Crucial Conversations Training helps Johnsonville Sausage gain a competitive edge

My name is Tim Ahrens and I am the learning and development leader here at Johnsonville Sausage. Johnsonville Sausage is the number one national brand of brats, italian sausage, smoked cooked sausage, and fresh breakfast links. We were founded in 1945 and we have about 1,400 members.

Johnsonville Sausage has been growing rapidly and with that growth adding more members which has stretched our culture a little bit. We’re a team-based culture and we’re very proud of that--it is a big part of who we are. At the same time, we did a leadership skills assessment that showed our leaders needed 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 one of the things we had to do was training. So, I was charged with looking at training to address conflict management or assertiveness or safety issues. 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, Don McAdams, our director of 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 front-line supervisors. Our plan beyond front-line supervisors was just to offer Crucial Conversations as demand required. We’ve been doing it non-stop for the last five years. To date, we trained over 370 members including our entire C-level team and our owner. We’ve also taken intact teams like the MIS team, the sales team, the marketing team through it as teams so we could address some team issues.

Now Crucial Conversations in an integral part of our leadership development program. It’s a pre-requisite for all of our leadership classes. Any new member who becomes a leader or any leader who is 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 the leadership skills assessment. At that time, we saw improvement in all the areas we were focusing on. Specifically, we saw a 25 percent improvement in our members’ or employees’ ability to hold conversations to correct unsafe work practices. Also 16 percent improvement in mediating differences of opinions. We saw 13 percent improvement in defending one’s own opinions and also 10 percent improvement in being able to work with angry or hostile team members. Our corporate safety numbers also improved dramatically.