When the personal ambition of an individual gets ahead of the common good, damaging ripples are likely to ensue.
Management principles, as practised in large corporations, often allow or even encourage individual rivalry and competitiveness. In fact, many senior managers in these large companies see this competitiveness in employees as a necessary driving force for the success of the company. This can be a valid viewpoint; and if you look at the heads of large corporations the majority of the CEOs would not list compassion, team player or consideration for others as being top of their personal qualities. Instead, descriptions such as ambitious, high achiever or goal-orientated would probably be in the top five character traits found in their personal statements.
The company is a lead-acid battery factory operating in the late 1980s. The sales director, Dean, announced at a management meeting that he had personally landed the largest single order ever placed with the company. It was from an established customer, who themselves had landed an enormous order to supply standby power equipment to five 100MW coal-fired electricity generators.
As usual, the prices were barely above break-even and delivery was desperately optimistic. It would, however, increase the company’s turnover by 10% over just three months of production and it was all marginal business. A reasonable profit was certainly on the cards.
The design was standard and the materials suppliers were able to deliver on time, so the whole matter now rested on the shoulders of the production manager, Mandy. After raising the usual concerns of manpower, overtime, equipment limitations, breakdowns and overtime costs she was asked to produce a production plan to meet the order deadline, which the accounts department could cost out.
A manufacturing plan was developed from a week-long series of meetings of the production department, which Mandy presented at the next management meeting. It seemed to tick all the right boxes and was adopted by the team as the way forward. Materials were ordered, additional overtime was approved and temporary recruitment and training were organised for the few additional staff required for this order.
There were some wrinkles to be ironed out: the main one was the move to a 3-shift operation in some production areas, including the formation department. It seemed unusual as, traditionally, this was a 24-hour process, and equipment was limited. However, four hours per shift were taken up with loading and unloading batteries onto the circuits and cooling baths, with the same staff having to perform both operations during their shift. By moving to two 12-hour shifts and having extra formation staff loading one circuit whilst other staff were unloading another, it was possible to gain an extra four hours of formation time per day. Since this was a 36-hour process (with four hours of loading and unloading) it meant an additional 11% output was theoretically available, if the circuits were attended 24 hours per day.
As part of this plan, the two formation department supervisors were each made responsible for a 12‑hour shift. The shifts, which ran for six days and nights, were alternated weekly between the two teams. Sunday was designated a rest day for equipment maintenance. The two shift supervisors Tim and Clive were very different characters.
Tim, in his early 30s and very ambitious, wanted to get to the next rung of the promotion ladder, which was shift manager, then production manager, in the next couple of years. He had started his working life in the maintenance department and was a qualified electrical engineer with an HNC in mechanical engineering. Very bright but quite ruthless in achieving his ambition, he had little regard for the damage he may inflict on others on his way up the ladder.
The supervisor on the other shift was Clive— in his early 40s, unambitious and frankly not too bright. He was, however, highly respected by the shop floor staff for his integrity and dedication to his work. It was this dedicated approach and sense of fair play that was his undoing when dealing with the trickery of Tim, his opposite number on the second shift.
Tim was aware that the present production shift manager would be retiring in a few months, in fact just a couple of weeks after the completion of this order. He also knew that Clive and he had both applied for the position and the new manager would be decided at a management-level meeting. Tim saw this as an opportunity and in order to make sure he was chosen, he decided to discredit Clive, whom he now considered to be a rival for the position.
It was only the second week into the programme when Tim’s adroit schemes were launched. There were three parts to Tim’s plan.
- Step 1, allocate part of Clive’s stock to his own count when Clive had the night shift. Not easy as each circuit has a fixed voltage with a maximum number of batteries per string. Tim’s plan was to keep stock back from each circuit and add them to his own stock. His explanation for this difference would be the resistance of the connectors. He would use his loyal worker Jimmy, who depended on him to keep his job.
- Step 2 was to replace new formation connectors with old damaged ones. This would create high resistance and therefore a high voltage circuit, causing the formation units to switch off, probably several hours into the programme, thereby delaying the end of the formation process.
- Step 3, and perhaps the most damaging action, was to hide one or more of the company’s bespoke narrow pallet movers on Clive’s shift. The formation department had long water-cooling tanks placed as close together as possible, in order to maximise the use of available space. A unique, narrow-width, motorised platform lift was designed for the purpose of loading the cells or batteries into the water baths. The company had four of these, without which it would be impossible to load or unload the formation circuits. This simple ruse of hiding one or more of these from Clive’s shift was repeated several times over the following six weeks.
Tim started step one of his plan in the second production week, which was to allocate some of Clive’s stock to his own production count, using his henchman on Clive’s shift. This created a noticeable shortfall, all of which was attributable to Clive’s shift. A production meeting was held, during which Clive was identified as the source of the shortfall. Furthermore, he was at a complete loss to understand why all of these problems were happening solely on his watch.
Naturally, Tim showed concern and wondered if there were cells miscounted, particularly as the line leader with that responsibility was near retirement and probably prone to making mistakes. He thought Jimmy might be more suitable to be given the count responsibility. Clive argued that it was a machine that provided an automatic count, and human error was not possible. Tim, however, showed that the inadvertent passing of empty boxes through the counter during line set-up and during some repair work could inflate the throughput. Since there were repairs and long set-up times, it could reduce the output numbers significantly.
