Today is Sir Tony’s Birthday! Engr Tony Attah is ‘transformational leadership personified’. It’s such a blessing to have him and a host of many other amazing leaders grace our world. Nigeria is not short of abundant talents in every spheres of life. The country is endowed with ‘best-in-class’ corporate leaders. Still on our transformational journey series, I have the privilege of spot-lighting the leader who passed the baton to Sir T in his current role to underpin my point on aspiring to leave a place better than you met it. Sir Babs Omotowa recently penned down his early stint at business transformation and I have his graceful permission to 're-echo' it on my blog. Please enjoy “Making a difference in whatever role” in his words.
“Abel walks into my cubicle on a Monday
morning, looking dejected and telling me, ‘There has been a break-in and
theft.’ I ask him, ‘What is missing?’ ‘The stainless-steel valves we received
into stock last week”, he replied. I am sad.
This follows a pattern of break-ins at
the weekends when staffs are away. I wince as I think of having to report on
theft again at the supervisors’ meeting later in the day. This is not what I
expect to be grappling with, in this role.
‘Abel, let us go and have a look,’ I say.
I do not want to look demoralized to my team as I am just getting familiar with
the job’s responsibilities of receipt, storage, and issuance of materials;
maintaining inventory; keeping record and reconciling, and ensuring the
effectiveness of the warehousing activities and staff performance. But these
repeated thefts were making things difficult and it feels like a heavy, weight
on my shoulders.
‘This cannot continue and we must bring
it to a stop,’ I say to my team members who had gathered in the store. They
look at me with doubt written on their faces. This is a low moment, but it
invigorates me with determination to drive the needed improvements and make a
difference.
This was my first assignment in Shell as
a supervisor in the ‘lowly’ storeroom, tucked away in the company’s industrial
area in Warri. Here materials were stored to be retrieved and used to operate,
maintain, repair, and replace production equipment in the company’s oil and gas
fields.
I spent the first few months making
efforts to understand the activities, processes, culture, and norms. I took
time to assess the physical structures, layout, quality of staff, store record
systems, processes for receipt, and issuance of materials. I studied
warehousing, read reports, and visited other warehouses to learn. I spoke with
staff, supervisors, and customers to understand the issues, challenges, and
opportunities.
The storeroom, which housed hundreds of
millions of dollars of items, was poorly organized. Materials were strewn all
over and as such it was a herculean task to find items when customers requested
them. The stores were an open space with a roof, bare floor but without walls.
The chaotic situation was an opportunity for theft as intruders could easily
access the open space. I was disappointed that the company had invested money
to procure materials, yet failed to secure them properly. From police
investigations of the reported thefts, we discovered the stolen items were sold
on the black market, to unscrupulous contractors, who sold them to other oil
companies or to manufacturing industries.
I contextualized all these against how a
good storeroom should operate and started to think of making a difference. I
had learned from working on my father’s farms during my early years, the need
for planning, preparation, hard work, and perseverance to make a difference.
For example, sequences of clearing, ridging, planting, nurturing and
harvesting, had to be planned and timed to coincide with the appropriate
seasons. All farming phases required hard work and the phase of nurturing
required perseverance.
I discussed my observations with the
management, customers, and staff, and everyone was concerned with the negative
image the storeroom had as a ‘junkyard’. I secured alignment on the urgent need
for the turnaround to a place staff would want to work and customers will speak
highly of. The staff had always felt the need for change, but they had assumed
that the company was not interested, since they had hardly ever been visited by
management.
The vision I developed was for our stores
to look like and be run similarly as world-class supermarkets (Sainsbury,
Walmart) which I had seen in pictures in magazines, where stores are well
secured, materials properly arranged on shelves, and customer-friendly processes.
I identified three areas to focus on -
safety, customer satisfaction, and integrity. I had learned from my school
years that it was better to focus on a few things and do them exceptionally
well than to do many things and perform poorly. One cannot boil an ocean or
solve world hunger.
With management support, we worked with
other functions to actualize the vision. With engineering, we designed required
work and determined costs, and with Finance, we secured budgets. Walls were
built, a cold room built and carousel machines, synthetic racks, and pallets
procured, all of which we had seen in those world-class supermarkets. It was
not all smooth sail as we had to adapt during the process like changing from
procuring new materials to utilizing in-house materials to construct heavy-duty
racks. We arranged materials and labeled them in racks and in carousel units.
We entered the locations into the company’s enterprise system to make
retrievals easier. My team was unrelenting, with weekly review meetings, and working
overtime to achieve the objective of reducing theft to zero.
We also focused on customers, who had to
physically come to the store with a requisition, for our staff to search and
retrieve the items from our ‘junkyard’. This meant that field staff had to
spend time away from production work, to collect materials. Working with IT, we
enabled customers to send their requisitions electronically and not need to
come to the warehouse. We secured vans and trucks to deliver items (milk-runs)
to customers at their worksites.
With customers no longer coming to
collect items, the storeroom was far less crowded, and this increased safety in
the store as well as staff productivity. Safety risks were also reduced as
drivers of customers no longer needed to drive from their various locations to
the warehouse to collect materials. We were consolidating their orders which
significantly reduced driving safety exposures. All these changed the
perception and satisfaction level of customers.
At the end of two years, the warehouse
was completely transformed. Customers shared the stories and we started to
receive visits from the company’s management. They were proud to showcase the
storeroom to their visitors, as for example, our carousel units, were
industry-leading.
I was no longer going to the supervisors’
daily meetings to report theft. I was proud of the team’s achievement and we
celebrated, with their spouses, as family support is crucial for periods of
high-intensity work. I owe a lot of gratitude to the staff for the result
achieved - they are the heroes.
To achieve a goal, one must know the
goal, focus, and enlist key stakeholders. It is not possible to hit a target
with eyes closed. Positive impact enables one to gain confidence and the
recognition of bosses.
I learned that no matter how lowly the
work one is assigned, one should embrace it, work diligently, do it well and
transform. It is important to leave a role in an improved state from when one
started. Hurdles are to be overcome; when one meets a hurdle, one should
embrace it, as beyond lies a prize. How one does any work (unfanciful or not),
can determine one’s next job. If one keeps complaining about a role and
does it sloppily, it affects one’s reputation, and can negatively affect the
chances of getting bigger roles.
As Martin Luther King said “If a
man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a
Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote
poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth
will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.””
