"They're raw recruits, and as far as we're concerned, they're in boot camp for about two years," Quadracci says. "They get indoctrinated, brainwashed -- theirs is not to reason why. It's authoritarianism all the way until they've proven they're adult enough to handle a participative management style. I mean, if you try to reason with an eight-year-old, he's gonna steal you blind."
And so the instruction begins. Performance is everything, new hires are told; union shops may do otherwise, but nobody at Quad/Graphics gets any points for mere seniority. Absenteeism or sloth will not be tolerated. And, more than anything else, Quadracci and his managers impress upon their employees a pride of craftsmanship -- a respect for the presses, and exacting standards for the work they turn out. To drive this last lesson home, Quadracci himself teaches the "Intro to Printing" course offered by the company's education and training program (Quad/Ed).
Meanwhile, other staffers are, as Quadracci puts it, "mother-henning" these young employees into opening checking and savings accounts and instructing them in how to make use of their benefits. Those who don't have high-school diplomas are gently prodded into getting their high school equivalency certificates.
Indoctrination or no, all of this attention goes only so far in preparing new hires for the challenges that await them. "They're never ready for the responsibility," Quadracci says. "We always give them more than they feel prepared to handle." Over the years, a few employees -- most of them newly promoted managers -- have failed to grow accustomed to the burden, and Quadracci has granted their requests to be moved back into less-responsible positions. But given time, the vast majority become comfortable with their duties -- and their lack of supervision.
"Most of us were terrorized for the first couple of months after we became first pressmen," says Mike Collins, a 32-year-old employee who held jobs in three other printing companies before joining Quad/Graphics five years ago. "It's not as if you can't get help from the other guys if you need it. You can. But nobody holds your hand around here. There's no foreman standing over you like there is in other plants, telling you what's okay and what needs fixing. All you've really got to judge your work is your pride. It's a lot of pressure, but you learn to thrive on it."
In most printing plants, the first press man is an hourly paid worker who has no authority beyond running the press, and -- particularly if the plant is unionized -- it may take a person five to eight years to get that far. But at Quad/Graphics, first pressmen have been as young as 22, and frequently they have no more than five years' experience under their belts. Nevertheless, they are salaried managers who represent their company's first line of supervision -- each having responsibility for a multimillion-dollar piece of equipment and a five-person press crew.
Each press crew is an autonomous profit center that warrants its own entries in the company books. The first pressmen, therefore, are required to keep daily tallies on production levels and downtime. They also have a say in hiring, firing, and work schedules and almost total authority in the areas of cost containment, quality control, and customer relations. Another of their duties is to continue the training their crew members began in Quad/Ed -- a fitting assignment, since it was a group of first pressmen who initiated the education program.
Printing, like most skilled occupations, is learned primarily by doing. In previous jobs, Collins found out the hard way that experienced printers are not always eager to take junior employees in tow and teach them the tricks of the trade. "Sometimes the old-timers think, well, if it took them 20 years to learn something, they'll make the people below them wait 25 years to learn the same thing," he says. Agreeing that a more formal means of sharing knowledge would prevent similar attitudes from developing at Quad/Graphics, Collins and several other first pressmen appointed themselves to the task of starting a school. They wrote a rudimentary curriculum and began holding classes.
Collins says neither he nor anyone else in the group ever consulted Quadracci on the training program. Nor did they discuss its progress until a decision was made to hire a training director. How, then, did Quadracci find out about the program?
"I really don't know," says Collins. "Through the grapevine, I guess."
As that comment shows, there isn't much of a chain of command at Quad/Graphics. Not that the company lacks a hierarchy: Quad/Graphics has a full complement of vice-presidents -- in charge of finance, administration, manufacturing production, press and bindery operations, and distribution -- and under each of them is a supervisor or two, as well as a broad rung of managers. In the pressroom, for example, there is one vice-president, six supervisors (two for each shift), and 36 first pressmen. But none of these managers can say that his or her sole function is one of overseer. One management level does not exist to give orders to the next one down.
Consider the relationship between a pressroom supervisor and a first pressman, Collins says. "The supervisors don't monitor us. They're there to make our jobs easier. They order the supplies we need, and they coordinate the scheduling of the various presses. They also work with some of the customers now and then, but if there's a real problem, they wind up sending [the dissatisfied customer] to us anyway."
Quadracci says he wants his managers to be "involved, not executives." To his way of thinking, managers should be virtually indistinguishable from those they manage. That is why employees at the lowest managerial level -- including the first pressmen -- wear the same uniform as any kid pushing a broom or driving a forklift. Only the embroidery over their breast pockets sets them apart: The managers have their surname there; the hourly workers go by their given names.
Quadracci admits that, despite his best efforts, he has an "executive" or two that have "delegated to the extent that they are no longer very involved in the department." Stoically, he chalks it up to style. "You have to accept the fact that every department is going to be run differently, depending on where the leader is on the authoritarian-participative scale. You can't change them. After all, imposing participative management on everybody would be just as structured, or more so, as authoritarian management."
