Giving Everyone a Voice

By Russ Kathrein

Recently, I attended the LBM Strategies Conference and was able to hear Kevin Hancock deliver his keynote speech, where he talked about giving a voice to everyone in your organization. Afterward, I was thinking about his message and the results he has seen at his company, Hancock Lumber since he adopted this philosophy, and I recalled something I had witnessed several years ago that demonstrated the effectiveness of Kevin’s message in a relatively short time.

I had taken my extended team of 15 people to do some off-site team-building training for 2-1/2 days. Right off the bat, our team was introduced to the Lifeboat Drill, and we were told that we would practice this exercise with our team several times each day. On the last day, we would do conduct the exercise in front of all the other teams at the training and the best time to complete the drill would win. The Lifeboat Drill consisted of a large black cloth zippered bag with various pieces of unmarked 1x4s in different lengths from two to four feet and an instruction page with a diagram. The goal was to unload the bag and stack the 1x4’s on the ground in a fashion that exactly matched the diagram and thus create “the lifeboat”. Since I was everyone’s boss at work and we had plenty of people, I told the team that I would completely sit this exercise out and just observe.

After looking through the bag and reviewing the diagram, the team did its initial trial run. True to form, the supervisors and the Type A personalities quickly took charge of the bag and the instructions and started instructing a few of the other team members where the pieces were to be placed, while over half of the group stood by and watched. After a few attempts, the team told the facilitator they were ready to be timed. As they had done in their practice sessions, a few participated, while most stood around and offered what little help they could. The first time was over two minutes.

During the course of the first day, we would take breaks from the training and practice the Lifeboat Drill. Gradually, by having the instruction reader read louder and faster, and by having the keeper of the bag hand out boards faster, the core participants got the time of the exercise down, while the rest of the team stood around them and offered encouragement in order to stay engaged. The second time was 1:45, the third time was 1:22, and the last practice session of the day was just over a minute at 1:05. The team had cut their time in half and was feeling pretty good.

Right before we broke for the day, someone asked the inevitable question, “What was the record time for the Lifeboat Drill?” Our instructor laughed and said, “You don’t want to know. It will just discourage you.” “Yes”, the whole team exclaimed, “We want to know the record so we can beat it!” The instructor smiled and then informed us that the record time for the drill was 13 SECONDS! This hit the team like a ton of bricks. Here they had been working so hard, and the team’s time was five times longer than the record.

At dinner, everyone started talking about what they had just learned. The core participants all acknowledged that they could speed up some, but not five times faster. That is when everyone agreed that they had to completely rethink the exercise and start asking more questions and approaching it differently. One of the people who had previously stood back asked if the contents of the bag could be pre-staged (The only rule was time started when the team was ready and the bag unzipped). Someone else who previously had not participated pointed out that there were 14 boards and the bag with 15 people doing the drill. Another observed that if everyone had one duty and had it memorized, they would not need someone reading the instructions.

The next day, the team could not wait to try out their new and improved tactics. They staged the parts and worked on where to place everyone around the bag so each person would reach in the bag to grab their board at the correct time and place it in the correct place after the bag master unzipped the bag. The improvement was dramatic. All of day two they made little tweaks to the methodology to take out any wasted motion and reduce friction. On day three, when the final time trials were done, not only did our team beat every other, but it set a new record of 9 SECONDS!

I usually share this story because it is a great example of implementing LEAN ideas in a process. Reduce waste, identify bottlenecks, eliminate friction, continuous improvement, etc. Yet after hearing Kevin’s presentation, I remembered that most of the observations and ideas that made the team so successful in the exercise came from the people on the team who either by tradition, precedent, or personality, would remain in the background and normally not have had their voice heard. Once the “leaders” of the team hit a wall and ran out of ideas, only then did the others have an opportunity to gain their voice and express their ideas that ended up solving the problem.

How many people in your organization are not given a chance to have their voices heard? How often do we tell the people who do their job every day, how they should do their job, rather than asking them what they think can be done to do their job better? Do our employees view doing their job better as working faster, or do we let them figure out how to make their job easier and more efficient? As leaders, we often feel the burden of offering many of the solutions, when maybe our job is to create the right environment where all voices are given the opportunity to offer the solutions to us. The results can be astonishing. After empowering the voice of his employees 10 years ago, Kevin Hancock found his revenues essentially doubling, while his number of deliveries stayed flat. That increase in productivity speaks volumes, and it all came from his employees’ voices.