Alan Mulally Module 2: Working Together Management System

It sounds so simple — “A great culture attracts and retains great people.” And yet, it eludes many organizations. 

But by applying the Working Together Management System developed by former Boeing and Ford CEO Alan Mulally, you can create a company culture of transparency, inclusion and positivity that can cultivate growth in the long term. 

In this module, Mulally explains how the system works.  

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Building the system

Per Mulally, the management system is based on five core concepts: 

• Principles and Practices 
• Governance
• Leadership Team 
• Creating Value Roadmap
• Business Plan Review  

Principles and Practices

As Mulally says in the first module, the Working Together Principles and Practices deal with the culture behind the framework. “This is [how] we’re going to treat each other. This is how we’re going to act. We’re going to share the reds. They’re going to be gems. We’re going to work together.”   

Governance

Governance focuses on the meetings Mulally created to keep all the stakeholders involved and included in the plan, “whether it’s the suppliers or whether they are the investors.” 

In addition to the business plan review, governance includes the “special attention meetings” designed to tackle the big areas: strategy, products and services, productivity, and people.

Leadership Team 

Key to this system is the leadership team, Mulally says. Tying back to Principles and Practices, it’s imperative the team “is leading with humility, love and service,” he says. 

“We need everybody’s hearts in addition to their minds. And the way to do that is to respect them and love ’em up, include them, tell them what’s going on, and, of course, the discipline and the civility and the authenticity that I talked about … everybody knowing what the status is so we can all move forward together and make progress.”  

Also built into the leadership team is the idea of “continuous improvement and lifelong learning,” Mulally says, meaning that every member has a leadership development plan for themselves. What’s important is that “they developed [it] with the help of everybody else on the team, and everybody else knows it, so we’re all helping each other,” he says. 

The development plan should include benchmarks for personal development, teamwork and contribution to the business. “So you make it a positive thing…you build that right into the performance reviews and the conversations,” he says. 

Creating Value Roadmap

The Creating Value Roadmap outlines your strategy moving forward, Mulally says. “Once you’ve reached your productivity goals for creating goods and services, you can assess what your revenue and margins will look like and build out your organization’s goals and strategic plan.

For long-term businesses, “I’d always go at least five years out on drawing the profit line going up at 5-10% a year,” Mulally says.  

What’s great about this model is that you can quickly compare productivity to your assessment at the end of the fiscal year and make adjustments, Mulally says. 

“It takes us about five nanoseconds to update the five-year plan because we’ve been working on improving the plan all along,” he says. 

Business Plan Review

The business plan review is a weekly meeting where the executive team reviews their current status against the strategy and plan. 

Typically, Mulally says, he would start the meeting with a summary of the vision, the strategy, the plan and its status. Then every team member presents — engineering, manufacturing, procurement, legal, human relations, etc.

Each team member color-codes every element of their operations by:

• Green: It’s on plan.
• Yellow: We have an issue, but we have a solution.
• Red: We have a new issue, and we’re working now on the solution.

“You’re not working on all the issues here,” Mulally says. “You want to make sure that everybody knows what the status is and areas that need special attention. But … at the end of that two-hour meeting, everybody knows everything.”

By following this disciplined structure every week, you can keep meetings focused, streamlined and results-oriented with little disruption to your overall strategic plan, Mulally says. 

“It’s so neat because everybody’s working on turning the reds to yellows to greens,” he says.

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