Silver Stripe Blog

I just came across this fascinating article on how teams are organized at GE’s Durham plant. This plant is used to manufacture GE’s high powered jet engines for long haul commercial flights. The surprise? Teams at this plant are completely self-organized. There are 170 people here, with a single plant manager (more like a facilitator than a supervisor).

It’s a long article. Here are some quotes.

So how can something so complicated, so demanding, so fraught with risk, be trusted to people who answer only to themselves? Trust is a funny thing. It is the mystery — and the genius — of what goes on at GE/Durham. And it is the reason why the plant offers so many lessons about why people work, how teams succeed, and what workplace democracy really means.

About the pay structure

Money alone can’t motivate people to perform this well. At GE/Durham, people strive for perfection, expecting no reward other than their own satisfaction. This place has no performance incentives.

Self management

“We had to come up with a schedule. We had the chance to order tools, tool carts, and so on. We had to figure out how the assembly line to make the engine should flow. We were put on councils for every part of the business,” says Williams. It was his first taste of an environment in which there really are no bosses: The technicians not only build the engines; they also take responsibility for the work that middle management would normally do. “I was never valued that much as an employee in my life,” says Williams.

Daily stand up meetings?

Some of these routines are big things. Everyone at the plant belongs to a team, and every team meets every day at 2:30 pm. The team meeting is the pivot of GE/Durham. There are two shifts, and they overlap to allow everyone either to start or to end the day at the team meeting. More than a simple update of the day’s progress and problems, this meeting is a place to hip-check morale, conflict, overtime, hiring, technical snags, and planning for the future.

Specializing generalists

“Multiskilling is how the place is kept together,” says Derrick McCoy, 32, a tech-3 and a buddy of Duane Williams’s on Team Raven. “You don’t hoard your skills. That way, when I’m on vacation, the low-pressure turbine can still be built without me.”

Trust

Some of the routines seem smaller, but they are no less essential. Everyone cleans up. Despite the plant’s almost operating-room cleanliness, there is no cleaning crew. The plant’s tools are not locked up. People trusted to make important decisions have to be trusted not to take home a socket set.

Decision making

At GE/Durham, every decision is either an A decision, or a B decision, or a C decision. An A decision is one that the plant manager makes herself, without consulting anyone. B decisions are also made by the plant manager, but with input from the people affected. C decisions — which make up the most common type — are made by consensus, by the people directly involved, with plenty of discussion. With C decisions, the view of the plant manager doesn’t necessarily carry more weight than the views of those affected.

This is a fantastic article. Read the whole article here.