Crucial Conversations Case Study: Johnsonville Sausage

My name is Tamarens and I'm the learning and development leader here at Johnsonville Sausage. Johnsonville Sausage is the number one national brand of BRZ, Italian sausage, smokecooked sausage, and fresh breakfast links. We're founded in 1945. We have about 1,400 members. John Hill Sausage has been growing rapidly and with that growth adding more members and that stretches our culture a little bit. We're a team-based culture and we're very proud of that and that's a big part of who we are. At the same time, we did a leadership skills assessment that showed our leaders were needing some help in areas like conflict management, dealing with angry team members, addressing safety issues on their own. A lot of them were deferring those conversations to other people. We knew part of the things we had to do were training. So I was charged with looking at training to address conflict management or assertiveness or safety issues. And as I was looking for that, I came across crucial conversations and realized that we didn't have five or six problems. We just had really one problem and that was we weren't stepping up to those crucial conversations. I introduced crucial conversations to the leadership team of our operations group with a two-day training session. That group included the directors of operations, supply chain, R& D as well as our plant coordinators. From there, Domc organizational development and learning and myself got certified to teach crucial conversations internally. We then taught the crucial conversations class to the entire leadership of the operations area including frontline supervisors. Our plan beyond operations was just to offer crucial conversations as demand required and we've been doing it non-stop for the last 5 years. To date, we've trained over 370 members including our entire sea level team and our owner. We've also taken intact teams like the MIS team, the sales team, the marketing team through it as team so we could address some team issues. Now, crucial conversations is an integral part of our leadership development program. It's prerequisite for all of our leadership classes. any new member who becomes a leader or any member who's new to a leader who's new to Johnsonville is required to take crucial conversations because leadership has determined that being able to hold crucial conversations is vital to our success as an organization. One year after we rolled out crucial conversations training, we repeated that leadership skills assessment and that time we saw improvement in all the areas that we're focusing on. Specifically, we saw about a 25% improvement in our members or employees abilities to hold conversations to correct unsafe work practices. Also 16% improvement in mediating differences opinion. We saw a 13% improvement in defending one's own opinions and also a 10% improvement in being able to work with angry or hostile team members. Our corporate safety numbers also have improved dramatically.