rates were used to estimate the cost of the project and develop a budget for the work. In the past, these rates had been closely guarded. They had never before been shared with the craftsmen who would perform the work. 21

When the labor rates for installing reinforcing steel were shared with the ironworkers, they were curious to see if they could beat the budgeted rate. By the time they finished the work, they had cut 25 percent off the allocated hours per ton and saved the contractor a considerable amount of money

Whether we are operating from an executive suite or pushing a broom on the third shift, when we make decisions, we need information. Operating as a Next Level Team steps up the level of information sharing because team members play a larger role in monitoring their own work. People simply need better information to make better decisions. As information is shared freely, more brainpower is enlisted for problem solving and business growth.

EXAMPLES

Examples of Next Level information sharing

Frontline production workers at Chesebrough Ponds, Inc., routinely scan online inventory reports from the company’s distribution centers and make adjustments to their production schedules.

Workers at a small Xerox production facility generated over $3 million in savings per year when given information about competitors’ costs.

Dynamically growing Whole Foods Market, Inc., makes salary information on every person—including executives—available to all team members.

As business changes, the nature of work needs to change. Relationships, responsibilities, and information flow between management and the workforce must change to meet the demand for ever-improving performance. The move to Next Level Teams begins with sharing the information necessary for people to carry out their work effectively and efficiently Information sharing is absolutely essential for solving the problems that plague organizations. 22

EXAMPLES

Information sharing and problem solving

In training sessions for Next Level Teams, an exercise called the “Polygon Puzzle” is used to demonstrate the power of information sharing. Participants are asked to assemble a large puzzle composed of colored plastic pieces. The puzzle is difficult to assemble, so each participant is given a card with a clue to the solution. For five minutes, participants share the clues verbally with those at their table. For another five minutes, they share the clues with all participants. This encourages verbal communication, listening, and sharing of information.

Finally, all of the participants, working as a large team, are given five more minutes to assemble the puzzle. As difficult as the puzzle is, it is almost always assembled within the time allowed if the clues are shared properly.

The rich discussion following the exercise brings out important points about how critical information is for problem solving and how every team member has information that can be vital in solving the problem. It also reveals the barriers to information sharing that hold teams back from achieving effective solutions. 23

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

Assessing information, sharing in your team

Using the above examples about information sharing to stimulate your thinking, how would you assess the level of information sharing in your team? Is your team given information that will help you make better decisions about the work? Do your team members openly share work-related information with each other? Do they share it with management?

WHAT INFORMATION TO SHARE?

The following story illustrates how team members with information can solve problems that often baffle the experts

EXAMPLES

The country club

An exclusive country club had a problem with members taking home the expensive shampoo from its showers. The club’s president had considered all sorts of options to fix the problem but couldn’t find a solution that would not offend the members. Finally, he shared this information with the locker-room attendant, who responded, “Don’t worry, they won’t do it anymore.” The president looked dumbfounded. The attendant continued, “It’s simple, I’ll just take the tops off the shampoo. No one will want to take the shampoo without the top.” 24

The sharing of information requires us to change our prior beliefs about what people need to know. If team members are being asked to accept more responsibility and accountability for work performance, then they must be given more resources to affect that performance.

Historically information has been guarded and held closely at various levels of the organization, each level assuming that to share that information would be to compromise it. Information has been regarded as power, and those holding the information have been seen as more powerful.

But as the examples above suggest, power actually increases as more people are included in the organization’s thinking processes. The ironworkers increased production once they had a benchmark, and the locker-room attendant devised a solution once he was aware of the problem.

Information sharing in the workplace is simply the process of communication between people who have mutually held goals. In other words, people who are working toward the same result have a need to help each other by pulling together the best information available.

In the past, the communication was between the team and its team leader or supervisor. In a Next Level Team environ ment, communication widens to include other work teams, managers, and customers.25

In the past, information that was shared with frontline employees was generally only that which was necessary to perform the work. Frontline employees were not asked to make decisions and thus did not need as much information. Next Level Teams are called upon to make and implement decisions, so they need more and different kinds of information.

In a Next Level Team environment, this includes having information such as

• Production rates and quality statistics, both expected and experienced
• Customer feedback, both good and bad
• How well competitors are doing
• How well the organization is doing financially
• Specific problems the organization is having
• Feedback on the team’s overall performance
• The health of the industry

Next Level Team members also receive information that needs to be shared to aid in better decisions, such as

• What’s working well for the team and what’s not
• Ideas for improving work processes to enhance productivity
• Suggestions for better working conditions that yield better results
• Ideas for improving quality
• Suggestions for needed training 26

EXAMPLES

Information opens the way to an improved production process

A crew of workers in an auto parts plant spent their time punching out parts on an eight-hundred-ton press. When they needed to change the die on the huge machine for a new run of parts, the machine went off-line, producing no parts and no revenue for the company. Even with their best efforts, the average changeover time was two and one-half hours.

One day a manager mentioned that workers in other countries were changing the same size presses in as little as ten minutes. At first the crew didn’t believe him. It just didn’t seem humanly possible.

However, after confirming the information, the crew set out to learn more about how to reduce their changeover time. They worked continually on the problem, analyzing and brainstorming new techniques. Some of the crew members were skeptical, stating that they did not believe the changeover could take less than an hour; however, little by little, they chipped away at the time.

Within a year of starting their project, their changeover time dropped to five minutes! Because of the significant time saving, they increased production from their machine by eight hundred hours per year and revenues to the company by $4 million—all because the people on the press team were given new information they could act upon. In this example, great information produced a great result. 27

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

Information to be shared

Drawing from the above examples about information sharing, can you think of information that you could share with your team members that might help the team operate better? Is there information that you would like to receive that would help you do a better job? Have you thought about an idea that might improve either the work environment or one of your work processes?

TRUST

Whenever we share information with someone, we create an implied agreement of trust. We trust that the person will handle the information responsibly.

Additionally, when we share information—particularly information of a sensitive nature—a powerful message is sent to the recipient. This unspoken message says that we value the person and trust him or her to act responsibly.

Conversely, when we refuse to share sensitive information with someone, we may send the opposite message: that the person cannot be trusted. This severely hampers the working relationship and, ultimately, opportunities for work improvement.

Sharing information enhances trust and the building of relationships.

Next Level Teams become powerful because information is shared openly in an atmosphere of trust and respect. Team members know that they are protected by the bond of trust that exists among them, so they feel freer to offer information that may be sensitive but important to the team’s success. 28

THE NEED TO CHANGE OUR
BELIEFS ABOUT INFORMATION

The beliefs we have all acquired about work are deeply embedded in our thinking. These beliefs ultimately become strong drivers of our behavior at work. In the traditional system, we learned that information about an organization and its systems was held tightly at its various levels and parceled out on a need-to-know basis.

The Next Level Team environment turns the old thinking upside-down. Information about the organization and its systems is shared openly so that it can flow naturally to the areas where it is needed most.

Sometimes an organization’s sensitive information must be held closely. But much of what has been controlled in the past is information that can and should be shared with everyone. Financial information about the health of the organization, for example, is rarely discussed, although most of this information can be readily found in the organization’s annual report to stockholders.

Breaking down this information by business unit, department, or work group becomes meaningful to team members when they can connect how their daily activity contributes to these results and then act in new ways to initiate improvement.

As you share this information, you will unleash a process that will build trust. Ultimately, you will create stronger and more productive working relationships and better performance by your team.

There is no joy in possession without sharing.

ERASMO DE ROTTERDAM