Ready, Aim, Focus

A Leadership Intensive Training program helped one company refocus its squabbling employees onto competitors.

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Rodel's Leadership Intensive Training ended internal battling and refocused the war where it belonged: on competitors

A rush of cold fear shot through Tammy Casper as she stood unsteadily on a platform no bigger than a Frisbee, some 40 feet in the air atop a wobbling wooden pole. Climbing up, she had told herself she couldn't get hurt; she was, after all, wearing a safety harness. But once she reached the top, her calm fled. If she had looked down, she'd have seen 30 people cheering her on, but looking down was out of the question. "I was shaking like a leaf," she recalls. Then, steeling her nerve, she pivoted and leaped. Handling the ropes attached to her harness, her colleagues on the ground broke her fall.

A jump like that might be routine for an airborne ranger candidate, but Casper is a 35-year-old factory worker with two kids. The experience, just one of many different kinds she had over the course of a recent year, taught her a few things about trust, teamwork, and leadership--which was exactly the objective. She and a few dozen other employees of Rodel Inc., a manufacturing concern based in Newark, Del., are graduates of the company's Leadership Intensive Training program.

Fostering leadership among their employees wasn't what brothers Bill and Don Budinger had in mind eight years ago. They were trying to save their company. They didn't have a strategy problem. Rodel had the right product in a growing market. What it couldn't do was execute its business as well as the increasing numbers of its mostly foreign competitors. The solution the Budingers stumbled onto was leadership, a potent answer to a question that bedevils countless entrepreneurs: How do I make the people around me as effective as I am, for the sake of our mutual self-interest?

The Budingers aren't miracle workers, but today Rodel--with four times the sales and employees--is much healthier than it was in 1990, largely because 50 or so Leadership Intensive Training graduates have become missionaries of transformation at every level and in every corner of the company. "When people walk out of Leadership Intensive, they own this place," says Rodel executive Lloyd Fickett, who helped design the program. "And their actions and outlook are contagious."

Teaching leadership, or trying to, is a hot trend in management consulting today. Yet leadership itself remains a nearly ineffable art. Attempts to define or describe it concisely are futile. Warren Bennis, a business professor at the University of Southern California, knows of roughly 800 definitions of it in the literature. "Having written eight or nine books on the subject, I can tell you there is no single one," he says. "The reason is that leadership is squishy, hard to get your conceptual arms around."

Remarkably, the Budingers and their lieutenants have hit on a way to make leadership training concrete and hard-edged. Theirs is a homemade system, not one they bought off the shelf. The objectives of Leadership Intensive Training are tied to specific company needs. And whereas most companies find the value of leadership training tricky to gauge, the Budingers achieve tangible, measurable results. They know the program has merit in part because it pays for itself.

Rodel, a supplier to the electronics industry, manufactures polishing pads and slurries used to process silicon wafers and microchips. Bill Budinger, a Notre Dame- trained physicist and onetime Du Pont salesman, entered the business in 1972, when wafer production was a U.S. domain. "We had this huge cluster of American firms that dominated the world's silicon manufacturing," he recalls. But during the 1980s nearly all those companies went bankrupt, moved offshore, or sold their wafer divisions. Whereas in 1979, 90% of Rodel's sales were to domestic companies, a decade later nearly that same portion of its sales went to foreign companies, mostly East Asian ones, that were operating plants here or abroad.

Even so, in 1990 Rodel sailed in excellent trim. Revenues, about $35 million, were growing by 12% a year. Profits were acceptable, given the chip industry's rabid stress on cost reduction, and as the employee count rose to 150, then 200, Rodel was outgrowing one building after another in a Newark industrial park. "We were riding high," recalls Don Budinger, the president. "We had come from a garage shop to be the best in the world at what we did."

But new competitors, primarily from Japan, were moving up fast--"out of nowhere," Bill recalls--and they often enjoyed cozy connections with the same foreign companies that had bought or outcompeted Rodel's original customers. In that environment, continual incremental improvement--getting a little better year by year--could not keep Rodel out in front. "To survive and flourish, we needed to do more," Bill says. The company needed what consultants and academics like to call "profound change," and the Budingers set out to learn how they might achieve it.

Exhibit A in testimony to their success is Rodel today, more than six years into a deliberate, dead-serious makeover. Since 1993 its sales have grown 50% annually, rising to about $100 million last year, with a joint venture in Japan generating another $50 million. In a hugely competitive field of some 20 players, Rodel leads the pack, controlling a market share of nearly 40% that's still growing. Its customers, numbering about 1,000, include the likes of Samsung, Hitachi, and Fujitsu as well as such premier U.S. semiconductor makers as IBM, Motorola, Intel, and Micron Technologies. "There isn't a chip made anywhere in the world without at least one of our products," says Bill, who at 57 (Don is 54) is very much a hands-on chief executive.

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