Roadmap to achieving High Performance Culture

Safety Critical Component Manufacturing Unit in South India

The unit manufactures Connectors (safety critical products) and supplies to the world’s big names in aircraft manufacturing and defence products manufacturing. The unit is less than a decade old and the average age of workforce is around 25 yrs. with a good gender diversity across levels and people of different employment model working together and seamlessly towards unit’s performance.

The unit has a union formed few years ago by the permanent workmen – fairly young, limited in their exposure, and still in the nascent stage of their leadership capability. The unit employs around 350+ workforce in total.

The search for Self-Managed Teams (SMT) started when their leadership team was looking for a model to improve employee engagement levels and institutionalize supervision-less workplace.

After a brief diagnostic study – the program started with conducting series of awareness sessions at all levels and when there was larger consensus the SMTs were rolled-out in Sep-2017. In the first 3 months a lot of initiatives were taken to define the empowerment roadmap, firming-up team performance scorecards, selection of right leaders for various roles (such as coach, pilot, STAR champs etc.) and that set the platform for teams to plan, meet, discuss, organize, execute, solve and achieve their targets.

After about 18 months the teams have now taken charge of the daily performance – expecting the engineers and managers to only share knowledge and support in critical trouble shooting. The SMT practices are now being spread to the other units of the company.