As he [Ken Iverson] explained in his book, Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick,

Most of today’s corporations were conceived as command-and-control organizations. The founders of integrated steel mills, for example, clearly assumed that the “genius” of the organization resided almost completely in management … In contrast, we built Nucor under the assumption that most of the “genius” 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 that’s able to solve complex, multidisciplinary problems.

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.

SPECIALIZATION. Nucor’s team members are deeply skilled, but they’re 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 “slots” at Nucor and, thus, no artificial limits on where and how team members can contribute.

As they say at Nucor, “We don’t build steel, we build people.