With a formal regimen built around leadership, Wilson hoped to underscore that Rodel's transformation was no fleeting fancy. "Quite often, management gets fired up about some new idea, and it dies after six months," he says. "We wanted to emphasize that this idea was here to stay."
One avenue for learning leadership skills, Wilson and Fickett determined, could come in the context of a group project--not an idle exercise but a serious attack on a current company problem. That idea yielded another potential benefit. "We knew this was going to be expensive compared with what we usually spent on training," Wilson explains. "I wanted to make sure we'd get something back, and the project we picked could save us a lot of money."
As for length, a year seemed about right. Change, Fickett believed, required constant reinforcement. "If we had them for a year, we could catch them when it got tough and they tried to bail out," he says, "and they'd have time to get back on track." Underpinned by the Rodel Way, the LIT curriculum drew ideas from existing programs--Outward Bound, for one--and from the writings of Peter Senge, Stephen Covey, and other leadership luminaries.
On the premise that leadership could happen anywhere in Rodel--"it's not the same thing as managing," Wilson points out--he and Fickett opened the program to employees from all departments and all levels. And remembering the grudging compliance of the supervisors' group, who chafed at mandatory attendance, they made it voluntary. In fact, to add panache, they made it available by application only.
To be considered, candidates first had to answer, in writing, five questions designed to weigh their commitment to Rodel's success. For example: "The key to leadership is being a passionate advocate for something that forwards our mission. What are you a passionate advocate for?" Then came interviews. "If the people were freely self-selected and had to clear hurdles to get in, they'd have more chips on the table," Fickett reckoned, "and we'd have a mandate to ramp them up at a steeper gradient."
For the inaugural class, set to begin in February 1993, the program accepted about half the 50 or so applicants and made sure the group represented the whole company. One goal--breaking down barriers between departments--required a good cross-section. There were 18 people from Newark and 8 more from Scottsdale, ranging in rank from the Budingers, to salespeople and engineers, to factory workers. Few of them knew what to expect.
The course commenced with two days of shock treatment. The leadership skills of all the participants had already been rated anonymously by about a dozen of their superiors, peers, and subordinates. They'd been graded from zero to 10 on 11 specific behaviors, such as, "When you're on a team with this person, you know that the objective will be accomplished," and "I feel when I work with this person, he or she has my success in mind."
On day one, the class got the results. On day two each participant had to stand before the group to interpret his or her scores and outline individual goals for the upcoming year. Intimidating? Revealing? "To begin with, it was public speaking," says Deborah Resler, a materials specialist, who remembers it well. "And you're talking about something personal--what people think of you. It was revealing because others see you differently than you see yourself. I was embarrassed by some of my scores, so it was very uncomfortable."
The biggest jolt of those first two days, however, came at the end of the second day, when Fickett and Wilson assigned the group its project for the year: reduce production waste material from 18% to 10%.
Even the idea of a group project came as a surprise, and the way Wilson and Fickett broke the news guaranteed a wild start. After the announcement, they left, expecting chaos to ensue. It did. The dazed trainees wondered what to do next. "With no lines of authority to lean on, they were forced to have leadership emerge," Fickett says, noting that the Budingers exempted themselves from this part of the program. "Natural leaders tried to dominate the situation, but without the power that comes from position, they had to exert influence through persuasion. People learned that leadership isn't always easy or convenient, and that sometimes it means being a good follower."
Fickett anticipated--correctly--that periodic breakdowns and crises throughout the yearlong project would serve as opportunities to impart leadership lessons. "We coached them, but we wouldn't tell them what to do," he says.
The group eventually split into five teams to handle different facets of the project, and they had to enlist the active support of people all over Rodel. "We'd always been real turfy, but we forced ourselves to work outside our normal areas," says Dale Davis. "Suddenly, I was dealing with people who had no responsibility to me whatsoever." Winning them over was itself a leadership test for the LIT students. "They carried with them all the things they were learning," says Fickett, "and they infected other people with it."
Given the project's complexity and the extra hours it occupied on top of people's regular jobs, some participants occasionally tuned out. Their classmates pulled them back. "Keeping people involved--that's a big part of leadership," says Fickett. "We didn't know how they'd pull this thing off, but the important thing was the engagement itself. They couldn't help learning, and they couldn't learn without getting some results. The two things come together."
Fickett and Wilson met monthly with the 18 Newark-based participants as a group, expecting progress reports and giving out homework assignments. Required reading included a few books--Lester Thurow's Head to Head, about competing in the world marketplace; Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, about how organizations learn; and High Output Management, by Intel president Andrew Grove. To each meeting, students also had to bring real-life illustrations of leadership, something they had seen or learned in the past month. "We had a basket of Ping-Pong balls, and if your number came up, you had to stand and tell your story," Fickett says. "We started every meeting with a few of those. That kept them awake in a different kind of way, always looking for some incident or example to draw on. We coached them on how to make a point as they told those stories, because telling stories is part of how you transfer leadership and influence other people."
