Q-C businesses get lesson in team management

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By Jennifer DeWitt | Wednesday, June 04, 2008 |

The Muscatine, Iowa-based Bandag Inc. was riding high back in 1990 when its leader, Martin Carver, decided the tire retread manufacturer needed a culture change.

Sales were strong and Bandag was growing — and competing — in an industry with far bigger giants. But Carver recalled having “a gut feeling that we need to do something different. We had been successful but I felt that was not going to be enough.”

He shared the story of how the family-owned company emerged as a world leader in its industry and how adopting a team management model made the difference during his keynote speech Wednesday at St. Ambrose University’s Organizational Best Practices Conference. He and a dozen representatives of several leading companies and organizations shared their advice on the daylong conference’s topic, “Achieving Results Through Teams.”

Carver, the former chairman, chief executive officer and president of Bandag, said it took as long as 15 years for the company to fully evolve as a team-based organization. Under the former management philosophy it was “thought that the CEO had to know more than anybody and it was about tops-down organization. That is not only expensive but ineffective,” he told the audience of 170 gathered at the Rogalski Center on the Davenport campus.

Following the teachings of now-late W. Edwards Deming, known as the father of the Japanese post-war industrial revival and the leading quality guru, Carver and Bandag adopted a new movement toward quality and the team approach.

Under the new philosophy, he said “our relationships were based on respect for individuals and creating trust.” The ability to lead, mentor and teach took on a new importance, he said. “We always felt it was easier to teach the technical expertise than to teach how to be a decent human being.”

After his speech, Carver explained that Deming’s approach completely changed how he looked at business. He realized learning to treat people they way you want to be treated. “People will have their maximum creativity when they have a good feeling about their work.”

Carver led Bandag — a business founded by his father, Roy Carver — from 1982 through 2007 when the Muscatine company was acquired by Bridgestone Americas Holding Inc. in a $1.05 billion deal.

Today, he consults businesses on team-type management through his new company, MG Consulting LLC. His accolades include being named CEO of the Year by Financial World magazine in 1986 in the rubber and plastics industry. Three years later, he was named CEO of the Decade in the broader category of the chemicals industry.

As part of his presentation, Carver offered a list of Do Over (his mistakes) and Do Again (things that worked). Among the mistakes was not getting the company leadership on board with the culture change and not communicating the need for it enough with the entire organization. “When you go to a different culture, it takes time to build trust,” he said, admitting change can be hard on the organization.

But the successes included involving all employees in the problem solving and the team structure. He created a Delta Team to design the new culture. “We put the organization’s success ahead of our own.”

After Carver’s keynote, the participants spent the day learning lessons from leaders of several area and regional companies, including Pella Corp., U.S. Army, Monsanto, Rockwell Collins, Caterpillar, Boeing, Deere & Co. and HON Co.

The first-time conference, which St. Ambrose now plans to offer each year, drew participants from more than 40 Quad-City area companies. The second conference is tentatively scheduled for June 3, 2009.

John Byrne, the new dean of St. Ambrose’s College of Business, said he was thrilled by the turnout of the inaugural event. “Our hope is that 170 people will go back to their workplace and because of something St. Ambrose put together their organization will be better off,” he said.

“It’s a big feather in our cap to have a conference of this caliber right here in the Quad-Cities,” he said, adding that the conference had presenters from nearly half a dozen Fortune 500 companies.

In addition to St. Ambrose, the event sponsors were Northern Trust, Bandag, Deere & Co., Muscatine Foods Corp., and the USA Rock Island Arsenal Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center.

Jennifer DeWitt can be contacted at (563) 383-2318 or jdewitt@qctimes.com.