Corporate Culture
Driving force
How Richard Morrison steered Molded Fiber Glass through cultural changes to ensure its future
By Kristy J. O’Hara
Smart Business Cleveland | November 2007
Richard Morrison and his management team headed out for a
retreat at Peek’n Peak Resort in western New York a few years
ago, thinking it would be just another management meeting. But
during this particular get-together, he realized that Molded Fiber
Glass Cos. was in need of change.
It had traditionally operated as many companies do — raising
prices when it raised wages — but as it grew globally and competition picked up, this became ineffective.
“We realized that if we didn’t have a cultural way of genuinely
getting better that we wouldn’t survive,” says Morrison, president
and CEO of Molded Fiber Glass. “Up to that point, there were different programs ... but they were a little bit of an event-oriented
scenario — they would go in, work on something, and they would
make improvement, but once you turned your back on it, it didn’t
stick, and you had backsliding, so you had to generally have a culture that was different.”
He thought if his people could eliminate waste in the company,
which manufactures fiberglass reinforced products for a variety of
industries, it would help them become culturally better for the
long haul. He hired an outside consultant to help him and his team
work on it, and they combined aspects of both Six Sigma and lean
manufacturing, implementing them throughout the business.
“It was difficult,” Morrison says. “People weren’t used to it. The
biggest challenge was to change it from an event-oriented phenomenon to a cultural phenomenon. It’s a process.”
Implementing major changes requires having an environment of
trust, engaging people and dealing with opposition. Even with all
these elements though, no change will succeed if you just talk
about it.
“I think the delta or the gap between the good ideas is not in the
fact that there is a shortage of good ideas,” Morrison says. “The
delta is in that you actually do it. It’s the actual execution. We have
in our six core values, walk the talk. You can say anything, but do
you really do it? Do you really believe it? That’s not rocket science.
That’s just hard work. That’s just being diligent.”
Creating the right environment
Nothing can happen in your organization if you don’t have the
right environment to aid changes, and that starts with trust.
“That’s a major component of change. You have to trust your
leaders. If you don’t trust your leaders, then it’s a tough go,”
Morrison says.
Establishing trust and a rapport with employees doesn’t always
come as an easy task though. The key is treating them like family.
“While you’re here, this is extended family,” Morrison says. “For
some people, it may be their only family. To feel wealthy, you must
have friends and family. It’s a great social need people have, so we
try to provide an environment that’s extended family.
“When people trust their leadership, they’ll do what they have
to,” Morrison says. “That takes time. That’s being honest. That’s
spending time with them, asking how they feel and getting back to
people when they have a problem. It’s about treating them fairly
and with compassion. That takes time, and you have to earn it.
People watch what you do. They don’t expect perfection, but they
look for consistency. When you screw up, just say, ‘Look, we
screwed up. May I have your forgiveness?’ Life without forgiveness is impossible.”
If you operate in that manner, over a period of time, people will come to trust you more, but you have to realize that a title doesn’t
garner trust automatically.
“Spend time with people,” Morrison says. “You don’t lie to them.
It is not bestowed upon you by birthright or anything else. You
earn it.”
Once you reach that point, it becomes easier to get people to do
what you need them to do, and it doesn’t require as much time to
get them buying in to changes and engaged in the process.
The other benefit of treating people like family is it helps people
perform better.
“They key is peer pressure, where you want someone to say,
‘Hey, you’re kind of screwing up,’” Morrison says. “One of the best
places for that to come is from a peer because it’s like your sister
or your cousin or your friend telling you you’re really screwing up
here rather than your mother.”
He says that when a peer is telling you what’s wrong, that puts
pressure on someone horizontally, so they don’t feel like they’re
getting in trouble like they do when the pressure comes vertically.
“The [Cleveland] Indians have a players-only meeting,” Morrison
says. “Well, what are they doing? They’re putting pressure on each
other. Without the hierarchy, you’re able to say what’s on your
mind.”
When Morrison announced that MFG would institute elements
of Six Sigma and lean manufacturing, three of his better employees came to him concerned about losing their jobs.
“I said, ‘No, you’ll be concerned with losing your jobs if we don’t
get better, and I hope you will trust me on that,’” Morrison says.
