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Theodore Rizer is happy. When asked why, he struggles to find the words.

He knows the reason but has a hard time articulating it. In his previous job, he liked the work: machining. But still he came home feeling run-down.

“People kept to themselves,” he says. “They just got through.”

At his current job at in Plainfield, Connecticut, things are different. “Here, people are more open. You don’t have to be afraid of making mistakes.” After a typical day spent working at this shop—work that currently consists of programming, setting up and overseeing two machining centers—he comes home feeling energized.

He searches for the words to characterize the difference, the change in his emotional environment, because almost any of us would have to search for the words to define and understand this kind of change. For the most part, all of us are trained that emotions largely do not matter at work, that professionals ought to be unaffected by how they feel, and that the emotional environment of a job is an unimportant phenomenon that, if it is bad, can be muscled through.

Starting about five years ago, Westminster, a mold maker and a contract manufacturer, completely departed from this view. The shop’s founder and president, Ray Coombs, came to understand that the emotional environment is very real. In a new world in which inexperienced employees had to come up to speed quickly in skills needed on the shop floor, the emotional environment was the number-one factor that would enable or inhibit his shop’s long-term success. The realization launched him on a transition of his business that has been ongoing now for five years.

The transition has been painful. Throughput per employee dropped while employees were diverted into training in emotional intelligence. Staffing also dropped; a 40-percent loss of experienced staff resulted in part from established employees deciding they could not go along with the changes. In addition, the shop went five years without capital equipment investment. Instead, money was spent on human resources personnel to help guide and support the changes, as well as an independent consultant expert in emotional intelligence to assist with changing not only the business, but also its owner and leader.

The changes continue. No one at Westminster would argue the transition is complete. But today, there are fruits to be seen, including:

• The shop no longer faces a skilled labor shortage. It is fully staffed at 35 employees. New employees become skilled employees quickly—scheduling, CNC programming and quality all are now capably performed by people with fewer than five years of manufacturing experience. The current scheduler, Regina Byrne, is a 21-year-old who had zero machining experience when she was hired at 18.
• The shop also no longer faces a potential skilled labor shortage. A pool of 13 potential employees—prospects expressing a willingness to join the company if a position opens—have already been vetted according to the personal attributes and character traits the shop has identified as key to success.
• The shop has resumed capital investment. A new holemaking EDM machine arrived as this article was being prepared for publication.
• The shop’s throughput per person has increased. It took time to get to this—the gain has come only in the past two years. But within that time, throughput per person has increased to a level 60 percent greater than what it was when the shop was staffed by established toolmaking veterans.

But did I mention the transition was painful? Over the course of multiple visits to Westminster Tool, I learned how the shop’s commitment to emotional intelligence is playing out, and how this commitment directly connects to a system the shop has established, called “Westminster Academy,” for structuring the rapid continuous learning of both new employees who arrive with no prior manufacturing experience and current employees as they expand their skills. The shop’s methods provide a model for other manufacturing businesses struggling with difficulty finding skilled help. At the same time, its journey provides a caution about adopting these methods. Culture is costly. My own takeaways from my visits include:

1. Culture change is difficult. It is one of the most difficult things a business owner can undertake.
2. Companies routinely claim to view people as their greatest asset, but I believe the claim is overstated in many cases. Westminster Tool illustrates what it looks like to invest in developing people, and this company’s commitment is not typical of what I see.
3. Company culture is a real phenomenon with a real effect, and it can be a negative holding people back from realizing their full value and effectiveness.
4. Company culture is a choice. Again, it is a difficult choice (see point 1) and a costly choice (point 2). If culture is to change, a leader has to make and stick with the choice to change it.

In Westminster Tool’s case, that leader was Mr. Coombs, who founded this shop in his basement in 1997. When the time came that he needed to find a new way forward for this shop, he was either genius enough or self-aware enough to recognize that the change would begin with him.

“I had to change the way that I think, the way I look at myself, the way I look at my business as a whole,” he says. “I had to change the strategy and get my organization to buy into that strategy.”

Prone to speaking bluntly, he also expresses this same point in a more concise statement of the insight. “I had to stop being such an a--hole,” he says.

Because, ultimately, he knew he would be calling on his team members to commit to similar change.

Know Your Amygdala

To give a sense of the way Westminster Tool operates today: On the first day I visited, employees were talking about the “amygdala hijack.” This term describes the moment when the defensive, primitive, emotional part of our mind takes over from the thinking, rational part of our mind in response to unwelcome news or a statement that sounds to us like an accusation. My own amygdala is a serial hijacker. The term was in vogue at Westminster because employees had just received training in conflict management, so they were learning to integrate this idea into their understanding of their own responses and their interactions with others. Mastering this idea is valuable in many walks of life, moldmaking not the least of them.

