Engines of Democracy

Sims would be easy to underestimate. She's a small woman, and she's watchful. She doesn't need to be the first person to express an opinion. She has braces on her teeth and wears wire-rim glasses, and her bearing is no different from that of anyone else at the plant. Although she has two engineering degrees, along with an MBA from UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School, she has the approachable air of a junior-high soccer coach. Every day, she wears the same outfit (blue slacks, gray pullover) that everyone else wears. "The idea of being 'The Boss' -- having a big office or whatever -- doesn't turn me on," says Sims. "It never really has. I've had a nice, big office, and I felt uncomfortable -- removed from what was going on. But I know I'm the boss here. It comes out in funny ways. I hadn't been here long before I started hearing the phrase, 'Paula says . . .' After awhile, it became a joke."

During her tenure at the plant, Sims was almost never at rest over the course of a day. Any person wearing a gray GE/Durham pullover had a potential claim on her attention. "I had never worked in this kind of environment before," she says. "The workforce is highly skilled and highly motivated -- and highly demanding as well. It is demanding of information, time, resources, results. I consider that a good thing -- because a lot of managers I've talked to are lulled to sleep by the layers of insulation around them. But with 170 people reporting to you, you really have to balance face time with getting your work done."

The job, says Sims, "has been the most challenging four years of my life -- and also the most rewarding. To do it well requires a different level of listening skills. Significantly different." In a place with no layer of middle managers to muffle the noise from below, a manager like Sims is exposed to the daily twang of worry, conflict, and tension that filters through a plant that produces roughly 400 high-performance jet engines a year. "More and more of what I do involves listening to people, to teams, to councils, to ideas, trying to find common themes."

The goals for GE/Durham this year that didn't have to do with productivity or quality included things like reviewing compensation; working to make more satisfying the jobs of the people who maintain each teams' workstations and parts kits; and revising how technical skills are assessed for purposes of promotion. All three of those were areas of dissatisfaction that Sims heard about during 1998. "The beauty of this job is that there are very few limits that you'd associate with its structure or its responsibilities. The difficulty is that there is a lot of stress. I'm always wondering, 'What do I do next? How can I simplify things and make everybody's job easier?' "

Training and information are key to making the plant manager's job manageable -- not for her, but for the rest of the plant. "I hadn't been here more than six months," says Sims, "when there were some big budget challenges. We wanted to reduce costs at this facility by $1.2 million. And we wanted a plan to do it in a few days. I'd been through this kind of thing many times in many different places, but I'd never been through it here before."

Sims quickly and silently developed her own plan and sent it to her boss. "At the time, this plant wasn't very cost-conscious. So I formed an expense council to educate people at the facility about why keeping track of expenses is important and how expenses fit into the total scheme of things."

The council moved fast. Although the full "cost education" process took six months, the expense council took less than three weeks to grasp the basics and to develop a plan to trim costs by $1.2 million. "It was a real rudder change--to get the plant to focus on expenses," sasy Sims. "That was the year when everyone decided that I was a cheap skate. But in a place like this, you have to trust people to a degree that you never would have before.

"When I had a new plan, I called my boss back and said, 'Take that first plan I sent you and throw it in the trash. We've got a new plan, a better plan.' And I explained the process that we'd gone through. This job requires realizing that the rest of GE doesn't work the way we work. You can't say to GE, 'Let me geat a council together, and we'll get back to you in a couple weeks.' But the plan we came up with in that case was better than what I had come up woith on my own. My boss chuckled and said, 'I guess you're learning the process down there.'"

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