With operations in 27 countries, sales of approximately $4.5 billion and 26,000 employees working in more than 80 plants around the globe, The Timken Company keeps the world turning with its innovative products and services. But Timken, like many world-le
by Site Staff
March 1, 2006
With operations in 27 countries, sales of approximately $4.5 billion and 26,000 employees working in more than 80 plants around the globe, The Timken Company keeps the world turning with its innovative products and services. But Timken, like many world-leading manufacturers, significantly downsized its workforce during the 1980s, and Timken’s corporate leadership and development group disbanded. However, after the corporate group disbanded, it became apparent to the organization’s three business units—especially Timken’s Industrial group—that there was a significant need to develop current and future leaders.
“When I first joined the company (22 years ago), we had a very large centralized group of training people—52 total,” said Kim Ridgway, senior organizational advancement specialist for Timken’s Industrial group. “Over the years, the training group has changed and downsized to at one point where we had only two trainers. Today, we have distributed training and development functions. There is a corporate group that handles most of the management and leadership training, but at a higher level in the company. Since there was no group for us to call upon, we undertook this effort within our business group, and I put the Manufacturing Academy into place because of the perceived lack of professional training for our plant people.”
The Manufacturing Academy was initially launched in 2002 for the Industrial group’s U.S. high-potential workers because Ridgway knew that reaching its global audience would be more challenging. “We built it for the U.S. audience even though we knew at that point we wanted to get it to a global audience, but we thought it was too big of a chunk to bite off at one time,” he said. “The program was designed to run one week a month for four months. So we would fly people into our corporate headquarters in Canton, Ohio for a week of training and then fly them back to their respective plants, bring them back for another week of training and so on.”
Approximately two years after the initial launch, Ridgway and his team redesigned the academy for its global audience as well. Instead of running one-week a month for four months, learners go to the academy for two two-week sessions.
The academy targets high-potential employees that are identified by their superiors. The Manufacturing Academy does not exclude any level employee, and it has trained everyone from staff engineers, managers, supervisors, plant managers to area managers. The program includes an initial orientation, business simulations, customer satisfaction simulations and modular training, which includes quality training, supply-chain training, lean six sigma training and more. Learners also visit one of the Industrial group’s top-performing manufacturing plants—either in Noahboro, N.C., or in Ploiesti, Romania—for experiential learning.
Ridgway said the overall purpose of the training processes is for employees to learn how to build both corporate-level and plant-level business plans and learn how to manage capital investments. “We take the learners to plants because we want people to see, understand and live in the best team cultures and team environments,” he said. “And while we are in the plant we do cultural assessments, so they can get a deep dive into how the plant is organized and how they can achieve the same kind of success.”
But according to Ridgway, training the high potentials from overseas can be a challenge. Breaking down cultural barriers has been one of Ridgway’s primary efforts. “The last academy we ran we had 22 people from 16 different plants and nine different countries, so we had to figure out how to successfully bring these people together,” Ridgway said. “So we did a gift exchange during the orientation. People brought a gift and talked about why they brought this gift, what it means to their country, why it is significant, etc. And this process really made everyone more culturally sensitive.”
Another challenge is introducing western values into another country. The Industrial group is in the process of building another manufacturing facility in China and according to Ridgway, introducing the company’s values has been extremely difficult there. “Our one established plant in China was at one time a state-owned enterprise, and we still struggle to get people to take initiative, do things on their own and make decisions because those things are very averse in the Chinese culture,” Ridgway explained. “They are just used to living in a culture where people do not take risks or chances because they are scared, and that is one of the cultural issues we are trying to battle. That is why we have role models (expatriates) there to show them and coach them on what our expectations are. And we are starting to see some change.”
But Ridgway hopes to see even more change in China because it is one of the fastest growing economies. “Because we expect to see such growth there, we may try to develop a different version of the Manufacturing Academy for China,” he said. “We think that the target audience is pretty underdeveloped in their knowledge of our company, in their knowledge around supply chain quality and Lean Six Sigma. So it could probably run there for a few years and provide good value.”
– Cari McLean, carim@clomedia.com