He went on to explain to them that instead of actually operating
the line, they would be controlling the robots on the line, and that
they would be trained to do new things that would probably be
more interesting to them and more beneficial to their careers. That
honesty helped them understand the importance of making
changes.
“People are suspicious that while you’re ‘leaning out’ that you’re
going to fire everybody,” Morrison says. “That’s not the idea. The
idea is to make what you have far more productive through the
waste elimination process. People understand what waste is. They
see it all the time. They know what it is, and they understand quality and quality problems, so if you explain it to them in those terms,
they relate to it.”
You can’t just say it once either — you have to keep communicating.
“We moved down the road because we insisted on it, and we
spread the message, ‘This is not to make more money; this is to
survive,’” Morrison says. “You just keep beating the message in.
What you want to be able to do eventually is have enough people
believe it who are engaged in the process that you can now start
to shift from event-oriented to a culture, and that takes a lot of
work.”
Engaging your people
For any change to be successful, it can’t be you doing everything.
Others have to be involved and engaged in the process.
“For people to think all they can do is, ‘The CEO says, “do this,
and make it work,”’ that doesn’t happen,” Morrison says.
After communicating changes, piggyback off of the zealous
employees who get on board right away. He says when you speak
to someone, if that person has passion for what he or she is doing,
then that employee is interested and engaged.
“You can just sense it,” Morrison says. “Their body language, the
way they speak up, the way they participate — you look for it.”
When you can pull out these employees and use them to help
lead the efforts, it makes changes more successful. One of the big
proponents of instituting lean was a general manager in North
Carolina who bought in to lean and convinced everyone the company could do it, so Morrison used him to help lead others and
educate others because he was passionate about it.
“Leadership is not just in the domain of senior management,”
Morrison says. “Leadership is throughout. A good vision and
judgment and inspiring trust and confidence can be anybody.”
It’s also important to teach people so they get more involved
in the process.
“You can’t get excited about something you don’t understand,” Morrison says.
Molded Fiber Glass employees regularly convene for learning
sessions in the company’s learning room, which has a scarlet
and gray, Ohio State theme. As more engage in these sessions,
others hop on the bandwagon.
“It’s slow at first, but now we have people saying, ‘I want to
be a green belt,’ because they think, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.
That looks kind of fun,’ and then they sort of think in the backs
of their minds, ‘Yeah, and it’s good for my career, too,’”
Morrison says. “That’s OK. People should have self-interest
that aligns with the interest of the company.”
It’s important to reward people as well so they can see how
they benefit when the company benefits. MFG offers monthly
cash profit sharing for employees, which also gets people on
board. As more people get into the process, it aligns the company so everyone is working the same way, and that’s important to succeeding.
“People understand how to read the playbook and what’s
expected,” Morrison says.
Dealing with resistance
With any change, despite your best intentions, people are
going to oppose you, and you can’t force them to buy in to
what you’re doing.
“You’re not running a military or anything,” Morrison says.
“People are free to come and go here as they choose. All you
can do is influence them by convincing them that it’s good for
them and they’re going to have more fun being on the train
than alongside the track.”
No matter how much you communicate, you’ll have some people
who still question your message and are leery to get involved.
“You’ll have people that jump on board right away, and then
you’ll have some that are against it,” Morrison says. “I think the
majority are going to sit there and wait and say, ‘How long is
this going to last before they decide?’
“If you study history, that’s the way it was in the American
Revolution — people for it, people against it and a group in
the middle that didn’t know which way to go because they
didn’t know who was going to be the winner, and they didn’t want to be on the wrong side because they thought they
might get hanged. In a change process, you have a block in
the middle that’s just watching to see what happens. That’s
why you have to have very strong, active champions over
here and have some successes so people say, ‘This is really
what’s going to happen — I better jump on.’ That takes time
because you have a lot of people that say, ‘Well, here’s the
latest gig. We’ll wait this one out.’ Not that they’ll oppose it,
but they’re not gung-ho about it.”
Morrison says it’s easy to identify the people that buy in to
the changes, but he says it’s harder to tell who’s on the
fence, so you have to keep communicating with everyone.