Still, why is this idea being taught in a mold shop? The answer is clear to everyone who works here. But at the start, Mr. Coombs had to put this connection together.

His path to seeing the value of the shop’s emotional understanding began five years ago, when he was unable to find a new toolmaker. “We spent about $30,000 on recruitment over a three-month period, looking for an experienced person anywhere east of the Mississippi,” he says. “We got four applicants. Three were retired and only looking for part-time work. The other did not want to move to Connecticut.” At that point, he was merely trying to grow his business—so what would happen when he needed to sustain it? The average age of employees then was no less than 50. Fifteen years in the future, he realized, he would have practically no workforce left unless he could find a different way to staff it.

The different way would be to hire inexperienced employees. However, he would not be able to afford for them to remain inexperienced for long. He would need his shop to be a place of rapid and continuous learning. He would need his shop’s culture to foster this. And that was a problem.

It was a problem because the culture at Westminster Tool was very nearly the opposite of a culture of learning. It was a culture of experts, of skilled craftsman who had already learned. People were acclaimed and rewarded for their expertise. They won special accommodations because their expertise was so important. Mr. Coombs never consciously chose for this to be the culture, but it is the state of the culture that naturally developed—a culture of exceptions, a culture of status, a culture of being ashamed of failure or mistakes because of what the public exposure of failure or mistakes might say about one’s expertise. Having accepted that he would not find skilled help, Mr. Coombs recognized he would have to push hard in a different direction. Westminster needed a culture of helping, cooperation and clear communication. Most importantly, it needed a culture of admitting and even celebrating mistakes so the lessons of those mistakes could be openly and thoroughly learned.

Today, there are no job titles in the traditional sense at Westminster. An employee’s job description is simply the work he or she is called to do today, and employees know that as the mix of work changes, their assigned tasks or departments might change as well. Also, a small but significant detail: There is an expectation of punctuality. Employees arrive by 7:45 a.m. to begin preparing for the 8:00 a.m. daily standing meeting. Arrival time by itself is a minor point, but the freedom to arrive at work tardy without consequence is an example of a status marker that becomes corrosive to easy sharing and easy communication among employees, Mr. Coombs says, so this marker had to go. No one—including him and including his wife Kim and daughter Hillary, both of whom work for the business—gets to have this privilege.

This recognition of how status inhibits communication, which in turn inhibits learning, illustrates the subtlety of the ideas that have become core to Westminster’s way forward. Perceived status differences are just one example of barriers between people that might be raised up by the culture—barriers that exist in the realm of emotion. The typical manufacturing environment (and the typical business environment) is dismissive or oblivious to emotional responses to cultural phenomena. The expectation is that we should not be affected by what occurs around us. But the reality is that emotional responses are part of the experience we all have and part of the burden we all carry, and efficient working relationships between people begin with confronting this reality head on. At Westminster Tool, skills such as how to read a micrometer and how to set a cutting tool offset are critical—and the shop has a system for teaching these skills (read on)—but how to understand your own responses and how to engage with your coworkers are the skills that come first.

Westminster now hires for character attributes over metalworking skills. In particular, it looks for people who are curious, dynamic, motivated and high in integrity. Once it hires someone, the company doesn’t start with shopfloor skills as the foundation of its training; It starts with emotional intelligence.

Applied EI

Emotional intelligence (EI) at its essence is self-awareness. Training in emotional intelligence consists of imparting terminology and a toolkit for recognizing our own emotional responses and not being mastered by them, while also recognizing the many ways people differ in perspective, aptitude and communication, so as to navigate those differences. To build on their training, employees periodically gather into classroom presentations by a visiting instructor on further concepts in EI. (The recent learning about the amygdala and its perils was an instance of this.)

One useful tool is the “DISC” assessment for classifying personality traits. Everyone in the shop knows his or her own personality type on the DISC matrix, and employees freely discuss this with one another. The letters stand for dominance, influence, steadiness and conscientiousness, and “C”s are overrepresented because the work of a machine shop tends to attract this personality type. The intent is not to label anyone, Mr. Coombs says. The intent is to make plain the fact that different people value different things in their habits, their work, their processing of information and their means of expressing themselves. If everyone in the shop understands what a “D” values relative to what an “S” values, then Ds and Ss can be more readily understood and, even better, obtain what they need.

Employees are also trained in different learning styles. Some people are visual learners, some auditory, and some are tactile, needing the hands-on experience of performing the task in order to learn the most quickly. At Westminster, employees train other employees, so everyone needs to understand that a method that works well for one smart and talented individual might not work for another who is, in her own way, every bit as smart and talented.

