Engines of Democracy

To see how candidates cooperate, they are interviewed in groups and given group tasks. Each team includes technicians who have been trained as "assessors," and they do the interviewing. Both the team and the plant manager have to agree -- to "consense" -- on the hiring of a new team member. "We ask, for instance, 'If there were something in your past that you could change, what would it be?' " says Derrick McCoy. "If you say, 'Well, I wish I could play "Stairway to Heaven" on the guitar,' well, I'm not sure you're going to get hired. You are on a team, a group, and you have to voice your opinion, but you also have to know when to hold back your opinion -- when to offer an idea, and when to consent to an idea. You've got to be able to give a little and to take a little. You've got to be able to listen. You've got to be able to change. That process is how we get the best people to work here."

Tom Mitchell, 29, a program-improvement leader, is listening to McCoy. "It's a fit issue," Mitchell offers. "We wouldn't hire Donald Trump here. But that doesn't mean he isn't good at what he does." Keith McKee knows firsthand how stringent the screening is. One of the people who applied for a job at the same time he did, in April 1995, was a GE technician who had built CF6 engines at another facility. "I thought he was a shoo-in," says McKee. "But he didn't get the job."

The Durham plant is not a setting that tolerates muttering, resentment, or unresolved disputes. "When I got here," says Derrick McCoy, "I was skeptical. I hadn't been on a team yet. What happens if someone is not performing? If you've got an issue -- a problem with someone's work ethic, for instance -- you've got to bring it up. Like, why is the day shift not getting its work done? Maybe the computer is down, or the parts are not in. Either way, we have to discuss it. Recently, Keith [McKee] was expecting me to get further along on building the BEA-92 (that's the system of cooling tubes near the fan hub) than I did. And I said to Keith, 'Well, I'm working with a guy who has been here only eight months.'

"They expected me to get to a certain point," McCoy adds, "but when you put someone with the new guy, you can't expect that person to get as far as he would if you put him with an experienced guy. As the materials-council rep, Keith did the right thing by confronting me. And I did the right thing by confronting him back -- by explaining. It was friendly."

GE/Durham's continuous-feedback culture -- "We call this the feedback capital of the world," says Paula Sims -- means that while in one sense it's true that no one here has a boss, the opposite is also true: "I have 15 bosses," says Keith McKee. "All of my teammates are my bosses." No one is exempt. "Not long after I started here," says Sims, "an employee came to me and said, 'Paula, you realize that you don't need to follow up with us to make sure we're doing what we agreed to do. If we say we'll do something, we'll do it. You don't need to micromanage us.' I sat back and thought, 'Wow. That's so simple. I'm sending the message that I don't trust people, because I always follow up.' I took that to heart. This was a technician, and I had been at the plant less than 30 days. I appreciated that he felt comfortable enough to tell me this. And I thought, 'This really is a different place.'"

The ABCs of Decisions

When it all comes together, GE/Durham can accomplish things that are almost unheard of -- even in the world of sophisticated manufacturing. Early this year, for example, GE offered the Durham facility the chance to start building another kind of engine: the CFM56, for which demand is rising. The CFM56 is one of the most widely used commercial engines in the world. GE says that 40% of all passenger planes carrying more than 100 passengers use CFM56s -- including the most common commercial jet, the 737. GE/Durham had never built the CFM56, but getting a new engine line, and more work, is good for morale in the plant, for expanding skills, and for job security. "Also, it reinforced the job we were doing," says Paula Sims. The question was simple: "How do we do that engine, which we've never done before, and do it fast? We were going to do it with just one new team -- and with no new hires."

After interviewing some tech-3s, Sims picked the first two members of the CFM56 team, along with a tech-support person. Those three people posted the rest of the jobs for the team, and then started interviewing and building a group. GE's Evendale, Ohio facility -- where the bulk of CFMs get built and where GE Aircraft Engines (the parent division of GE/Durham) is headquartered -- sent engineers to Durham to help design the line and to provide details on how the engine would be put together.