The new system identified 10 essential skill sets. Every plant worker was entitled to a peer evaluation three times a year, resulting in a numerical ranking in each skill set: one (experienced), two (qualified), or three (proficient). The higher the total score, the bigger the paycheck -- more than $15 an hour for anyone who could demonstrate proficiency across the board -- and the higher the multiplier for the gain-sharing checks. The shipping, maintenance, and purchasing employees were given special consideration, on the theory that the company was better served by not having those key personnel wasting time learning how to mix paint. Otherwise, no exceptions. Annual raises were out. Seniority no longer meant a thing.
"One of the things that clicked for me," says Henkelman, "was the fact that when it was all said and done, there were smiles on all but a couple of faces. And the ones that weren't smiling were the ones that were gonna be hurt by it."
Including, as it happened, a plant worker with 20 years at Sandstrom, who went straight up the hill to Hartsock and complained. When Hartsock advised him to speak to a member of the team, he admitted he was one, that in fact he had voted to approve the new system. But, he said, only because he figured Hartsock would make an exception for a loyal employee.
It was a defining moment. Had Hartsock tried to circumvent the team's authority -- and there were many on the team who feared he might -- it would have undermined the whole concept of open-book management at Sandstrom. What Hartsock did instead was broker a compromise, which the team approved: a grandfather clause affecting anyone whose pay was slated to go down, granting that person six months to make up the difference by acquiring new skills. For this particular disgruntled worker, the story does not have a happy ending: six months later his pay went down; a year after that, he quit. For the others, though, it was a confirming experience. Compromise was possible. Hartsock was not going to undercut them. Open-book management was real.
"That was probably the one that empowered us the most," says Henkelman. "Because of that I felt and still feel today that I have control of my own destiny."
* * *
Those were heady days, when open-book management was new, but they were also trying days, unsettling days. Henkelman breathed deeply of the new atmosphere and was swept up in the lifting of limits. No longer simply a mill operator, he took on added responsibilities. For a while Hartsock put him in charge of scheduling production, and for a while after that he was de facto plant manager. Neither role suited him exactly. Henkelman was a doer; that was his strength. "All of my discussions with him seemed to center on the idea that, 'Well, I'd rather do it myself than tell somebody else to do it," Hartsock explains. "In a nutshell, he found it really hard to delegate."
Then, a year and a half ago, a technician job opened up in the lab, and a new, previously unimaginable future presented itself to Henkelman. It was a stretch. He should have had a college degree, and he hadn't even taken chemistry in high school. But Bob Sireno, the lab's technical director, was adamant. He wanted Henkelman, and Hartsock went along with it.
So last winter Henkelman left the plant, took off his blue-collared shirt, and moved down to the lab, to a desk in front of a window with a view of the Mississippi. In a sense, Henkelman's doing what he always did -- making paint. Only now, instead of following orders and doing only the grunt work, he guides the process from beginning to end -- working with customers, developing new products and refining old ones, and doing it all better and faster than others who don't have his hands-on experience. "In a year he's developed skills that most college graduates would take three to five years to develop," says Sireno.
Once the "Hunter Thompson of Sandstrom Products," Henkelman has made a new identity for himself since the transition to open-book management: clear thinking, capable, responsible, "a guy that I can depend on to throw into a really complex problem and solve it," says Hartsock. Today Henkelman can no more imagine going back to the old way of working than he can drinking again or smoking dope. "I would find it really difficult to go work for somebody else that wasn't doing this kind of stuff," he says. "It would be really, really tough. Because I have been allowed. I've been trusted."
Still, it seems almost incredible to him, the way things have worked out. He's still pinching himself. "I would never have dreamed 16 years ago coming down here that I would be sitting at a desk looking out over the river, watching the business grow," he says. "With me as a part of it."
* * *
On a late-winter Saturday morning, Henkelman stands in front of the picture window in his kitchen, bathed in sunlight: barrel chest, strong brow, muscular nose, balding on top but with a ponytail behind. He looks a little like James Carville -- he's got the same smoldering mischievousness behind the eyes.
Henkelman got married again recently, to Debi, a nurse who has long brown hair and green eyes and a strength to match his (born of her own commitment to sobriety -- two years and counting). They live together in a frame house (childless for now, but hoping) on two acres in tiny Cleveland, Ill., on the Rock River, with their black Lab, Molly; their cats, Little Bit, Cocoa, and Squeaky; and birds, lots of birds, drawn from distant parts to a yard filled with birdbaths, birdhouses, and bird feeders. "I like to watch 'em, listen to 'em, everything," Henkelman says.
He points to the birds, one by one, and names them: a cardinal, a black-capped chickadee, a common house sparrow, a purple finch, a white-breasted nuthatch. He talks about the sighting he's most proud of, a white-crowned sparrow that visits twice a year (it's the same one, he's certain), stopping for a day or two on the long flight between its summer nesting grounds above the Arctic circle and its winter home on the Gulf of Mexico. The bird itself is nothing special. It's the journey Henkelman thinks is so amazing.
* * *
