Manufacturing Leadership Journal

and to support military requirements, we learned to get comfortable in the discomfort of relying wholeheartedly on internal and external collaboration.

Starting with a look inward, Cooley determined that there are three principles around which we have a zero-tolerance policy:

1. Operational Safety

2. Personal Integrity

3. Corporate Collaboration
The first two points seem obvious: safe-
guarding our employees’ well-being as well
as insisting on personal integrity in business
operations big and small are paramount.

However, adopting our less obvious but equally essential final principle of company-wide collaboration has reaped business and personnel rewards that shocked the very business leadership team that put these principles into place.

Inspiring the Team

The easiest way to determine if your business struggles with collabora- tion is first to evaluate your internal
communications. How do your employees in-
teract at meetings, over email, and on phone
calls? Internal communications that aren’t
face-to-face (i.e., emails) are particularly tell-
ing. If you notice negative, frustrated even
hostile inter-office messaging then you have
immediate feedback as to the deteriorated
state of collaboration at your company.

At Cooley we have silos – physical silos that contain polymer compounds – as well as internal silos that pertain to separate functions, business units, and departments.

Pictured below are two sets of physical silos: one set old and the other new. The rusted, dented silos on the right are damaged as a result of old-time measurement practices, one of which was when Cooley employees would throw rocks at the silo to determine the remaining volume of chemicals inside. To the left, the pristine white silos are equipped with electronic measurement meters that evaluate material volume without resorting to the archaic rock throwing method.

Just as Cooley no longer permits rock throwing to evaluate our physical silos, we’ve adopted a “no throwing rocks” culture when working with internal, functional silos. Prior to our collaboration transformation, negative emails would escalate to the senior lead-

MANUFACTURING LEADERSHIP JOURNAL

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