To begin with, Fickett distilled the Budingers' vision to eight core values, which they called the Rodel Way. (See "The Rodel Way," below, for five of those values.) Circulated companywide in 1990, the Rodel Way aimed to define "how we intend to relate to each other in our business," as the introduction put it. "There are eight fundamentals that when practiced consistently give our company its speed, agility, and profitability....By harnessing our collective intelligence, imagination, and spirit, we gain an essential competitive edge."
"Speaking straight" was one of the precepts. Another was "listening generously." A third, "being for each other," was meant to inspire teamwork. Fickett drove home the doctrine in special orientations; new employees even went off-site for two-day immersions. But preaching the values was one thing, and imbuing them in people was another. Among employees, the initial attitude was "you gotta be kidding," Fickett says. "But slowly we began to work through these things." Still, it was a radical departure from Rodel's existing ethos, and the principles of the Rodel Way were not easily absorbed.
"Something like 'listening generously' sounds easy, but it's tough to put into practice," says Dale Davis, the facilities manager. "To me, it means really wanting to understand someone's opinion and why they hold it. Before, I always assumed my opinion was right and yours was wrong--the conversation involved getting you to accept mine. Changing that," he admits, "would be a long and tortuous process for me."
Two other changes made in 1990 helped nudge the company toward the transformation the Budingers had in mind. The first was a switch to open-book management, augmented shortly thereafter by a new system of quarterly bonuses pegged to profits and productivity. The second change was the debut of monthly company meetings.
The move to open-book management came about as part of a "philosophical wholeness" the Budingers hoped to bring to Rodel's reincarnation. They saw everyone as a stakeholder in the enterprise, attuned to its fortunes. "We were not at all sure how folks would react to it," Bill says. "We were concerned at first that if people saw a profit, they'd want a wage increase. Or that the information would seep out. But we'd discuss in the company meetings the importance of keeping it confidential. Even at that, you're telling people they have something of value they could go out and sell. So open-book management was one way to be straight with everyone and provide a feeling of ownership."
The monthly meetings were Don's idea. He still flies in from Scottsdale to run them, typically drawing some 400 employees during the day and hundreds more at night in a session for the late shifts. At both, he lays bare even Rodel's most sensitive financial data. "We were clear when we started these," Don says. "We explained that anything the company did would be discussed with them, except a colleague's salary."
Besides furnishing a forum for an open-book dialogue, the meetings served as a clearinghouse for anything employees wished to discuss--competition, benefits issues, pay scales. Moreover, they intrinsically made the Budingers more visible and accessible to the employees, who were invited to challenge and even criticize the top management. "We required people to speak their minds," Don says. "We wanted that sense of authenticity and realness. But at first, no one said much."
There was nothing magical about those early moves. The Budingers expected Rodel's transformation to gain traction slowly, and it did--too slowly, in fact, to suit Wayne Wilson and Lloyd Fickett, the change agents. By the end of 1992 they had spent two years working closely with employee groups--19 production supervisors to start with, and then a crew from engineering, manufacturing, and research and development--only to see little progress.
The supervisors had seemed perfect as initial targets. For most employees, the supervisors are Rodel. "We thought that if we could engage them, we could leverage their exposure to get the biggest impact on the largest number of people," Wilson says. "We were trying to change their attitudes, their supervisory styles. But old habits die hard." The supervisors, he says, had difficulty opening up. "Many of them just didn't want to be there."
With the second group, the challenge involved breaking up Rodel's top-down structure and engendering innovation and smart operational decision making from the bottom up. "We had good people, but we needed to fully involve them in building quality products," Wilson says, "to keep pace with a fast-moving industry." The technical types, he thought, relied too heavily on "the company" instead of themselves to solve problems. "There is no the company," Wilson says. "It's them. But we couldn't get across what we wanted, which is that everybody owns quality. They kept making excuses why something couldn't be done. I wanted an attitude that said, 'I can't get that done, and here's what I'm going to do about it.' They needed to learn how to communicate and marshal resources to make something happen. That meant they had to learn how to be leaders."
By the fall of 1992 open-book management and the Rodel Way were slowly gaining currency throughout the company, but Fickett and Wilson knew they needed something dramatic to speed up the transformation. From that realization, Leadership Intensive Training--or LIT, in Rodel's shorthand--evolved.
Fickett had never run a leadership program, but he was well-read on the subject and had a knack for bringing it alive in ways that made sense for Rodel. He defined leadership as "stepping forward, seeing what is missing and calling attention to it, then enrolling others in the task and guiding the path of engagement." And to him, it was a fluid thing. "One person might provide leadership at one moment, and someone else might provide it at another," he says. That definition argued against creating a program strictly for the company's brass. Why couldn't lower-level folks learn to supply that sort of leadership in their own spheres?
