Vision, storytelling, and company culture

Keynote speaker at the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association Annual Meeting, Jake Wood spoke of the importance of ethics, values, storytelling, and a shared vision.

Metal fabrication has its flashy toys. It’s a big reason that many enter this business in the first place. Automated lasers, press brakes, welding, and now front-end processes like quoting and programming can help a shop in its quest to shorten lead time and increase capacity.

All of this technology is integral to metal fabrication’s narrative. Technology isn’t the protagonist, but it certainly propels the protagonist forward. It’s part of a fabricator’s story; thing is, not everyone in the shop shares the same story.

“Every company has a vision statement, but how do you actually align [employees’] behaviors to the accomplishment of that vision? Here, I think storytelling is one of the most underutilized tools in any leader’s toolkit. We love movies and books and shows and plays and musicals because we all ultimately at our core want to be part of a story. Your organization has a story, and its vision has to be the final chapter.”

So said Jake Wood during the final day’s keynote address at the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association Annual Meeting, held this past March in Nashville, Tenn. As a Marine veteran with multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan, and as a founder of Los Angeles-based Team Rubicon, one of the largest volunteer-based disaster response organizations in the country, Wood has deeply moving stories to share, many with heroic acts requiring split-second life-and-death decisions.

Of course, Wood probably would not call what he did heroism. He was just with his team—an elite group of Marines, but a team all the same—and he was acting as any other team member would. That’s what happens when everyone shares the same vision and partakes in the same story.

If Wood ended his presentation like that, the cynic inside me would have stepped to the fore. I mean, really—a story about Marines in battle is one thing; a fab shop is quite another.

But then came questions from the audience, and someone asked, essentially, when to fire people. Wood mentioned that in the military it’s impossible to fire people, “so you just promote them to irrelevance.”

After the guffaws from the audience subsided, Wood clarified that of course firing someone shouldn’t be so arduous. If business leaders have good values and ethics and have built a positive organization with a shared vision, firing someone shouldn’t take long.

“Hire slow and fire fast,” he said, something he conceded isn’t always easy, particularly if the person being fired is very productive and yet impossible to work with.

Reflecting on Wood’s talk, I now see how a fabricator could have a great story to tell, one meaning more than some bland vision statement on the wall that, let’s face it, most if not all employees simply ignore.

Step one involves ethics, or as Wood said, “those universal norms regardless of what continent you were born on, norms like integrity, trust, and respect. Values are how those uniquely manifest themselves in your organization.

“It starts with ethical leadership,” Wood continued. “People will internalize what they see in their leaders. If you’re rotten at the top, you’ll be rotten to the core.”

Not every business leader is ethical, of course. Say someone inherits a family fab business; he didn’t necessarily want it, but now that he has it, he might as well make the best of it. He installs cameras by various work centers to track productivity. He pushes people to their limits and buys cheap equipment to keep costs down. New hires don’t seem to care, and many leave after just a few weeks on the job. The shop lacks trust, a basic ethical norm, and the culture remains rotten to the core.

You could blame all this on the fact that metal fabrication isn’t easy, especially when it comes to cash flow and customer retention. Metals prices can skyrocket (as every fabricator experienced last year), customers shop around, salespeople need to replace the work and sometimes accept lower margins.

But then you have customers that do stick with the same fabricator for years. Reliable quality and delivery build that stickiness. It really boils down to reliability—so how does a shop develop a culture that ensures such reliability?

Think about Wood’s emphasis on storytelling. Metal fabrication’s story isn’t really driven by technology. It’s driven by the desire to make lives better for both internal customers (at downstream processes) and external customers. Poor quality of fabricated parts can create a life-or-death situation in many applications, from aerospace and defense to rail and mining equipment. And in any application, a customer halting production because of a parts shortage doesn’t make life easy for people down the supply chain. A shortage doesn’t have the life-and-death immediacy of a firefight in Afghanistan, but it still can have far-reaching effects, like personal stress, missed social events, and even a turbulent home life.

A company’s vision statement that incorporates these elements engages people. Then the values emerge and the plot thickens. The fabricator adopts processes, procedures, and technologies to move closer to the company’s vision. Cross-trained people think not just about the part in front of them but how that part flows from the receiving dock to the shipping dock. They perhaps create new processes or part designs that, again, make life better for those down the supply chain. As Wood described, people within such company cultures share a common story, a quest toward a shared vision.

Cool technology attracts people to this business; a positive shop culture keeps them here. The cultures at the best shops I’ve visited seem like a glue that holds the team together. Often the team members are an actual family. Other times I think they’re related but they really aren’t—a good sign that, barring bad luck or general economic turmoil, the fab shop will be around for many years to come.