Henkelman signed up for three teams right away: plant equipment, process control, and merit pay. The first real test was a proposal by the plant-equipment team to buy a new $18,000 forklift. There was a meeting in the conference room next to the lab -- foreign ground for the managers who had come down from the hill. The team members made a compelling argument. The forklift they were using was more than 20 years old. It was unreliable and unsafe. (A month before, it had caught on fire.) And the data they'd assembled comparing the cost with the anticipated productivity gains made it plain that a new forklift would soon pay for itself. Still, the corporate triumvirate -- Sandstrom, Hartsock, and Morrison -- reacted badly. As in "jaws hit chests," says Henkelman.
After the team finished its presentation, Jim Sandstrom spoke. He stressed a key point that the team members were still learning: resources were finite. While it might make sense to spend $18,000 on a new forklift, it might make even more sense to spend the same amount on, say, research and development, which after all was the lifeblood of the business. The management had to think about those things; so did everybody else now that the books were open. The message was clear: you can't always get what you want.
Listening, Henkelman squirmed. The big question in his mind coming into the meeting had been, "Is this gonna fly or not?" Not the forklift -- that wasn't the issue. If the company had other, more pressing needs, so be it; common goals had to outweigh parochial ones in the pursuit of profit, Henkelman understood that. But he had to know that the process was more than just a tease; that if a team did its homework and made its case, the management could be moved. That wasn't clear to him yet. After the meeting, as he filed out of the room with the other plant workers and headed back up the stairs to his platform, he felt a tremendous letdown. "It was like, 'God, what are they trying to do now? This is the same old story."
So it was both a surprise and a lift to learn a few days later that a new forklift was indeed on its way. "That definitely boosted some spirits -- in my own case, for sure," says Henkelman. "Because it was like, 'This didn't fall apart.' It gave me the idea that we can make a difference. It made me feel that we weren't doing all this work for nothing."
That helped. So did Henkelman's early experience with the process-control team. What had long made work such a deadening experience for him was the yawning gap between what he felt he had to offer and what he was asked -- or allowed -- to contribute. He was reminded of it every day, in the never-ending battle between the plant and the lab. What the lab ordered, the plant did, period. Knowledge was power, and the lab had it all. But during the spring of 1991, as Sandstrom set about transforming itself into a company of owners, mistrust slowly evaporated and the doors to knowledge began to open. For example, the conference room -- its shelves lined with technical manuals -- was no longer off-limits to plant workers. If a batch of paint came out lumpy, Henkelman was free now to check the manuals and try to solve the problem himself.
Eventually, Henkelman got a password that gave him access to the formula menu on the company computer. Before, the formulas had been the sacred texts of Sandstrom Products, closely guarded by the priests in the lab, handed down like commandments to the workers in the plant. It made all the difference, Henkelman says, when he could finally "get in there and look around and update a formula, actually change it so the process was on file differently."
Henkelman was living now in a one-room apartment so small that the bed and the table folded up into the wall. And, as of November 19, 1990, he had stopped drinking. So he was alone, and he had a lot of time on his hands. He had his own key to the plant and took to coming in on weekends, just so he could log on to the computer and explore. It was a way to fill the empty hours, but it was more than that. Henkelman was also filling himself -- with knowledge about the business, with confidence in his skills and abilities, and with hope.
Once his whole world at work had been the mill he stood over and the platform it was bolted down on. Now his sense of what mattered -- of what he could influence and what he was responsible for -- was rapidly expanding. He was working hard, trying to absorb "the whole process," he says, "rather than just bits and pieces of it." Getting the password "was definitely a big step. It gave me, I don't know, self-esteem, I guess I'd call it. It was like, 'Hey, they finally trust me."
* * *
In the summer of 1991 Henkelman and the other members of the merit-pay team took on by far the most challenging assignment yet: designing a new compensation system. In the past, deciding how workers would be paid had been the plant manager's prerogative; seniority and favoritism were the key variables. Many plant workers were unhappy with that. They thought pay should reflect usefulness on the job, period: the more things you know how to do and the better you can do them, the more you should make. That was fine with Hartsock, who wanted basically the same thing: a highly skilled workforce with interchangeable skills.
By July the team was ready with a proposal that offered plant workers incentives to cross-train. But as Hartsock quickly pointed out to the team, it was unrealistic. Together they studied the numbers -- looked at the cost of labor and its necessary relationship to raw materials, overhead, and packaging -- and eventually came up with a figure for total payroll that made fiscal sense to everybody. Then Hartsock stepped aside, and the team went back to work.
By now, though he doesn't say it exactly this way, Henkelman was thinking like an owner. "It boiled down to realizing that there are constraints," he says, "and incentives aren't the only things to consider. Then it became, 'How can we make this work?' And the only way was to take from some people."
That was too big a leap for some of the original team members; rather than going back to the drawing board, they quit. But Henkelman stayed on and was joined by others. It was hard work, and it went on for months -- the group was meeting formally once a week, debating continually with coworkers on the job, searching all the time for a balance between an incentive system ("whoever does the best job should get the most") and what Henkelman calls the "union perspective of equal work, equal pay." But one day, says Henkelman, "it all kind of fell together."
