There shouldn’t be any serious hunger pangs after the National Truck Equipment Association’s fifth annual Executive Leadership Summit in Baltimore on Oct. 16. After all, one of the keynote speakers, Cyndi Gave of The Metiss Group, is scheduled to give a presentation titled, “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast.”
NTEA summits offer a mix of business insights and perspectives. This fall’s agenda includes a North American macro-economic forecast, presented by Mark Vitner of Wells Fargo Securities, and other speakers are slated to talk about market forecasts for the work truck industry as well as the use of augmented and virtual reality technologies as a business tool to enhance sales and research and development.
NTEA executive director Steve Carey said the one-day event typically attracts commercial
“Our summit is the place where industry stakeholders come to articulate business issues and receive practical feedback from seasoned leaders.”— Steve Carey, executive director, NTEA
vehicle business owners and managers and will offer a unique forum to explore important trends influencing the work truck industry. “Our summit is the place where industry stakeholders come to articulate business issues and receive practical feedback from seasoned leaders,” Carey added.
Employee engagement stressed
Scott Curtis, president and CEO of the TWI Institute, is scheduled to present on industry training, and the need to truly engage employees in order to develop a competitive advantage.
“I’m assuming that most of these organizations have started or have been using some form of continuous improvement or lean manufacturing methodologies,” Curtis said when asked for a preview. “And that better than 50 percent of them have at some point in the past used some tools to improve their business and their processes — whether to shorten lead time, deal with quality issues, or reduce inventory — with some eye towards improvement. That’s the baseline.”
These kinds of initiatives have often under-performed and even failed, Curtis said. “They just sort of evaporate and die a slow death, and people revert back to their normal routines and what they know how to do and what they’ve been taught and trained or learned over time.”
Curtis, who worked in plastics, textiles, printing, consumer packaging and other manufacturing before joining TWI, a consulting organization, said he plans to offer a brief history of “lean” and how it came about. And he plans to emphasize that, rather than viewing methodologies as a tool set, organizations wanting to improve their processes and performance need to remember that everything comes down to their people.
“It’s about building the skills and the capability into the workforce so (employees) are capable of performing the work necessary to provide good quality products that are delivered on time and under budget,” Curtis said. “Then, when they do start to run into problems, they have the skills to solve those problems. It’s really about building skills into the workforce. People are their greatest asset.”
Corporate culture examined
By shifting the paradigm from tools and processes to building capabilities into the workforce organizations can address shortages of skilled labour, Curtis said. “You don’t necessarily have to find that really specialized and skilled person off the street. You can develop those people effectively and quickly internally with the right application of good training methods. I’ll be talking about that.”
The Metiss Group is a consultancy specializing in organizational behaviour and Gave, its founder, has a background in human resources and for-profit businesses. She told Service Truck Magazine she plans to elaborate on how organizations can keep culture front-of-mind as they’re hiring, making decisions and operating on a daily basis.
“A lot of the people hired to run those service trucks are being hired because they have experience with a particular truck or with some of the machines they’re working with. But if you hire exclusively on those hard skills, you wind up firing on those soft skills, and then not only have you incurred costs relative to turnover and training, but think about the impact on other people in the organization who have had to work with that bad hire. Whether it’s just an inconvenience or it was a cancerous cell in an organization, it can be really traumatic.”
Impacts on the bottom line
Gave said she hopes to explain that the culture of an organization “isn’t just a touchy-feely, cutesy little thing to have” but that it truly impacts the bottom line and employee engagement. “It doesn’t matter what generation you’re from, if you’re working with someone who just doesn’t fit the organization it’s an impact on everybody. That’s the gist of what I’m going to be talking about.”
A prime example lies in the automotive safety-related scandals that erupted several years ago. “That wasn’t just a leadership problem, that was a culture problem,” Gave said. “It wasn’t one person making a bad decision, it was a lot of people being willing to sacrifice the safety of people in cars all over the world to protect a revenue stream.”
Culture needs to be embedded from the get-go, Gave said. “If you aren’t crystal clear about what your culture is, about what your core values are, to begin with, how do you know if the people you hire are promoting your culture or if they’re tearing it apart limb by limb.”
Gave said she plans to offer actual examples to explain how leaders can achieve clarity around their organization’s culture and core values, and how to use this in hiring. “Most people don’t know how to evaluate for soft skills or culture fit. I’m hoping to make that just a little bit easier.”
For more information, visit www.ntea.com/executivesummit.
— Saul Chernos
Saul Chernos is a Toronto writer.