Betty Kesmer was continuously on top of things. In school, she
had always been at the top of her class. When she went to work
for her uncle's shoe business, Fancy Footwear, she had been
singled out as the most productive employee and the one with the
best attendance. The company was so impressed with her that it
sent her to get an M.B.A. to groom her for a top management
position. In school again, and with three years of practical
experience to draw on, Kesmer had gobbled up every idea put in
front of her, relating many of them to her work at Fancy Footwear.
When Kesmer graduated at the top of her class, she returned to
Fancy Footwear. To no one's surprise, when the head of the
company's largest division took advantage of the firm's early
retirement plan, Kesmer was given his position.
Kesmer knew the pitfalls of being suddenly catapulted to a
leadership position, and she was determined to avoid them. In
business school, she had read cases about family businesses
that fell apart when a young family member took over with an iron
fist, barking out orders, cutting personnel, and destroying morale.
Kesmer knew a lot about participative management, and she was
not going to be labeled an arrogant know-it-all.
Kesmer's predecessor, Max Worthy, had run the division from an
office at the top of the building, far above the factory floor. Two or
three times a day, Worthy would summon a messenger or a
secretary from the offices on the second floor and send a memo
out to one or another group of workers. But as Kesmer saw it,
Worthy was mostly an absentee autocrat, making all the
decisions from above and spending most of his time at extended
lunches with his friends from the Elks Club.
Kesmer's first move was to change all that. She set up her office
on the second floor. From her always-open doorway she could
see down onto the factory floor, and as she sat behind her desk
she could spot anyone walking by in the hall. She never ate lunch
herself but spent the time from 11 to 2 down on the floor, walking
around, talking, and organizing groups. The workers, many of
whom had twenty years of seniority at the plant, seemed
surprised by this new policy and reluctant to volunteer for any
groups. But in fairly short order, Kesmer established a worker
productivity group, a "Suggestion of the Week" committee, an
environmental group, a worker award group, and a management
relations group. Each group held two meetings a week, one
without and one with Kesmer. She encouraged each group to set
up goals in its particular focus area and develop plans for reaching
those goals. She promised any support that was within her power
to give.
The group work was agonizingly slow at first. But Kesmer had
been well trained as a facilitator, and she soon took on that role in
their meetings, writing down ideas on a big board, organizing
them, and later communicating them in notices to other
employees. She got everyone to call her "Betty" and set herself
the task of learning all their names. By the end of the first month,
Fancy Footwear was stirred up.
But as it turned out, that was the last thing most employees
wanted. The truth finally hit Kesmer when the entire management
relations committee resigned at the start of their fourth meeting.
"I'm sorry, Ms. Kesmer," one of them said. "We're good at
making shoes, but not at this management stuff. A lot of us are
heading toward retirement. We don't want to be supervisors."
Astonished, Kesmer went to talk to the workers with whom she
believed she had built good relations. Yes, they reluctantly told
her, all these changes did make them uneasy. They liked her, and
they didn't want to complain. But given the choice, they would
rather go back to the way Mr. Worthy had run things. They never
saw Mr. Worthy much, but he never got in their hair. He did his
work, whatever that was, and they did theirs. "After you've been in
a place doing one thing for so long," one worker concluded, "the
last thing you want to do is learn a new way of doing it."
Betty was now starting to wonder if all those fancy theories she had
studied could actually work in a "Real World" situation.