Recruit, Inspire & Retain

Act in an Un-Organization Way to Retain Employees

The new Escape gas-electric Hybrid was the most complex project in Ford’s history. To pull it off, the company had to act in some very un-Ford-like ways.

In the Spring of 2003, Phil Martens saw trouble down the road.

As head of product development for Ford, he was supervising the creation of what could be one of the most important vehicles in company history. While the car wasn't due to come out until the Fall of 2004, the team needed to be in launch mode right then to stay on schedule. It wasn't. It was still pulling marathon hours just trying to get the thing running properly.

The hybrid team was packed with PhDs, but for all of their technical prowess, the brainiacs had one weakness: little launch experience. Martens needed someone to crack the whip without destroying morale, someone to persuade the scientists to stop perfecting and start finishing the vehicle. That someone was Mary Ann Wright -- part spark plug, part disciplinarian, and all Ford.

A self-described "car nut," Wright, had launched Sables, Tauruses, and Lincolns. Her discipline is legendary. Twelve-plus-hour days. Five hours of sleep. Four a.m. workouts.

Concerned about alienating her new team, Wright asked Martens to play the heavy. "We are going to deliver on time," he told the team. "You have to throw out all the processes and tools that you'd normally use on a normal gas engine and reinvent the way you do it. Anything you need you'll get." The group's reaction? "You could have heard a pin drop," Martens recalls.

How They Did It? — Staffing & Management Tools
To develop its unconventional vehicle, Ford created an unconventional team. Typically, researchers and product engineers didn't work closely together. At Ford, in fact, they worked in different buildings.

The Escape Hybrid team office feels ordinary, but for Ford it is revolutionary. Engineers and scientists work in adjacent cubicles. "Before, it might have been a half mile apart, but even one building away is a barrier compared with what we have now," says a team member. "It makes a huge difference." Group lunches in the nearby cafeteria evolve into meetings. Hallway chats lead to impromptu problem solving. Once, a couple of engineers at the soda machine discovered a discrepancy in a power-train specification and corrected the issue before the code was written. With thousands of tasks on the to-do list, preventing a problem is as sweet as solving one.

The hybrid group has become the envy of other Ford engineers. "I have engineers who say, 'I wish I could be on that team,' " says Craig Rigby, a technical support supervisor. "Then I tell them the hours." As a way of motivating his weary team, development manager, Patil, would remind them how fortunate they were. "This was a product that if you did it right, it was going to do a great deal for customers and the company and the country and the environment," he says. "You rarely get a chance to go after something like this in your career. It's what I call the nobility of the cause."

After telling the team they were going to deliver on time, Martens gave the team a rare gift: no outside interruptions. From May through December, it wouldn't have to do management reviews and other presentations. Martens would check in periodically and test-drive the latest prototype so he could keep his bosses informed.

Once the team was shielded from top management, productivity soared. "People who'd been saying, 'I don't know how we can get there,' said, ‘We can get there.’" During this "dark period," Martens says, "I allowed them to be entrepreneurial, and they doubled their productivity."

Early this year, as the August 2004 deadline for production approached, Martens continued streamlining the bureaucracy. If the team requested a technical expert or piece of equipment, it got it. No formal requests or delays waiting for approval. "People knew they couldn't say no," says Wright. When the language barrier was impeding work with the Japanese battery supplier, a Ford battery expert fluent in Japanese was dispatched to Japan within 24 hours. Decisions that normally would take days were made on the spot.

Launch mode meant acting as an even more integrated team. During the design phase, small groups had focused on each system to master its separate technology. Now the challenge was orchestrating the interaction between systems. "I told them, 'If one person is struggling, we're all struggling,' " says Wright. She could be tough, but Martens believed she was what the team needed, just as Patil and his more collegial style had been effective in development. She was the hybrid team's second motor; if Patil's job was to inspire invention, hers was to wrap it up.

Letting go didn't come naturally to scientists. Take Sankaran, for example. One of his goals was eliminating extraneous engine noise. Like a conductor with extraordinary hearing, he could detect an occasional, almost imperceptible high-pitched tone even though the transmission met the noise requirements. Technically -- officially -- it was good to go. But, Sankaran says, "as an engineer I wanted to say, 'What are the physics behind this sound? I can do better.' " Ultimately, though, he was persuaded to let it go by taking consolation in another of Wright's reminders: "This isn't the only one we'll do." There will be more hybrids down the road.

If the Hybrid turns out to be everything it's cracked up to be, if it avoids recalls and begins to restore the luster of Ford's once golden reputation, then the members of the hybrid team will have earned a new title: not simply researchers and engineers, but Escape artists.

Selections from Fast Company 10/04 Ford’s Escape Route