“You have a constant message, which is sincere so that
they will eventually believe that you mean what you say,”
he says.
Others will put up a front but are really working against
you. Morrison says it’s important for the management team
to be unified and know how to talk and effectively disagree
and work out those disagreements to be able to pinpoint
these issues.
“You need to consult with others you trust and have an environment where they can disagree with you,” Morrison says. “I
think disagreement is a good thing if it’s sincere and it’s not disagreeable. Disagree but don’t be disagreeable. You have to
learn the art of disagreeing so one disagreement doesn’t lead
to a larger one, and that leads to a larger one, and you have a
nuclear war.”
Morrison has an executive team of seven people who discuss the company’s progress, potential problems and problem people in the organization.
“An individual can fool one or two people, but ... I think
it’s pretty hard to fool all seven,” Morrison says.
Despite your best efforts, some people are never going to
engage and align with the company. While you can make
suggestions and coach people to help them buy in, sometimes you just have to go a step further and tell them what’s
going to happen when asking them to change doesn’t happen.
“Some points you ask people, and at some point, you
might have to say, ‘Well, we have to have this done, otherwise we have to make a change,’” Morrison says.
There have been a couple people that Morrison let go
because he could clearly tell they weren’t interested and
weren’t going to become interested in what was happening.
In doing so, he told them they’d be better off going to a
company where they wanted to participate.
“You need to get on the train and enjoy the ride even
though there’s good times and bad times,” Morrison says.
“Get engaged; participate. What a way to go through life not
caring about anything except when the weekend is.”
The way to pinpoint problems and problem people is to be
down in the trenches with them. If you stay isolated in your
office, you won’t know the real issues facing your company.
“You try to increase the probability that you’re correct,
and you increase the probability that you’re correct in business by standing as close to reality as you can, and sometimes the reality is painful, so you have to have the environment where people say, ‘We’re not doing this very well,’
and not take it personally but take it as an opportunity to
get better,” he says.
He says the only way to get better is to have people making suggestions and critiquing you and your actions, and
you can’t bite their heads off if they say something you disagree with or that questions your plans.
“You don’t want to intimidate people because intimidation
only gives you minimal performance, and they’re only going
to do what’s asked of them and no more because they don’t
want to make mistakes,” Morrison says.
To avoid coming off as intimidating, you have to visit
employees so they see you’re a real person like them and
not just some mythical creature hiding in an office somewhere.
“You can’t get the pulse of people by talking on the
phone,” Morrison says. “The majority of communication is
nonverbal anyways. You have to go there and get a much
better sense of what’s going on than sending somebody
out.”
Because of this, Morrison travels to all nine states he has
facilities in as well as MFG’s facility in Mexico. Making himself visible, getting feedback and uniting the people in the
company has helped him lead MFG on to greater successes
in recent years, ending fiscal 2006 with $250 million in revenue.
Changing the culture to focus on reducing waste has resulted
in approximately $10 million in savings.
“We do not think we can survive without this kind of initiative and its successful execution,” Morrison says.
Despite his successes, he knows he can’t get too cocky, so
he maintains a healthy paranoia about the company’s
future.
“What keeps an individual from running down the street
with no clothes on?” Morrison says. “It’s the shame he
would feel, and that’s a good thing. It’s the same thing in
business. You have to think that your existence is not guaranteed and not forever.”
With that mentality, he continues to look for ways MFG
can adjust to stay competitive.
“We have to make adjustments and you see it in professional sports,” Morrison says. “Why does one team get beat
up in the first half and come out and win in the second half?
The reason is they made adjustments and figured it out.
There’s other stuff they’re going to throw at you, but you
have to be flexible and make adjustments. That doesn’t
mean you throw away your ethics and values, but your tactics may have to change.”
He also reminds himself that he can never have it perfect
and can’t predict the future, but it’s important to at least
look in that direction and not stay stuck in the past.
“A lot of people have written about change, and just realize that change is going to occur whether you like it or not,
so the question is, are you going to participate?”
HOW TO REACH: Molded Fiber Glass Cos., (440) 997-5851 or www.moldedfiberglass.com
