General Mills: Serving It Up (No. 5 of the Training Top 125)
March 05, 2007
From strategy to execution, General Mills aims for real customer impact
By Holly Dolezalek
For the last couple of years, Minneapolis-based food manufacturer General Mills has hovered near the same top-10 spot in the Top 100. Ranked No. 10 in 2005 and No. 11 in 2006, it won a best practice award for its technology training in 2006. So how did the company snag the No. 5 spot this year?
At the highest level, it's because years of aligning training with the goals the company lives and dies by have paid off. Is there a new sales goal? Then there won't just be sales training; it will be the right sales training for the exact goal that's been set. Various committees, task forces, and executives, under the umbrella of an annual strategic review process, pull it all together.
But at every level, there's a process or a group that makes sure the training does what it's supposed to. For example, the General Mills Training Council for training professionals meets twice a month so that the participants can talk about training technology, methods, concepts, and theories that will help them reach those goals. They also get updates from the CLO about the company's goals so that they can adjust or reaffirm what they're doing.
Still, without the right execution, a strategy is just chitchat. So how does it all trickle down to the average Joe at General Mills? Examples abound of programs and initiatives that translate training into real outcomes, and the most direct one is Team Leader Boot Camp.
Team leaders from the manufacturing organization come to the camp for a crash course in the supply chain organization. The idea is to make sure those leaders have the technical and personal leadership skills they need, and the practice is to have senior leaders teach the participants those skills.
The training lasts three days and covers conflict management, change leadership, working with difficult people, ethics, finance, and other important information that helps those first-line supervisors to lead better. It used to last five days, but Kathy Carlson, manager of technical training for General Mills, says the training was condensed to three days. Trainees do pre- and post-work outside of class, and in-class time is only used for face-to-face, interactive activities.
The new structure facilitates learning, Carlson says, but even more importantly, it lets participants get to know each other. "A big goal of this training is to establish a network among the team leaders at different plants," she says. "That way, when they get into a bind or a problem they can't solve, they have someone to call." Carlson says that's why more time is spent now on get-to-know you activities during the course, and why her department established an online mechanism for them to post messages to each other after the course was over.
"The notion is that front-line leaders really touch the employees who make our products," says Kevin Wilde, CLO of General Mills. "If you have skilled leaders at the front line, it pays off in quality and better performance down the line." It also tends to pay off in reduced turnover, better morale, and a host of other positive outcomes.
Retirement and turnover pose difficulties for all companies who want to retain their best people and keep the knowledge of their employees in-house. At General Mills, mentoring helps to keep the talent pipeline healthy. But no company makes the Training "Top 5" by being ordinary, and so it is with General Mills's mentoring programs.
The Corporate Mentoring Program matches newly hired employees of color with more senior mentors. Pairs set goals and receive training to make sure the relationship is beneficial, and the formal mentoring goes on for a year. At a higher level, the Senior Co-Mentoring Program matches corporate officers with high-potential women and employees of color at director levels and above. The relationships yield coaching and leadership mentoring for the more junior partners, but they also give the senior partners perspective on what it's like to be a woman or a person of color at General Mills.
"The program helps people advance in two ways," explains Kjirsten Meckish, director of corporate diversity at General Mills. "It gives the junior partner the development they need to move to higher levels of leadership, and an experience of a day in the life of an executive. But it also gives the senior partners an awareness of the barriers these employees face and the opportunities they need to succeed."
Since General Mills plants are all in different cities and states, mentoring circles meet face-to-face initially in regional groups, but they keep the circles going via videoconferencing and conference calls. Each circle has a leader who facilitates discussions on topics determined by the circle, and who collects resources, reference material, or reading prior to the discussion.
Especially in facilities dominated by manufacturing plants and other non-desk environments, some learning methods are harder to embrace than others. But when the supply chain training department found a particular technology to be unexpectedly successful, they made sure the plants used it too—and although they were polite about it, they weren't going to take no for an answer.
The Live Virtual (LV) Classroom system is a videoconferencing network that delivers more than 3,000 classes and saves the company millions in travel costs and productivity. By sending employees to LV classes instead of putting them on planes to Minneapolis, plants avoid plane fares and lost time on the manufacturing floor. But at first, not everyone at the plants saw the value of the systems.
So Carlson says that in 2003, the supply chain training leaders decided to show them the value in the form of a loan-to-own program. Plants could borrow a videoconferencing system, including electronic whiteboards, for six months. After that period, they had to either pay for the equipment or return it. After trying out the learning—in topics ranging from welding to strategic communication—31 of 39 plants have chosen to keep the systems.
Two plants piloted the system, and Carlson says that was key to its later success. By seeing how those plants used it, they learned what made it sustainable, and established an infrastructure that allowed plants to view a calendar of courses online, register for those classes, and let Carlson's team know what they needed in future courses. "We didn't just go to the plants and say, 'here's a system,'" Carlson says. "If it was going to be successful, it was going to have to be in tune with what our customers needed."
So in tune, in fact, that the company is saving money in more ways than just productivity and travel. According to Carlson, "education we used to have to send employees to a university for is now conducted in-house."
There's another GM that always said quality was Job 1, but this one has the college to prove it. Quality College is ten years old this year. All of the company's quality engineers attend the college once, which consists of two week-long sessions in which subject matter experts teach modules in topics like sanitation practices, regulatory compliance, and sensory skills. It's more education in everything engineers need to know to make better products for General Mills and oversee conditions in its plants. For example, in one module, engineers learn how to taste food and rate it; in another, they learn more techniques and strategies for inspecting a facility to make sure that it meets Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirements. The course always takes place in a manufacturing site so that participants learn more by seeing a facility that isn't their own.
"The company sees a huge financial gain from the course," Carlson says. "Every year we hear from people who tell us how they put the course information to work." For example, one engineer used the skills he learned to help figure out how to prevent missing components in meals the company manufactures, and how to detect meals with missing components. The resulting effort reduced customer complaints in main meal or side dish products by 50 percent.
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