HOW MICHELIN GIVES ITS FRONT-LINE TEAMS THE POWER TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
The loss of “good jobs” in the U.S. economy and elsewhere have inspired a slew of proposals, including mandatory labour representation on corporate boards, benefits for gig economy workers, tax breaks for investments in human capital and a minimum guaranteed income. While some of these ideas have merit, they don’t address what we believe is the root of the problem: the widespread assumption that low-wage jobs are filled by minimally capable people — a prejudice that has denied millions of employees the opportunity to enhance their skills and exercise their minds.
Yet a growing band of organizations around the world have freed their employees from the yoke of bureaucratic control. They share a deep belief that “ordinary” employees — when given the chance to learn, grow and contribute — are capable of extraordinary accomplishments. That conviction, when consistently acted upon, produces a workforce that’s deeply knowledgeable, relentlessly inventive and ardently focused on the customer.
The question is, why haven’t more organizations followed suit? In this article we offer a path out of the bureaucratic trap, drawing on the example of the tire manufacturer Michelin. Since 2012, under the banner of “responsibilization” (French for “empowerment”), Michelin has dramatically increased the authority and accountability of its front-line workers, reversing the centralization that has characterized the automobile sector for five decades.
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HOW THE JOURNEY BEGAN The idea for responsibilization was born out of frustration. In the mid-2000s, the tiremaker had launched the Michelin Manufacturing Way, or MMW, a corporate-wide program to improve productivity through standardized processes, tools, dashboards and performance audits.
But as MMW was rolled out, factory leaders raised concerns that it was crowding out local initiative and creativity. By 2010 the standardization efforts were producing diminishing returns. Looking for a way forward, Jean-Michel Guillon, then the head of Michelin’s personnel department, hosted a workshop in early 2012.
One of the workshop’s most vocal participants was Bertrand Ballarin, the manager of Michelin’s Shanghai plant. A few weeks later, Guillon invited Ballarin to join the personnel department as head of industrial relations. Eager to broaden his impact, Ballarin quickly accepted. He felt that the solution to Michelin’s problems was responsibilization, and by the summer of 2012, Ballarin had sketched out a bottom-up initiative to promote it, which he labelled MAPP, the French acronym for “autonomous management of performance and progress.”
STEP 1: LAUNCHING MOVEMENT
Ballarin toured the factories, making his pitch to local managers and teams. By October 2012, Ballarin had recruited 38 teams, comprising 1,500 people (about 1% of the company’s headcount), from 17 plants. The next few months were hectic. At each of the 17 factories, Ballarin held kickoff meetings, where he reminded plant leaders that the point of the exercise was for teams to discover the solution.
Ballarin also walked each team through the mission of responsibilization. The focus was on the what, not the how. Team leaders were encouraged to let go and shift their role from “deciding” to “enabling.” To get the ball rolling, they could ask their teams two questions: “What decisions could you make without my help?” and “What problems
THE could you solve without the involvement of support staff like maintenance, quality or industrial engineering?”
Things advanced slowly at first, but by March 2013 experiments were ramping up. The tipping point, says Ballarin, came when the teams figured out that no one was going to stop them.
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STEP 2: CONVERGING ON A SHARED VIEW
During the first half of 2013, the responsibilization teams worked independently, but in the summer, Ballarin began connecting them with the help of Olivier Marsal, an enterprising manager in Michelin’s manufacturing function. The pair began hosting monthly phone conferences and set up an online space, MAPPEDIA, where teams could share findings and address common problems. Ballarin also ran a series of three-day workshops, at which teams shared videos about their experiments and then worked to define the signature practices of an autonomous team.
The insights from the workshops clustered into six categories — developing a shared mission and objectives, organizing work, developing competencies, driving innovation, coordinating with others and managing performance — which became the foundation of a framework for new teams joining the responsibilization journey.
STEP 3: SCALING UP
With pilot teams delivering encouraging results, Ballarin and Marsal aimed higher, wangling their way onto the agenda of a December 2013 senior leadership meeting. After playing a selection of the teams’ videos, Ballarin summarized the performance gains and noted the rising engagement scores. Then came the big ask: He wanted to test responsibilization at the full plant level — which would challenge plant leaders and support functions to redefine their roles. Even more contentious, the corporate staff groups would have to cede some decision rights to the plants involved.
Executives were enthusiastic and eager to learn more about the pilots. Hoping for permission to test responsibilization in two factories, Ballarin left the meeting with the go-ahead to scale up in six.
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STEP 4: REDEFINING BOUNDARIES AND ROLES
In the test plants, front-line employees began playing bigger roles in areas such as safety, quality and scheduling and even participating in high-level planning meetings. For the first time, they weighed in on decisions about plant design, capital programs, staffing levels and yearly targets.
As production teams began to exercise greater autonomy, managers at the test plants worked to redefine their roles. Each factory developed training programs on topics like emotional intelligence and “leading from behind.”
A few plant executives also offloaded some of their responsibilities.
In a win-win, front-line empowerment freed managers to focus on more rewarding work, such as building team skills and resource planning.
STEP 5: RENEGOTIATING RELATIONSHIPS WITH HQ Michelin’s plants traditionally depended on central functions to set standards, define processes and hand out production quotas. It was clear to Ballarin that unless factories could start managing those tasks themselves, responsibilization would stall out. Wresting authority from central functions was a challenge, yet several plants made progress. The key, local managers realized, was to win permission for a targeted experiment and then use the results to push for more autonomy.
THE CASE FOR RADICAL EMPOWERMENT
Companies like Michelin show what can be achieved when an organization has faith in the potential of its people and is prepared to invest in their skills and reward their contributions. This workplace alchemy — turning dead-end jobs into get-ahead jobs — doesn’t require new legislation or billions of dollars in public spending. It just takes commitment to building organizations that kindle the spark of everyday genius in each human being.
Gary Hamel is a visiting professor at London Business School and the founder of the Management Lab. Michele Zanini is the managing director of the Management Lab. They are the authors of “Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them.”
