When I left the advertising business, I took the reins of a small uniform apparel company. I literally went from Michigan Avenue to Main Street, U.S.A., and I carried my small bag of tricks with me. You can probably imagine the looks on the faces of my veteran crew of sewing machine operators when I told them they were going to be involved in a planning session. I asked them to vote for the two representatives who would be their eyes, ears, and voice in the process. I did the same with the office staff. We had only about 15 employees at this point and a “growth planning team” of five.
Our first attempt didn’t go too well. I spent too much time trying to educate them on what I knew and not enough listening to what they knew. The second meeting fared little better. They were uncomfortable and shy. I was the proverbial elephant in a china shop. By the end of the first year, we had agreed to little and had implemented even less. I was beginning to question my representative form of growth planning. Maybe it would be easier for me to be the benevolent dictator and just hand out the plan to everyone.
Just when I was about to give up, something pretty amazing happened. In our previous meeting, we had set a goal of increasing our overall production efficiency by an ambitious but achievable percentage by year’s end. Now, one of the team members representing the sewing machine operators was coming to the meeting with a new idea. “Some of the women on the machines thought we might be able to find a customized binding attachment that will speed things up,” she explained. You probably don’t know what a binding attachment is. Honestly, neither did I at the time. That isn’t the point. The point is, she had conveyed our growth goal to her department, listened to their ideas on how to achieve it, investigated a few suppliers of custom attachments, and then speculated about how much we could increase production on two of our best-selling products if we made the change. She had even roughed out a payback of less than one year.
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