Matco Tools: The handyman

Smart Business Akron/Canton, Mar 01, 2007 by McClellan, Matt

When Tom Willis took over as president of Matco Tools in May 1996, he entered an office that had been empty for 18 months.

In the absence of a president, Matco, a subsidiary of Danaher Corp., was managed by the company's CFO, who came in to work about one week per month.

"It was every man for himself," Willis says. "The functional walls went up, and people were not working very well together, if at all."

Instead of focusing on what was best for the company, each division was simply concerned with taking care of its own business - not necessarily taking care of the customer.

"The challenge was to break down those barriers and get the team starting to work together," says Willis.

He needed to find a way to improve Matco's culture in a way that would get employees to take ownership of their jobs and commit to making the customer their top priority. But solving that challenge was difficult, because departments were squabbling over resources and adhering to a me-first attitude.

By instituting processes that foster a culture focused on listening to ideas from both employees and customers, Willis now has his 600 employees working in synch toward common goals at the $350 million company, which manufactures and distributes automotive equipment and tools.

Listening to employees

No one wants to feel like they are moving a rock from one pile to the next every day, so when Willis took over as president, he wanted his employees to know that they had the power to make their jobs better.

He turned to the Danaher Business System (DBS), a process with a proven track record at Danaher Corp. with which he was intimately familiar. Through the system, employees report ideas for improving work efficiency. It uses lean manufacturing tools to eliminate waste and maximize employee productivity.

"We let every employee know that when they come in to work, they have an opportunity to make a difference every day," Willis says. "You have an ability to help us advance the ball down the field every day. If you see there's something in your job, if there's something you feel is archaic, if it's wasting your time, if it is nonvalueadded, you have the ability to raise your hand and let us know.

"If you think there's a better way, you and some of your associates who may be sharing the same frustration, you can go in and drive that improvement."

Willis says it's not easy to get employees to believe that you are serious about a commitment like that, especially at the lower levels. So it's important to reward people for bringing improvement ideas to the table - even if those ideas don't end up being implemented.

He says people have to know that they and their ideas are appreciated. And employees who aren't interested in taking an active role in the company are not a good cultural fit.

"Those people are here to work their eight hours a day and their 40 hours a week," he says. "We don't want that; we want people to be active. So we challenge them. Every department is given a productivity goal every year. They have to work with their team to find out how to help drive our productivity."

In the beginning, Willis' staff had to go out and find projects to challenge employees to work on. Now, it's not uncommon for an employee to bring him a value stream map or a variation-reduction kaizen - two DBS lean manufacturing tools used to improve productivity and limit wasted time and resources.

That's why Willis looks for workers who want a little more out of their jobs than just a paycheck, and the ideal Matco employee is willing to step into the boss's office and offer a better way.

"We try to get people who want to come to work and not check their brain at the door," he says. "We always try to find the people who are curious, who want more responsibility - those people who are willing to step up and lead and challenge us."

As the frustrating aspects of work are removed, the corporate culture gets healthier. And Willis says the extra communication makes employees feel more valued, which helps the culture, too.

Of course, not all employees are going to thrive in a culture such as Matco's. Willis has a mixture of young upstarts and seasoned veterans working for him, and he says it is important to take the time to find out how younger members of the team learn and develop.

"We've got some people who take more hand-holding than others," he says. "That's OK because I used to be one of them. I understand some people have more need for pats on the back. We spend a lot of time coaching and counseling, talking through issues with people."

However, if an employee has irreconcilable problems with the culture and its systems, sometimes cutting your losses is the best thing to do.

"You can't afford to have them," Willis says. "I don't have anybody on my staff that's difficult. Sure, some take more of my time than others. We don't have time to waste with people who are difficult.

"If they're difficult, that means they don't get it. We don't need them here, so they can go do something else."

As your company gets larger, it gets harder to keep up with every minute detail of the business. That's why it is so important for employees to open up, because in a large company, the CEO may not know what the problem is.