Tanglewood Conservatories Blog

About a year ago, having realized that we needed a new management paradigm if Tanglewood was going to survive and grow, we began to look for ways to engage everyone in our company with a vision of Tanglewood Conservatories that was inclusive of employee’s personal life goals. We felt that if we could get people to feel that they were vested in a very personal way in the future success of the business, we could finally get everyone rowing really hard in the same direction.

We saw that the basic business need for personal accountability for quality and quantity of production could not be had with out a workforce that was highly committed to that as a common goal. That goal also had to be linked to each team member’s personal life dreams for it to become a powerful catalyst for such a cultural transformation.

Our efforts at building a more unified and cohesive team began with the formation of what we expectantly called “The Leadership Team”. A select group of employees along with Nancy, Mark and myself began to meet regularly to explore how to improve communication, accountability, quality.

Early on, we identified several key aspects of our business which we felt needed to be addressed. We needed to develop and codify better Standard Operating Procedures throughout the organization, improve our job cost accounting and build “buy-in” for all these efforts from everyone from top to bottom in the company.

It was slow going at first. The team studied business books “Flawless Execution” by James Murphy and “When Fish Fly” by John Yokoyama and looked for ways to apply the principles. Mark mentored us in a system of personality types that enabled us to see each team member’s strengths and weaknesses in a new light.

It surfaced that there were varying levels of skepticism among the team members concerning the whole process, some overt and some quite subtle. Each of us is challenged to consider our own deeply rooted notions of things and ways of seeing ourselves and others and this can be at times painful and at times enlightening.

The first big challenge was to get to the point where everyone on the Leadership Team had a deep understanding of the concept “we are in this together” and “we are responsible for making it what we want it to be”, instead of embracing the old paradigm which makes the “boss” (Alan and Nancy) responsible for the future of the company and in which employees are mainly passive participants.

Getting people to start to take “active” responsibility for achieving overall company goals has turned out to be a huge step. In a gauge of our level of success, at one of our recent meetings, someone from our production department spontaneously offered to jump the “silo” between departments.

Silos are in a tradition business organization the different departments and they tend to want to function independently and protect themselves and their “turf”. They will often have their own agendas which may be in conflict with overall company goals and will tend to “blame” other departments for their “failures”.

In this case, our engineering department was buried with work forcing production to slow down and not meet their goals. In the “old world”, production would simply blame engineering and rest in its vindication. However in this case, production unexpectedly offered to jump in to help engineering by taking on some of the work itself! They did this because there was an instinctive commitment to an overall company goal – profitability, even though it meant taking on more work for themselves.

What was so amazing to me was that not six months ago, my suggestion of this concept might have been received like a ripe tomato hitting a brick wall!

More to come,

Alan