By bolstering business thinking deep in the organization, Nucor maximizes the quality of decision making at all levels and reduces the perceived status gap between frontline employees and commercially savvy managers.
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As he [Ken Iverson] explained in his book, Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick,
Most of todayâs corporations were conceived as command-and-control organizations. The founders of integrated steel mills, for example, clearly assumed that the âgeniusâ of the organization resided almost completely in management ⌠In contrast, we built Nucor under the assumption that most of the âgeniusâ in our organization would be found among the people doing the work. 2 3 From the outset, we shaped our business to let employees show management the way to goals that once seemed unreachable.
Exposing people to multiple skills and functions is a win-win. For individuals, the change in pace, activity, and colleagues makes work more interesting. In return, Nucor gets a workforce thatâs able to solve complex, multidisciplinary problems.
True to the spirit of humanocracy, Nucorâs model isnât about pushing employees to do more, but giving them the opportunity to be moreâmore than blue-collar workers, more than order takers, more than mere operators, more than employees. Nucorâs frontline team members are experts, innovators, risk takers, and owners.
SPECIALIZATION. Nucorâs team members are deeply skilled, but theyâre also multiskilled. Shared targets, cross-training, and malleable roles help them tackle the sort of tough, boundary-spanning problems that yield big productivity gains. There are no âslotsâ at Nucor and, thus, no artificial limits on where and how team members can contribute.
Each of these companiesâNucor, Haier, Handelsbanken, and Vinciâ has built an organization that is, at its core, a league of owners. Over the decades, each company has demonstrated conclusively that distributed ownershipâŚ
- Reduces turnover and creates a smarter, more experienced workforce
- Unlocks reserves of discretionary effort
- Increases the incentives for innovation
- Creates more cohesion and camaraderie
- Strengthens the connection with customers
- Produces faster, better-informed decisions
- Leads to a flatter, leaner organization
- Yields above-average returns