Peter's Return to Performance

Peter is not his real name but the story of Peter is entirely true. Many years ago I led a continuous improvement team in a factory with a few hundred employees and Peter became part of my team after about decade of paid time off. How did he get this much paid time off? In Germany there is a rule that per x hundred workers one works council member has to be relieved from daily work duties to focus fulltime on works council responsibilities. Peter was one of the two relieved works council members in this factory for more than a decade until he got voted out of this position. He still remained part of the works council throughout my time there but had to go back a few months before I arrived and my department was chosen to give him a new job as he had some practical and relevant continuous improvement and shopfloor experience. 

When I arrived it was immediately clear to me that Peter did not like his new situation and that my predecessor and Peter did not think much of each other. My leadership team colleagues looked me with rolling “best of luck to you” eyes but I was determined to make it work for both of us as well as the company. It was probably in this very work relationship that I coined my own formula of leadership that is based on Enablement, Coaching and Fun.

Let’s start with Peter’s Enablement. We started our work relationship with an hour long conversation to get to know each other and find out how to best make our time work for the triangle of both of us and the company. In these conversations I am always brutally honest as well as vulnerably open to build mutual trust and respect. Peter returned advanced with his own honesty and vulnerability and right then and there I knew we would make it work. We discussed what type of wok he liked, disliked as well as what type of work he wanted to start or leave behind. In this first conversation we got to know each other, discovered professional and personal commonalities, and managed to set some clear and measurable targets for both of us for the coming six to eight weeks. These targets were based exclusively on the things he liked to do and Peter was very positive after this initial conversation, he left with more energy than he entered. 

Coaching: In the following six to eight weeks I spent quite some shopfloor time with Peter which was mutually beneficial, we coached each other. He introduced me to all the important shopfloor employees which benefitted me countless times and I made sure he became better at his work every single day. This coaching relationship was clearly a two way street and based on mutual respect and 360 degrees learning. Peter enjoyed to give and to take and this fueled him with energy, he literally crushed his initial targets and we planned the following period with stronger targets which he was initially slightly concerned about, needless to say he also crushed these targets. This led me to give him the full responsibility and authority over 5S (a lean method) across the entire factory and Peter took it with open arms and showed increasing shopfloor leadership qualities. The third corner of our triangle, the company, noticed the positive change in Peter on a daily basis and in the company’s 5S performance during leadership shopfloor walks and audits. The positive performance spiral was in place and had taken off with unbeatable momentum.

Fun at work is extremely important to me. I strongly believe that people who have fun perform better and inspire others to do the same, Fun builds and further energizes positive momentum. This was an easy one with Peter, in our first conversation we found out that we support the same football team with a crazy passion and other people in the factory supported our rival team with the same passion. Many jokes were traded and we celebrated wins and complained about defeats together. Sharing a hobby and engaging on common topics together with a positive attitude nearly always leads to fun. A few days before Peter’s birthday I drove to the Borussia Dortmund fan shop and spend less than €10 on items to decorate his desk with. A lighter, a mug, a chocolate bar and few paper decorations later his desk was fully decked out in black and yellow the night before his birthday. I always arrived later than Peter but my colleagues told me that he had tears in his eyes when he entered the office on the morning of his birthday. He hugged me when I arrived and was happy and thankful beyond what I believed he would be. In the following weeks Peter started to suggest after work activities for our team and effectively inspired the entire team to have more fun at work, I had managed to reawaken his joy at work which had been lost for many years prior.

Peter and me are still in touch from time to time and I have left this particular factory many years ago. After I left he regained the confidence of the works council, became its president and managed to lead the workforce through one of the toughest restructuring efforts that sadly ended with the closing of the factory. Thanks to Peter everything went smooth and many workers found new jobs quickly, his leadership of the workforce was positive and instrumental in making a bad experience positive, forward looking and financially worth it for many colleagues. Enablement, Coaching and Fun truly worked wonders here and a little personal touch always provides the extra juice to run with more power and achieve the right results, even in difficult times.