Nuevo Laredo Remanufacturing Facility

Discover how developing leaders helped improve leading indicator performance and lagging indicator safety results.

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Industry

Remanufacturing

Situation

The Caterpillar Nuevo Laredo Remanufacturing Facility in Mexico is one of the largest in Latin America. After growth to over 2,000 employees, leadership sought to further enhance safety culture, specifically in the routine interactions between leaders and employees. They wanted a practical roadmap to balance safety, productivity and quality while empowering leaders to drive culture change.

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Solution

Leadership Development and Coaching Process

  • Safety Leadership Assessment
  • Leading for Safety Workshop
  • Safety Leadership Excellence Workshop
  • Leadership Coaching
Results

Over the course of three years, the facility completed three cycles of the Leadership Development and Coaching process, each year showing improvement. Their composite leadership performance score from the assessment rose from “Needs Improvement” in Year 1 to “Strong Performance” in Year 3. This positive change represents frontline employees seeing a positive, observable overall change in leaders’ everyday action related to balancing safety alongside production and quality.

Additionally, leading indicator performance drove positive changes in lagging indicators. Leading indicator results included an increase in safety-related talking points, speak-up conversations and identification of out-of-process work. Because of the growth in time talking to employees about serious injuries and fatality risks, along with focused efforts to mitigate those risks through controls, high-risk processes and recordable injuries (both lagging indicators) have decreased significantly.

  • Increased leadership performance scores based on frontline employees seeing positive, observable changes in their leaders’ actions in balancing safety with production and quality
  • Significant reduction in high-risk work processes and recordable injuries

 

The Leadership Development and Coaching process provided our leaders with 360°-type survey data followed up with in-depth coaching focused on improving our safety culture. Our leaders consistently tell us that they appreciate getting the feedback and the coaching to help them improve their leadership skills.

Facility Manager

The Leadership Development and Coaching process has helped me become a more open leader with my team when it comes to dialogue, through mutual trust. One of the challenges we face as section managers is the strong focus on results, and processes like this help highlight the importance of cultural change and sustained improvement over time–both of which are fundamental to safety.

Section Manager