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what would you do? Cessna

Staff Management
Cessna Headquarters, Wichita, Kansas1 Oriental Trading Company
The words “Cessna Skyhawk” have special meaning for anyone who has Savills
ever wanted to learn to fly. At 27 feet long and 8 feet tall, with a 36-foot Eichstaedt
wingspan, a 140 mph cruising speed, and room for two adults and their Bandag
luggage, more people have learned to fly with a Cessna Skyhawk than
Priority Designs
with any other plane in aviation history. In fact, the Cessna Skyhawk is the
best-selling plane of all time. Clyde Cessna built his first plane in 1911, and Patience and Nicholson
Cessna became a storied name in aviation. Cessna built 750 gliders for the Nucor Corporation
army in World War II, introduced the Skyhawk in 1956, produced the first
turbo-charged and cabin-pressurized single-engine planes in the 1960s,
delivered its first business jet in the 1970s, topped $1 billion in sales in the
1980s, and then, in one of the worst downturns in the history of aviation
business, nearly went out of business over the next decade and a half.
Sales of general aviation aircraft, which had topped out at 17,000 planes
per year, dropped to 12,000 planes within a year, and over the next de-
cade finally hit rock bottom at 928 planes for the entire industry. During
the same time, Cessna’s sales of piston-engine planes, like the Skyhawk,
dropped from 8,000 per year to just 600. Cessna was forced to lay off 75
percent of the employees at its piston-engine plane factories (Cessna also
makes business jets and larger planes) and eventually stopped making
piston-engine planes altogether. However, after the economy improved
and the U.S. government approved the General Aviation Revitalization Act
(barring product liability lawsuits on any plane over 18 years old), Cessna
decided to start building its legendary Skyhawks again.
my
Nettle/Ala

This is where you come in. With nearly 20 years in the company, your
first job with Cessna was teaching Cessna dealers how to service and main-
© Antony

tain single-engine planes. But now, with profits flowing again and the com-
pany’s legal risk greatly reduced thanks to the Revitalization Act, you’ve
been made the vice-president of Cessna’s “new” single-engine business. It’s
your job to rebuild this part of the business from the ground up. And be-
cause pilots tend to remain loyal to the kind of airplane
on which they learned to fly, much depends on your
success or failure. If you can rebuild Cessna’s single-
engine business, the pilots who learn to fly on today’s
Cessna Skyhawks will be buying Cessna business jets
study tips
20 years from now.
One of the advantages of starting completely
over is that you get to design the entire production Make up a
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Cessna does most of its production in Wichita, Kan- each conc nition and
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sas. But since it left the single-engine plane busi-
ness, Wichita mostly produces a small number of Make pho
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highly customized jets each year, just the opposite roup. e and for
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© iStockphoto.com/Ivan Burmistrov

of your business, which is a high number of stan-

dardized, single-engine planes. So, given the dif-
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ferences, you locate the new single-engine plane

factory in Independence, Kansas, two hours
© iStockph

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Part 3 Organizing

away by car, and only 40 minutes away in one of Cessna’s small planes. Along with
a new location, you’re debating taking a new approach to manufacturing planes by
using production teams. This decision may strike some colleagues as radical, particu-
larly at conservative-minded Cessna where, one of your fellow managers admitted,
“we probably got into a mode of doing things for the future based on how we’d always
done things in the past.” But the more you think about it, the more you are convinced
that it is the right decision. Instead of using a standard production line where each
worker does just one task, you are thinking about using teams to assemble Skyhawks
and other single-engine planes. In an incredible departure from the engineering-
based standards in which the motions of every worker on the assembly line are stud-
ied for time, cost, and efficiency implications, production teams would be completely
responsible for assembling the planes and for costs and quality.
You expect to see several benefits from a team-based approach, increased cus-
tomer satisfaction from improved product quality, faster, more efficient production,
and higher employee job satisfaction. A few things worry you, however. Despite all
of their promise, teams and teamwork are also prone to significant disadvantages.
They’re expensive to implement. They require significant training. And they only work
about a third of the time they’re used. So, despite their promise, you can’t ignore the
reality that using teams would be quite risky for Cessna.
Still, you can’t help thinking that teams could pay off and that there might be ways
for you to minimize the risk of failure. For example, because the plant will be in a new
location, Independence, Kansas, you get to start with a brand new workforce. What
kinds of people should you hire for teamwork? What kinds of skills and experience will
they need to succeed in a team environment? If you decide to take the plunge and use
teams, how much authority and responsibility should you give them? Should they be
limited to just advising management, or should you make them totally responsible for
quality, costs, and productivity? Finally, while you’re considering using teams on the
assembly line, are there other places in which you might use teams? Not all teams are
alike. Maybe there are other places in which teams could contribute to the success of
Cessna’s “new” single-engine plane-manufacturing facility?
If you were in charge of Cessna’s “new” single-engine factory, what would
you do?

N inety-one percent of organizations are significantly improving their effectiveness by using

work teams.2 Procter & Gamble and Cummins Engine began using teams in 1962 and
1973, respectively. Boeing, Caterpillar, Champion International, Ford Motor Company, 3M,
and General Electric established work teams in the mid- to late 1980s. Today, most companies
use teams to tackle a variety of issues.3 “Teams are ubiquitous. Whether we are talking about
software development, Olympic hockey, disease outbreak response, or urban warfare, teams
represent the critical unit that ‘gets things done’ in today’s world.”4
We begin this chapter by reviewing the advantages and disadvantages of teams and explor-
ing when companies should use teams instead of more traditional approaches. Next, we dis-
cuss the different types of work teams and the characteristics that all teams share. The chapter
ends by focusing on the practical steps to managing teams: team goals and priorities, and
organizing, training, and compensating teams.
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