Expansión & Empleo 15 October 2005

The source to get a company ruled by confidence and based in feelings is to share the objectives, the culture and the information.

"I reserve the heart for my family, in business I use the head and the balls". The sentence said by Mark Jacobs, the most famous American boxing promoter in the thirties, to the boxer James J. Braddock, when he implored for work in the middle of the Great Depression, and that collects the film Cinderella Man, was grabbed to Daniel Cisneros on his mind. It is because he recognised himself in such spirit during most of his management life till he jumped to the automotive multinational three years ago, when the previous CEO left it back full of enemies and conflicts.

Then he began his silent revolution. Today the company is at the top of the most-desired-companies-to-work rankings, has reduce its costs, has signed laboral peace with the labour committee and has retrieved the profitability of the best period. Cisneros's prescription is simple: he did the heart, that Jacobs left at home, flood all over the corners of the organisation, from the assembly chain to the carpeted floors, the warehouse and the dining room. But the most important thing is how he did it.

In the factory, the personal knowledge was an element of influence. In fact, some division directors gave instructions to their teams for not sharing information with other business lines. It was necessary to create a confidence frame, something the previous commander of the ship was unable to do. Cisneros forced the department managers to listen to the ideas of their teams before taking strategic decisions. As well, he eliminated the electronic arcs, a compulsory way for the plant workers at the end of each turn. This helped believe that no one would take tools home and contributed to destroy the distrusting ambience that mined the corporative moral. At the same time, he engaged the natural leaders in interesting projects that would activate their commitment.

Not less crucial was to engender a feeling of being recognised in every member of the company. He began an internal visiting program and discovered that many of the workers did not know the last goal of their daily duty and the importance of their personal contribution to the final product. They were asked for devotion to an objective that most of them ignored! Conscious, much more earlier than cursing his MBA, that it is impossible to love what one does not know, he set up visits to the factory for the whole personnel, and specific courses on the involvement of each one.

He identified ineffectiveness in the operations linked to the human performance, which solution supposed millionaire savings. Because most of the workers did a job that did not match them up, others did not have attributions for lack of delegation, and most of them did not know their work's purpose. By first time, someone looked at the employees like human beings who should have fun at work and feel responsible.

The initial resistances were reduced because of the unhappiness that had provoked the old order, the incentives of working in harmony, and the confidence and the respect for a new leader that brought vision, inspired values and gave personal example. But the true revolution of Cisneros began with a program to eliminate nominal positions, to make the managers were periodically evaluated by their staff, to give corporative information to all employees and leave them to fix their productivity objectives.

The new corporate culture turned the employees in clients and promoted a new emotional management. The autonomy of each one in their task, the respect for their own ideas and for the ones of others, and the entitlement to commit mistakes were transforming from a company where the truth ruled, to one dominated by confidence; from one based on facts, to one based on feelings; from saying, to asking; from pushing, to pulling. Even today, when the business press asks Cisneros about the reason of his success, he answers that the clue word has been sharing: the objectives, the culture, the learning, the efforts and the information.