Since this first part of the plan had worked flawlessly, Tim put the remaining sabotage measures into operation. During the next few months, fortnightly meetings were held and Clive could not explain how on earth all of these issues had bedevilled his shift. Mandy had her suspicions from the first incident and suspected that Tim was behind it, but had no tangible evidence to support her suspicions. On one occasion she had a private meeting with Tim to put her concerns about sabotage to him, hoping to invoke an incriminating response. Naturally, Tim was too clever to fall into a trap and completely turned the tables by demonstrating that it was Mandy’s management and project planning, plus her choice of people, that were responsible for the poor project performance.
He argued that the choice of Clive as a shift manager was a mistake, and consequently, his choice of key workers was flawed. Tim then proposed that he should be put in charge of both shifts as project manager. He would then put the right people in place and also make a viable recovery plan. Mandy ended the meeting at this point, rather too angry to continue.
From Mandy’s viewpoint, it was impossible to recover the lost production because there was no extra time and, with equipment fully utilised, there was no additional production space available to implement any sort of recovery plan. Dean then recounted a conversation with Tim who had suggested that the additional cells required could be made by parallel charging on some of the higher output circuits. In effect, this would double the number of cells available on these higher-rated outlets. There were sufficient of these to make up the difference by the time the contract period would be up.
Mandy objected to this and said that parallel charging of series strings was too risky, as it can result in under and overcharging of strings on a single circuit. This would lead to quality problems and high levels of warranty returns. It would, in fact, be gambling with the company’s reputation. Dean admitted he was not a technical expert; however, he knew that Tim was aware of this and had proposed the simple and quick solution of putting variable high-wattage resistors between each of the series strings connected to a circuit. These resistances could then be adjusted in order to minimise the difference in the current drawn by each string. Mandy was silenced by this and decided to share her concerns about Tim with Dean. This was a serious error of judgement. Dean accused Mandy of incompetence and suggested that Tim would be more capable of successfully completing the order than she would. He also suggested that Tim should therefore be promoted, in order to look after production before the losses were irrecoverable.
Dean stormed out of Mandy’s office and went directly to Barry the MD to place his concerns on the table and relate the outcome of his meeting with Mandy. An emergency management meeting was called and Mandy got a grilling from all of the managers and frankly did not come out of it well.
She was blamed for the shortfall and accused by more than one of the team of trying to use Tim as a scapegoat for her shortcomings. However, on her side, was the fact that she had, in the four years in this position, made substantial improvements to productivity, reduction of scrap and warranty claims. Some of the more established managers supported her, and they probably guessed there was an element of truth to her suspicions about Tim. However, with no proof and with such a highly damaging strategy for a shift supervisor to follow for personal ambition, it was very difficult to swallow. The upshot was that she was given one week to sort it out. This meant that the recovery plan with personnel changes had to be up and running within seven days.
Unfortunately, the technical recovery plan for resistance-balanced circuits did not materialise that week. For some reason, the variable resistors that were ordered were incorrectly rated and unusable. It was eventually traced to an incorrect transcription by one of the purchasing clerks on the order sheet. This was due to a hastily scribbled note where a ‘7’ looked very much like a ‘2’ in the wattage specification for the resistors. By the time the measures were implemented, it was too late. The production could not catch up and the final 20% of the order was delivered over two weeks late. The customer suffered major embarrassment: the last 20% was for a power station in the Middle East. The station had removed its old standby power battery banks in order to fit the new ones on arrival. Without the new batteries, there were major outages including some industries and homes without power for hours during this 2-week period.
As a result, the contract penalty clause was invoked and the final 20% of the payment was withheld. The company, therefore, made a loss on the contract and the promised bonus payments in the factory were cancelled. On top of this, the customer withdrew all of its normal business, which was more than 15% of the battery manufacturers’ turnover. This of course meant that many long-standing workers were made redundant, including Clive. Mandy was not spared and was also on the redundancy list. She was given a month’s notice but was not expected to attend work during this period. On her last day, whilst clearing out four years of accumulated belongings from the production manager’s office, she was interrupted by a visit from Tim.
He walked uninvited through the office door and looked around the 10 square metre space with a very smug expression. He spoke first: “Just came to say goodbye and that it’s a shame that you are leaving.”
Mandy pushed the drawer of her desk filing cabinet closed and locked onto his eyes, with a steely gaze. “Do you realise how many people have lost their livelihood; and all the rest who missed out on a substantial bonus payment that they had their hearts set on? Does that even affect you?”
Tim casually leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. He answered without averting his eye contact. “I guess that is why you had the chop, isn’t it? A lot of people are probably baying for your blood right now.”
There was no point in confrontation; Mandy stood up and started to put papers into her briefcase, not looking at Tim this time. “So, what is next Tim? Do you have any more plans?”
He answered over his shoulder, as he opened the door to leave: “Well actually I always did fancy the production manager’s job.” Then, pausing before he walked out: “As a starting point.”
