They Put a Motor in Motorola
There is a remarkable story in a recent issue of Harvard Business Review1 about the experience of the Motorola Company in actually setting up a university for training its employees. The article was written by Motorola's vice president for education and training--the president of Motorola U--and it holds a lesson for orthodontists.
Ten years ago, Motorola "hired people to perform tasks and didn't ask them to do a lot of thinking". Most training was on-the-job, by observation and by trial and error. Additional training taught new techniques as they came along. On-the-job training worked better when the technology was simpler and static, when innovation came along every five or 10 years.
As innovation and demands for quality grew, Motorola discovered that line workers had to truly understand their work to achieve continuously superior levels of quality in the work and in the product. That required education, not just instruction. Management recognized the need to change; the next imperative was to translate this to a desire on the part of employees to be change agents themselves.
A program of quality control and problem solving was instituted along with a program of instruction, but before long, it became obvious that the plan was not working. Management had assumed that once such courses were offered, employees would want to take them. But Motorola found that some employees lacked basic scholastic skills without which they could not understand the material. Some employees simply didn't want to learn. They knew what they knew, and that was enough.
Another problem was that while top management saw the need for change, the next level often did not. It is a problem of complacency that one sees in orthodontic practice today. It is the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it concept of management. What could possibly motivate a successful orthodontist to spend a great deal of time and money on staff training when everything seems to be going along smoothly? The answer is the challenge to stay on top with a continuing search for improvement in the quality of the product, the process, and the practice relationships.
The author writes: "We wanted to use the training to send a message to the company about achieving quality through the integration of efforts across functions, a message not just about quality of product, but about quality of people, quality of service, quality of the total organization." These efforts achieved recognition beyond the bounds of the company when Motorola became one of the first winners of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (see the article, "Quality in Orthodontic Practice", in this issue).
At Motorola it became clear to top management that although change may start at the top, it is a driving force that is energized by being "owned" by all employees. The orthodontist must believe there is something to be learned, but everyone in the practice must also want to grow personally and professionally.
Motorola had to contend with a basic flaw in the prior education of many of its employees: illiteracy, which prevented them from understanding even simple written material. Instead of firing all the scholastic incompetents, Motorola decided to operate a continuing education program to bring these people up to grade. Chances are that orthodontists will not have to contend with education at that level, and at any rate it might be inappropriate for so small an organization.
However, not all Motorola training is in-house. The company made arrangements with local schools and community colleges for courses appropriate to its needs. At one time it thought that it needed only to provide enough training to bring everyone up to speed, but it found that education is a continuing process. It was then a short step to establishing an in-house university for the continuing education of employees--work force and managers.
The Motorola University curriculum has three basic elements--a functional curriculum of relational skills, technical skills, and business skills in engineering, manufacturing, sales, and marketing; a cultural curriculum giving a historical perspective on the company and its work; and a remedial curriculum in basic scholastic skills. Can you see all that translating into an orthodontic curriculum involving technical expertise and patient management, acculturation to the mission of the practice and of orthodontics, and a remedial curriculum, if not in scholastic basics, then in orthodontic basics?
Could orthodontists get along without going to all that trouble? Could they continue to earn a respectable living and to enjoy what they do? Possibly so, but here is an opportunity to do better than "good", and to enrich the lives of patients, staff, and orthodontist. It will elevate standards of quality on a continuing basis, and electrify the practice.