In Durham, North Carolina, Robert Henderson was opening a
factory for General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). The goal of the
factory was to manufacture the largest commercial jet engine in the
world. Henderson’s opportunity was great and so were his
challenges. GE hadn’t designed a jet engine from the ground up for
over 2 decades. Developing the jet engine project had already cost
GE $1.5 billion. That was a huge sum of money to invest—and an
unacceptable sum to lose should things go wrong in the
manufacturing stage.
How could one person fulfill such a vital corporate mission? The
answer, Henderson decided, was that one person couldn’t fulfill the
mission. Even Jack Welch, GE’s CEO at the time, said, “We now know
where productivity comes from. It comes from challenged, empowered,
excited, rewarded teams of people.”
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA
3.0.
Empowering factory workers to contribute to GE’s success sounded
great in theory. But how to accomplish these goals in real life was
a more challenging question. Factory floors, traditionally, are
unempowered workplaces where workers are more like cogs in a vast
machine than self-determining team members.
In the name of teamwork and profitability, Henderson traveled to
other factories looking for places where worker autonomy was high.
He implemented his favorite ideas at the factory at Durham. Instead
of hiring generic “mechanics,” for example, Henderson hired
staffers with FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) mechanic’s
licenses. This superior training created a team capable of making
vital decisions with minimal oversight, a fact that upped the
factory’s output and his workers’ feelings of worth.
Henderson’s “self-managing” factory functioned beautifully. And
it looked different, too. Plant manager Jack Fish described
Henderson’s radical factory, saying Henderson “didn’t want to see
supervisors, he didn’t want to see forklifts running all over the
place, he didn’t even want it to look traditional. There’s clutter
in most plants, racks of parts and so on. He didn’t want that.”
Henderson also contracted out non-job-related chores, such as
bathroom cleaning, that might have been assigned to workers in
traditional factories. His insistence that his workers should
contribute their highest talents to the team showed how much he
valued them. And his team valued their jobs in turn.
Six years later, a Fast Company
reporter visiting the plant noted, “GE/Durham team members take
such pride in the engines they make that they routinely take brooms
in hand to sweep out the beds of the 18-wheelers that transport
those engines—just to make sure that no damage occurs in transit.”
For his part, Henderson, who remained at GE beyond the project,
noted, “I was just constantly amazed by what was accomplished
there.”
GE’s bottom line showed the benefits of teamwork, too. From the
early 1980s, when Welch became CEO, until 2000, when he retired, GE
generated more wealth than any organization in the history of the
world.
Based on information from Fishman, C. (1999, September). How
teamwork took flight. Fast Company.
Retrieved August 1, 2008, from http://www.fastcompany.com/node/38322/print; Lear,
R. (1998, July–August). Jack Welch speaks: Wisdom from the world’s
greatest business leader. Chief
Executive; Guttman, H. (2008, January–February). Leading
high-performance teams: Horizontal, high-performance teams with
real decision-making clout and accountability for results can
transform a company. Chief Executive, pp.
231–233.
Discussion Questions
Would Robert Henderson’s strategy have worked if GE were
manufacturing an entire plane rather than just an engine? What
about if they were manufacturing medical equipment?
Jack Welch stated that productivity “comes from challenged,
empowered, excited, rewarded teams of people.” Do you agree with
this statement? What are some other factors of productivity that
Welch may have left out?
One of the factors that contributed to the success of
Henderson’s new factory was the use of FAA-certified mechanics. How
could Henderson have accomplished his goal if the industry was
suffering a shortage of FAA-certified individuals?
As stated at the opening of the GE story, GE had already
invested $1.5 billion in the jet engine project. This implies that
GE has a large amount of money at its disposal. Could Henderson
have pulled off his revolutionary production facility without the
amount of financial capital GE provided? How might his initial
planning and development of the factory have differed if he were
working for a new, small, start-up organization?