By Victor Assad.
Executives would sleep better if they knew their employees had their back and would raise significant issues and opportunities, not just brush major issues under the rug. As a C-suite executive, wouldn’t you want an organization like this?
Today, I have a true story for you that illustrates how your employees can save millions and protect the company’s reputation. And how you can develop such a culture.
A quality inspector peered through her microscope to check the work of multi-million-dollar robots that insert and weld hybrid chip leads onto a circuit card. All the insertions were correct and the welds were clean. However, she saw for the first time what she described as “green ooze” on the circuit card. “What caused that?” she wondered. There was nothing in the manuals that described anything like this, or what to do.
Her employer, a division of Medtronic, a medical device company, in Tempe AZ where I was the HR leader in the 2000s, empowered all quality inspectors to halt the line in the event of poor quality or the unexpected. Should she stop the line for one sighting of green ooze or wait for a trend? She knew that the hybrids controlled the electronics of pacemakers to be implanted in the human body to keep hearts beating correctly. There was no room for error.
Would the employees in your organization have the courage to do so? Would they be supported?
She stopped the line and shut down the multi-million-dollar robots. A bright amber light immediately lit 12 feet above her workstation, circling like a police car beacon, making it known to everyone in the factory there was a problem. Her concerned supervisor and manufactory engineer rushed to her workstation.
Frantic search for the cause of the green ooze
The amber light that beaconed across the factory lit a fire across the global engineering, supply chain, quality, and scientific community at Medtronic. What caused the green ooze and what harm could it do to Medtronic’s patients? The environmental tests conducted in Tempe, which mimic the reliability of the pacemakers inside the human body over its 10-year life cycle, indicated, after weeks of tests, that these products would fail in the human heart in six to 12 months after implant.
But what caused the green ooze? Medtronic scrutinized its supply chain and determined that a Chinese supplier had changed a chemical compound used in the cards, which caused the green ooze and reliability issue. The supplier did not tell Medtronic about this change, which is a violation of FDA rules. Medtronic issued an alert to its hospitals and doctors, the FDA, and the FDA agencies of other nations to pull these pacemakers from stock and stopped making them until safe compounds could be sourced and stocked.
The public was told. The stock tanked, but Medtronic’s quality reputation survived. In time, the stock recovered. Most important, employees championed the Mission.
Why did our quality inspector, who could have been your grandmother, know the potential significance of even a small deviation in product standards? The Medtronic Mission is the answer.
The Medtronic Mission
Everyone in that factory and all employees at Medtronic had been briefed and regularly reminded of the Medtronic Mission, which is:
Contribute to human welfare by the application of biomedical engineering in the research design, manufacture, and sale of instruments or appliances that alleviate pain, restore health and extend life.
The Medtronic Mission has five tenets. The third tenet of the mission is “To strive without reserve for the greatest possible reliability and quality in our products; to be the unsurpassed standard of comparison and to be recognized as a company of dedication, honesty, integrity, and service.”
To learn more about the Medtronic Mission, click here
How did Medtronic build a mission-driven culture that all employees understood and championed? Below are the key actions:
The Mission is taught from day one, with Medallion Ceremony
All employees are told the mission story during the new hire orientation. The Mission was written by founder, pacemaker inventor, and then CEO Earl Bakken in 1960, during a cash flow crisis in the company’s growth from a start-up to manufacturing operation of pacemakers. Orders had surged so much that Medtronic could not expand enough to meet demand. The board asked Bakken for a 200-page marketing and financial plan for its investors to raise funds to alleviate the cash flow issue. Instead, Bakken wrote the Mission. He knew that Medtronic could survive a bad quarter but not a major quality issue that can occur on any day. He believed if every employee knew the Mission, Medtronic would not have a bad quarter. He also believed investors needed to know the long-term mission of the company and its commitment to quality.
Earl believed in the Mission so much that during the 1960s and 70s in Minneapolis, employees would be greeted by Earl,with hair down to his collar, wearing a leisure suit, and handing out mission cards while telling the Mission story.
Every employee — from the workers in manufacturing to the CEO — receives a medallion at a mission ceremony at the end of the calendar year in their first year of employment to remind them of the mission and their important role in safeguarding it..
The Mission is celebrated constantly
At every quarterly all-employee meeting, the CEO provides an update on the success of the mission with numbers of Medtronic product implants and services and stories on how Medtronic employees took extraordinary measures to uphold the mission. These stories included one about how sales people, warehouse workers, engineers and marketing employees canceled their Christmas holiday one year to measure, resource, and send overnight an aortic stent graft to an emergency room patient in Texas. His doctors needed a precisely measured stent graft to surgically implant and save his life due to a severed aorta from a car accident. The patient had to receive it within 24 hours. What a Christmas gift!
Other stories commonly shared at the all-employee meetings included the achievements of innovative teams focused on developing new products and services.
Year-end Mission celebrations and testimonials
At the end of year, an all-employee global mission celebration is held in Minneapolis, with global locations watching on video conferencing. Medtronic patients are given time to speak about how their implant changed their lives and what it meant to them. The patients thank the employees for their dedication and commitment. There is never a dry eye among the employees in these meetings.
Quality reviews begin every executive staff meeting
Every Medtronic executive staff meeting began with a quality review. They covered the failure of any product or service and its cause. These discussions could sometimes take up over half the meeting. Then the focus switched to the finance plan, sales and marketing, and so on. Detailed quality records were kept for organizational learning and the development of new products. Follow-up discussions were continued until all matters were closed.
From my time at Medtronic (and Honeywell Inc. Space Systems) I know the value of organizational culture. These cultures were mission-focused, transparent, with empowered employees getting involved in solving the organization’s opportunities and obstacles. Their efforts and success were celebrated.
I am now a managing partner for InnovationOne, LLC to develop mission-driven organizational cultures. We call these cultures, innovation cultures. We work with companies, government agencies and public-sector research and development labs.
We use a scientifically developed assessment to measure, benchmark, and improve an organization’s culture and capability to innovate and enjoy better outcomes and financial results. We assist organizations in understanding their assessment results and what steps to take quarter by quarter to build an innovation culture.
It works! These cultures work better than top-down leadership styles and cultures.
Our research shows that companies scoring in the top quartile of our InnovationOne Culture Index© report higher financial performance than bottom quartile performers by as much as 22 percent.
I invite you to learn more about how your organization can develop a culture that your employees, from the factory workers to the C-suite, will champion. You will rest more easily.
About InnovationOne®, LLC.
InnovationOne®, LLC helps organizations worldwide build a culture of innovation and make it sustainable. InnovationOne® uses a scientifically developed assessment to measure, benchmark, and improve your company’s culture and capability to innovate and enjoy better outcomes and financial results. Companies scoring in the top quartile of our InnovationOne Culture Index© reported higher financial performance than bottom quartile performers by 22 percent. Our latest research shows that R&D Labs can improve their performance by 20 to 30 percent with higher innovation culture scores. Measure and ignite your culture of innovation.