Integrating people and technical skills for Ford Motor Company

In 1989, Ford of Europe faced the challenge of quickly updating its engineers' skills to keep pace with competitors. Training resources were tight, yet quality methodologies such as Statistical Process Control, Experimental Design and Quality Function Deployment had to be adopted throughout the organisation in order to reduce warranty costs and improve the quality of Ford vehicles. A programme was needed for 6000 engineers in Ford operations across Britain, Germany, Belgium, France and Portugal.

Action:
SyCon - The Sporting Bodymind Group worked closely with technical experts and Ford engineers to develop an innovative approach to technical education. For the first time, the elements of teamwork or 'people skills', such as descriptive feedback, listening, questioning and innovative thinking were seamlessly integrated with the relevant technical topics.

Believing that people learn best through experience and personal interaction, we supported this integration by changing the methods of delivery. By altering the layout of training rooms, we enabled participants to work in pairs, threes or small teams. We then showed how to shift attention from the technical task to their own behaviour and back again. This allowed their learning to occur simultaneously on several levels, acquiring the 'hard' technical skills whilst learning how to apply them more effectively in their interaction with others. The complete programme covered eight technical topics over 35 days of training. This was delivered by teams of Ford engineers who were trained as internal consultants by SyCon - The Sporting Bodymind Group.

Outcomes:
EQUIP was well-received throughout Europe. Engineers reported their surprise at finding the training fun, challenging and directly applicable to their role. It was seen to make a substantial contribution to breaking down the 'us and them' attitudes that had previously existed between design and manufacturing engineers, whilst reducing the time required to get new products on to the market. Problem-solving teams were now able to address root causes and engineers had new skills to identify customer needs and translate them into vehicle features, all of which contributed to Ford's success through the mid 1990's.

The programme was extensively evaluated by the University of Nottingham, who found there was a successful transfer of both the people and technical skills into the work-place and a positive change in attitudes to quality. EQUIP has since been adapted as part of Ford's new global quality programme (FTEP) for 20,000 engineers around the world. For some eight months over the 1995/96 period, SyCon - The Sporting Bodymind Group consultants were heavily involved in the development of this new initiative, at Ford training headquarters in the United States.

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