A New Path to Business and Operational Excellence

It’s this dramatically new—and proven—leadership approach that prompts IndustryWeek editors to recognize Chapman as the first recipient of a new IW Manufacturing Talent Leadership Award, one of a new series of IW Industry Excellence Awards.In naming Chapman the recipient, IW editors noted his dedication to executing and communicating “truly human” leadership through example and outreach via speaking engagements, the Barry-Wehmiller Leadership Institute and the book, Everybody Matters. They think the approach has the potential to set a new standard for how to lever

age talent to build a successful manufacturing business.

Chapman insists that it is only in hindsight that he recognized the beginning of the company’s journey toward discovering the power of people-centric leadership. As he recalls, he’d watched as a group of jovial people, who were talking, laughing and having fun in the coffee room, transformed into deflated employees as they returned to their work stations. Without thinking, he insists, in a meeting with the customer service department that followed, he proposed that the group start playing a game. 

He can't explain why he proposed the game. Looking back, however, he says, "what obviously was going through my mind [was] 'why can't business be fun?'"

Meet Bob Cha

pman at the IndustryWeek Manufacturing & Technology Conference & Expo, May 3-5 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, Rosemont, Ill.

That first game was "immensely successful in building morale, fun and performance," Chapman relates. Team members began to more promptly answer phones, eagerly establish new ways of speeding customer requests and help each other meet their individual goals—all because they wanted to win. Within 12 weeks, sales were up by over 20%.

Chapman insists he didn't start out trying to invent a new leadership approach that would upend traditional thinking, or even to improve sales performance. "I didn't do it to improve performance; I had no idea how it would affect performance because I'd never done it. It was just a reaction to watching people have fun versus going to work," Chapman says. "I just wanted people to have fun at work."

Now, however, he realizes that “We aligned, coincidentally, winning the game with value creation and fun,” Chapman concludes. “For the first time in their lives, they went home every night knowing exactly how they were doing, they felt like a team, they felt individually recognized, they felt appreciated.”

As important, the success of that gam

e (and others the company implemented) suggested to Chapman that “the creative gifts of our people were being suppressed by classic ‘management’ practices.”

To learn more, Chapman convened a cross-functional team to reflect on the success. In launching the meeting, he proposed an overarching vision: “We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.” The team rallied around the vision, drafting the company’s Guiding Principles of Leadership (at right), and then later leveraging newly acquired lean practices “to weave Guiding Principles into the fabric of the organization."

A Radical Approach to Managing People

Critical to the development of Barry-Wehmiller's leadership strategy is listening. To do this, the leadership team leveraged the lean approach to continuous improvement, with one major difference. Unlike lean initiatives at other companies, Barry-Wehmiller’s was targeted to continually improving “how we [the leaders] live the principle that we put people first,” Chapman says.

Chapman and the leadership traveled among the companies’ business units, meeting with small groups of team members, and asking: “What does this [the Guiding Principles] mean to you? What are we doing that doesn’t match up to what we say here?”