26 MiMfg Magazine September 2021
Eliminating the Pink Elephant in the Room
How to Get the Buy-in from Your Leadership Team to Accept and Make Critical Changes
By Tom Borg • Tom Borg Consulting LLC
Have you ever faced a critical change in your company and couldn ’ t get buy-in from your leadership team to accept and make that change ? It is that pink elephant in the room . Everyone knows it ’ s there but no one wants to talk about it .
The first step is to point out the facts . Where do we want to go or what is our goal ?
The second step is to find the feeling . What are the emotions we are trying to identify and engage with , that will get us and our people to really buy into wanting to make this change ?
Let ’ s take a look at an actual example of how this worked for a company . In their book , The Heart of Change by John Kotter and Dan Cohen , they discuss how Joe Stegner , a leader who worked for a large manufacturer , identified how his company , through wasteful purchasing practices , was wasting vast sums of money buying work gloves for its employees .
Part of the problem was different factories , that were part of this manufacturer , purchased their work gloves from different vendors .
This was the pink elephant in the room . Yet this practice went on for years until Stegner came up with a plan . He had a summer intern identify all the types of gloves used in all the company ’ s factories and trace back what the company was paying for them . The intern reported that they were purchasing 424 different kinds of gloves . Depending on the location , for the same pair of gloves , they were paying anywhere between $ 3.22 and $ 17 .
Get More ! Check out the full version of this article and get additional insight from Tom Borg on the MMA Blog at mimfg . org .
“ At Stenger ’ s request , the student collected a specimen of every one of the 424 different types of gloves and tagged each with the price paid . Then all the gloves were gathered up , brought to the boardroom and piled up on the conference table . Stegner invited all the division presidents to come visit the Glove Shrine .”
What followed was unforgettable . “ For several minutes the presidents were speechless . It was rare that they didn ’ t have anything to say but this day they just stood with their mouths gaping .”
Staring at the mountain of gloves piled high on the conference room table , it sparked a shift in the way they thought and felt and , more importantly , how they acted in supporting the change .
It wasn ’ t long after this demonstration that the company instituted a change in its glove purchasing process . This resulted in the manufacturer saving over $ 1 billion dollars during the next five years . 6
Tom Borg is founder and president of Tom Borg Consulting LLC . For over 25 years he has been helping business owners , presidents , CEOs and their teams in the manufacturing industry . He works at the intersection of leadership , communication and culture . He may be reached at 734-404-5909 or tom @ tomborg . com .
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