Challenge
For years the industry considered Susquehanna a best-in-class facility
as assessed by the rigorous industry evaluation methods of the
Institute of Nuclear Power Organizations (INPO). But a stinging
1999 assessment by INPO showed that Susquehanna had slipped to
a bottom-quartile performer in the industry, revealing numerous
organizational effectiveness issues. Most significantly, employees
at all levels lacked understanding of the organization’s
strategic priorities, there was little accountability beyond a
handful of leaders for improving the facility’s performance,
and resistance to feedback and learning was widespread.
Solution
Gain Alignment of Senior Management – To begin with, executives
at Susquehanna needed to gain a common understanding of the cultural
patterns that contributed to organizational effectiveness and
their role influencing those patterns. Once it became clear to
them that they were the most visible factor in changing the culture,
a number of initiatives took place. Among these were personnel
changes to fill key leadership positions, as well as strategic
visioning and planning sessions that helped the team gain alignment
to the quest of becoming the “best nuclear facility in
the U.S." Once the team was aligned, they began to invest
in building the organizational capacity to achieve that goal.
Build Leadership Capacity – Based on a belief that leaders
create cultures and cultures enable performance, the primary
focus was on building leadership capacity to model the attitudes
and behaviors of a constructive culture – one that valued
sustained performance excellence through teamwork, achievement
and openness to change. This was in stark contrast to the prevailing
culture described as defensive, avoidant and full of blame. By
engaging leaders throughout the organization in developmental
workshops that reinforced the desired attitudes, beliefs and
behaviors of a constructive culture, a demonstrated shift in
the results obtained by Susquehanna leadership began to unfold.
Build Employee Capacity – In addition to the contribution
of leaders, employees at all levels of the organization were
provided the opportunity to re-cast their role in helping Susquehanna
achieve “best in class” status. As such, all employees
participated in Building Team Capacity sessions that enabled
them to let go of the past, improve inter-departmental communication
and re-commit to the future success of the plant.
Integrate Performance Improvement Initiatives – Recognizing
that culture change must be directly linked to improving performance
in order for it to be sustainable, various teams were assembled
to identify and improve upon the efficiency of plant operations
using the guidelines provided by the constructive culture norms.
This facilitated a positive change in the results that were accomplished,
as well as, how people worked together to accomplish these results.
Results
As a result, there has been a demonstrated shift in the culture
and performance improvement. Specifically,
•An overall improvement in their INPO Index, a cumulative
score of key performance ratings, from 85.9 percent to 99.9 percent
over a three-year span.
•A significant decrease in human performance errors from
1.2 to .58 incidents per 10,000 employee work hours.
• A reduction in maintenance backlog from 400 items to 21
items.
•Exceeding financial, safety and scheduling goals for a
planned outage – the first time in plant history.
Today, the management at Susquehanna continues its quest. Said
one senior manager, “There is so much that comes and goes
that employees can easily see this as the latest management fad.
We need to be willing to stay with it in terms of our succession
planning, development plans and the changes in infrastructure
and reward systems that support the cultural change. If we revert,
we fail.” |
