Case Studies: Leadership Development: Kawasaki Rail Car
Kawasaki Rail Car Organizational Assessment

Project Description and Results:

Background: The Kawasaki Rail Car company is a Japanese American firm in the transportation industry located on the East Coast. They produce light rail cars including trains for the subway system in New York City.  Ten years before we became involved with them, a number of individuals came together to bid on a public sector transportation project. At this point, they did not view themselves as a long-term, cohesive company. They won the bid but still viewed their work as a project only. They set up separate facilities for their engineers, administrative and production staff.  After succeeding in achieving the goals of this first project, they decided to form a more cohesive, longer-term company to bid on similar projects. Nevertheless, they did not really begin to function as one integrated company until recently when they assembled all of the management in one central office connected to the production facility. At this point, they asked for our assistance.

They wanted to run the business as one company and not a collection of different offices and individual people. They had employees representing many ethnic groups, speaking several languages. Thus, the loose organization was composed of many subcultures divided by functions as well as by ethnic differences. The executives’ goal for the initiative in which we were involved was to bring together the parts of the organization and create a cohesive, smoothly functioning long-term viable operation. They drafted a vision for their organization and listed some ways in which they hoped to achieve the vision. For example, they wanted to implement new management information and control systems, become process rather than functionally focused, formalize and strengthen their communications processes and clarify roles for each level of management. They believed that managers didn’t have the right skills to perform up to the appropriate level. They wanted to professionalize management and run the company more like an American company. They wanted to increase employee involvement and commitment.

Scope of Work: KRC retained Miller Consultants to help them meet their goals of creating a more cohesive organization with a strong leadership team and managers who were equipped to step up to more professional roles in the organization. 

Using our Organizational Assessment  tool kits, we looked at their culture, their management practices, their procedures and policies and the skills of their managers throughout the organization. 

Our data indicated that the executive leadership team, which was composed of Japanese and Americans, needed to come together with their own cohesive mission and plan for creating a more professional organization.  Therefore our first focus was to work with the executive team to facilitate the creation of a true leadership team that could set the direction of the organization with one voice, and lead it to success. 

Next we assisted the executive leadership team in defining the roles of the other levels of management in the organization and setting expectations for their performance.  We supplemented the roles and expectations work with a skills and knowledge assessment identifying the gaps between the current and required levels of skill for the various management groups.  In collaboration with a group of internal HR personnel, we developed and delivered some basic management training that cascaded from the executive level down through the supervisory staff. 

Approximately two years after the beginning of our work with them, we carried out a multirater (360) assessment process to measure how the executives were doing in demonstrating the leadership skills that we had been emphasizing over the past two years. The process also provided them with data upon which to base their individual development plans. Over the two years of our work with them, they had begun to develop succession plans. Appropriately, they viewed the individual development plans as critical to implementing the succession plans. Using the succession plans and gap analyses as our guides, we provided them with training and individual developmental coaching to those who needed it to achieve the skills for their next jobs.

Results:  Organizational development by working with the executive leadership team first resulted in a more cohesive and comprehensive organizational intervention.  The leadership team does have a strong sense of its mission within the organization.  Nevertheless, the challenges of balancing leadership and organizational development with the other pressing production priorities continue to be a challenge.  Also, several of the leaders have had some difficulties making their own personal changes required to lead the organizational changes.  We are now involved in a coaching process to help these individuals move towards more effective leadership styles for the organizational strategy to which they are committed.  Our desire is to get the leaders at the top to perform in line with their strategy and then to concentrate on cascading the role alignment throughout the other levels of management.