Question

Case #1

Hillshire-Dickie Clothiers

Kansas City, Missouri

           You are the new CEO at Hillshire-Dickie Clothiers, in charge of a Management Team struggling to improve productivity and profits. You have only been in this position a few months, having been brought in from the outside from one of the nation’s largest clothing manufacturing firms.

           As a matter of information, Hillshire-Dickie is one of the few remaining garment manufacturing companies in the midwestern United States, specifically in Kansas City. Top executives in the firm have been evaluating whether to close the plant, which makes pants for several different clothing companies, and move production to Indonesia. However, everyone hopes to keep the factory going.

           Your predecessor some time ago led the Management Team in its latest effort to turn things around by ordering a shift to teamwork in the manufacturing process.

           In this changeover to teamwork, Hillshire-Dickie’s top executives directed managers to abandon the traditional assembly system, where workers performed a single task, such as sewing zippers or attaching belt loops. In the new team system, teams of 30 to 35 workers coordinate their activities to assemble complete garments.

People were given training to help master new machinery and also attended a brief team-building and problem-solving seminar prior to the shift to team-work. Approximately 50 workers at a time were taken off the production floor for an afternoon to attend the seminars, which were spread over a month’s time. As an introduction to the seminar, employees were told that the new team system would improve their work-lives by giving them more autonomy, eliminating the monotony of the old assembly system, and reducing the number of injuries people received from repeating the same task over and over.

           The pay system was also revised. Previously, workers were paid based on their total output. A skilled worker could frequently exceed his or her quota of belt loops or fly stitching by 20 percent or more, which amounted to a hefty increase in pay. In the new system, people are paid based on the total output of the team. In many cases, this meant that the pay of top performers went down dramatically because the productivity of the team was adversely affected by slower, inexperienced, or inefficient team members. Skilled workers were frustrated having to wait for slower colleagues to complete their part of the garment, and they resented having to pitch in and help out the less-skilled workers to speed things up. Supervisors, unaccustomed to the team system, provided little direction beyond telling people they needed to resolve work flow and personality issues among themselves. The idea was to empower employees to have more control over their own work.

           So far, the experiment in teamwork appears to have been a dismal failure. The quantity of garments produced per hour has actually declined 25 percent from pre-team levels. Labor costs have gone down, but morale is terrible. Threats and insults are commonly heard on the factory floor. One seamstress even had to restrain a coworker who was about to through a chair at a team member who constantly griped about “having to do everyone else’s work.”

           As CEO, you have been leading your Management Team in its evaluation of why the experiment in teamwork at Hillshire-Dickie has been so apparently unsuccessful, and what are the issues of leadership that must now be addressed.

           You have also been considering what might be recommended to managers to promote more effective teamwork, as well as what might be done to alleviate the conflicts that have developed among employees.

           What will you lead your Management Team to do?

Answer 1

We can lead the team in the way it is being led till now which is pay for total output of the team but the top performers must be provided some incentives for their contribution to the team which would act as an encouragement for them as well as others who are slow performers. We need to ask the managers to come up with team activities to improve unity in the teams and introduce incentive system for top performers which will create some competitive environment in them and hence will increase the productivity.