Dupont de Nemours

The AWS Team Building project is a culture change program within the manufacturing plant of Du Pont Dordrecht, which aims at creating empowered, self-managing teams to achieve business excellence.
Each team was involved in a team-specific four-step process provided by Challenge Learning.

Background

In 1991 Du Pont Dordrecht developed a long term business strategy, of which "People Development" was one aspect. All other aspects depended on the increasing capability of plant personnel.

The concept was to create a continuously developing work environment in which the planning and controlling functions were devolved to team levels. In the AWS scheme, self-managing teams provide better solutions to many manufacturing problems, as well as increased levels of accountability and productivity, and lower maintenance costs.

Each Business unit: Delrin, Lycra, Teflon, and Terathane reorganized itself around teams, and began the process of empowering and developing them, reducing layers of management.

One critical success factor was to integrate the AWS concepts into the team building framework. AWS entails conceptual models of production, communications and human relations aimed at organization effectiveness. The marriage with team building was to ensure that all personnel held a consistent, shared view of a developing and effective work environment.

Approach

Challenge Learning was charged with the team building process for two reasons:

1. Teamwork cannot be taught, but it can be learned. Challenge Learning specializes in having people try and practice teamwork. Challenge Learning Labs are a series of teamwork simulations which focus on critical success elements for effective team relations. The simulations enable teams to generate shared understandings of how they need to operate together to be successful. At the same time, relationships and esprit de corps are built to a high level through shared success experiences.

2. Creating a team-based organization represented a significant change. The question was: how to get people to take on more responsibility, to have a new attitude toward work and a new way of dealing with colleagues. In this case Challenge Learning utilized high ropes course adventure activities to stimulate new attitudes about growth, change and learning. These activities, when applied well, are a powerful means of generating confidence, trust, support, and openness: the essential elements for creating motivation and empowerment and for enabling people to accept and become committed to the need for change.

Training Structure

The structure of this development training intervention followed a three step approach:

1. a needs assessment was made for each team. Each team met and set program objectives together with their manager;

2. the team attended a three day team-building program at the Challenge Learning training center in Holland;

3. back at the plant, Challenge Learning worked with each team to ensure the application and follow-through of the training.

The whole intervention followed a "top-down" approach with the leadership of each business attending first. In addition, Challenge Learning held training programs to develop internal team coaches to help carry the process forward.