Organizational Success

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I completed the master’s degree course from LIOS in 2001, while working for Alcoa, Inc. As a leader for much of my career, I’ve been exposed to the usual number of leadership development programs; they all have value in some way, yet for the most part, the training touches on the surface. I’ve learned that you can’t lead without getting a firm grip on knowing yourself. LIOS helped me with this capacity in a way that made me confident I could bring it to others. 

I had explored doing LIOS leadership development work at a former company, but the sponsorship was not there. In 2018, when I joined Bonnell as the Plant Manager, I engaged Chris Crosby and LIOS. We started with Goal Alignment in the Niles plant and then we did a Tough Stuff™ with my leadership team. Tough Stuff™ starts to go deeper and asks you to look inside yourself first. You learn to be aware of how and why you react. You walk away realizing that everyone has their own story and that it is really not fair to judge people. We grow up differently; you learn to look at others as a full person with a different story and distinct perspective from you.

I brought LIOS to Bonnell six years ago. We needed a different approach to leading. We needed to address the dependency that the workforce has on our leaders to guide them. LIOS teaches us how to interact: person to person. You can spend money on the development of people, such as emotional intelligence training, but what happens when times get tough? Everyone reverts to old ways. Our plant needed to safeguard around how to train this asset: our leaders, before things got difficult. LIOS does this.

At the same time, I personally believed it was the right thing to do. I believe in people. At this point (Spring 2024), about 90% of our leaders have been through Tough Stuff™. It's taken years of staying on a consistent message and developing a number of cohorts, of leaders, at all levels. You have to know where you want to take your team. Now, I see that our communications, our language such as, “Let me paraphrase what I think I heard,” and way of working together has changed. The development has sunk into our core and now, it's just the way we do things around here.

In a plant that is about value streams, effective communication is non-negotiable. You must have it. And at the same time, there is always stress and conflict between people. 

In 2018, we were chronically late with deliveries. Our on-time delivery was consistently about 35-40%, and there was no hope of getting it better. Due to the stress of the poor performance, there were daily emotional breakdowns. We had customer service reps crying, people leaving, and people just refusing to do work, due to the stress. This plant was a pressure cooker. 

As a result of the above mentioned goal alignment work, in three months we went from this intense stress and low performance to an on-time delivery average performance in the mid-80s. This year alone, our average was 95% on-time delivery. Now, it's unheard of to drop below. On a bad day, we drop to 70%. We raised the floor and produced a complete turnaround.

We’ve had a number of significant successes, I believe in part, due to the strength of our deeply trained leaders. In mid-2018, as part of the LIOS program, we realized that our cost structure was upside down. Productivity and throughput went up, and at the same time it became evident that we had some pricing issues. This project is a work in progress, but we would not have been able to uncover the root issues had we not done the continuous improvement work as part of a LIOS project. This success went straight to an increase in the bottom line.

Another big win was taking on an automotive customer, a new category for us. Firstly, we were able to take on a challenging customer and with a level of detail that touched many internal processes. I attribute our ability to successfully meet this client where they were, at a difficult time in the economy, with our ability to work through hundreds of small problems. As a team, we recognize triangle conflict and I can go to my manager and ask him to facilitate a 3rd-party conflict and work through it with a high degree of confidence.

After many years, our success is just beginning to get noticed. We have been exporting a steady stream of talent to other plants, and HQ is beginning to take notice. None of the training was cheap. It was all an investment and there were sacrifices, but we are a values based organization, and I felt confident that we remained in integrity with our values. I’ve had the honor of promoting many leaders in this organization and at the same time a few have decided to leave. That’s okay. We are becoming  clearer and clearer on who we are as an organization. 

If you run a plant, and maybe I’m old school, but I just don’t see taking the people out of the process. AI and tech is great, and we need the people. So much of our work is interacting with others and working through problems. LIOS brings action learning so you can solve problems and learn at the same time. It's practical. 

This investment has given us the ability to be agile and adaptable. When things change, we improve and keep improving. Our business was contracting in the pandemic. We purchased the property next door and expanded. Then in 2023, we were in trouble again. We adapted and avoided losing money. We stayed profitable. You don’t hear anymore, I’m a Press 1 operator, you’re working on Press 2. There’s not a cop on every corner. The whole plant runs with one supervisor and we have a role to make sure everyone is cared for. We are an interdependent organization. It works!

~Stefan Vogt, Plant Manager at Bonnell Aluminum. LIOS graduate and Plant Leader