All of this aims directly at the company’s core business: moldmaking. To share knowledge fluidly and impart skills quickly, status barriers and other emotional impediments to communication need to be cleared away and unseen communication obstacles related to differences in outlook or style need to be brought to light. With all this accomplished—with the foundation laid for communication to be open, effective and clear—it then becomes a matter of using the open and effective channel to teach needed skills.

How many skills? At last count, about 1,970.

Westminster Academy

The system described above—the training and practice of emotional intelligence—lays the groundwork for another system. “Westminster Academy” is the shop’s mechanism for defining and imparting skills necessary for the work of a machinist, CNC programmer, quality technician, toolmaker or whatever manufacturing role is needed. The “academy” has no formal coursework because people differ so widely in learning styles. Instead, it provides a scoring mechanism for characterizing each employee’s progress with specifically defined skills.

The skills are granular. How to take a faulty EDM part to welding for repair is one example of a skill, or “lesson,” within this system. Mr. Coombs began Westminster Academy by trying to list everything he knows how to do as a toolmaker. The result was an incomplete list, but it was a start. From there, he has insisted upon a simple rule: If any employee has to seek instruction in a task not listed in the academy, then that task must be added as a new skill. There are now 572 “courses” in Westminster Academy consisting of 1,970 individual lessons.

The scoring levels within each lesson are 0-, 33-, 66- and 99-percent proficiency, with definitions for what each proficiency level requires. Every employee has a digital profile on the shop’s intranet that lists scores in all 1,970 lessons. Employees update these scores frequently, often daily, as they gain new proficiency in needed skills. There is no required order for proceeding through the lessons, and for the most part, employees learn what they need when they need it as they grow within their roles or are shifted into different roles.

Again, there is no required or dictated method for how employees will learn these lessons. There is only the assurance that the people who already know the information will be available to impart this knowledge. A culture of continuous learning requires two things: people who are ready to learn and people who are ready to teach. Per-capita throughput dropped when the culture changed partly because the new system expected experienced people to routinely pause their work to teach inexperienced newcomers. This was clumsy at first. It was costly. To hear Mr. Coombs describe it, it was clumsy and costly for a long time—long enough for him to doubt the wisdom of what he had set out to do. But the shop increasingly hired people suited to this type of environment, and it increasingly got better at integrating on-the-job training into its habits and expectations. The culture of training took hold, and the productivity came back.

Today, to a visitor familiar with machine shops, this habit of training is strikingly apparent. It is routine to see instances of two of more employees together, one of them matter-of-factly imparting a lesson to the other, who pays attention with interest. Just after I spoke with Mr. Rizer at his machining center, for example, I saw him with a coworker, explaining something related to a nearby lathe. No judgement is involved in these encounters—no sense of being imposed upon and no sense of shame over what the student “should have known.” The need for learning on everyone’s part is assumed.

Two employees who frequently work together in this way are Danielle O’Connor and Victoria Rooke, both currently assigned to the shop’s EDM area. They are a surprising duo because Ms. O’Connor, in her 20s, could be assumed to be inexperienced and out of her depth with a sinker EDM. In fact, she is a confident veteran with this equipment, and the author of approximately 50 training documents she has used to instruct coworkers in various lessons related this machining. (Her favorite of these documents is the most basic: clear, comprehensive documentation for a course in “What is EDM?”) Meanwhile, Ms. Rooke, not yet 20, is an attentive and receptive student, absorbing what Ms. O’Connor can impart and quickly ascending in confidence at the EDM machine. Visitors touring Westminster are often introduced to these two because they offer such an encouraging picture of the way the culture is supposed to work. Ms. O’Connor was hired just as the culture change was beginning and embraced the change enthusiastically, and both Westminster and Ms. Rooke have been beneficiaries.

Yet I was also drawn to another employee working at a CMM near them, Amy Skrzypczak. She had been with Westminster only two years, arriving with no manufacturing experience, yet she has demonstrated enough proficiency to be entrusted with certifying the dimensional quality of EDM electrodes. In demeanor, she possesses many of the traits a shop might hope for in a quality technician: She is quiet, careful, precise in the way she moves and attentive to detail. While talking to me, she kept bringing her focus back to her screen, back to the part, concerned not to be distracted from her work. In a culture less concerned with training, someone this reserved might not find the opportunity or the assertiveness to push her way forward into greater responsibility. At Westminster, this capable person found a place naturally and has been able to develop and flourish.

These are successes, but Mr. Coombs admits the shop is still finding its way and sometimes stumbles backwards. The Westminster Academy model can be a challenge even to him, its inventor. An instance of this came when Ms. Byrne, trying to schedule a job, asked him for clarification on how to judge when a feature needs hard milling over EDM.

He answered, “You need years of experience to understand something like that. Years of experience.”

“OK,” she said. “But within that experience, can you just tell me some the kinds of things you’re looking at, the kinds of things you’re thinking about?”

Impatiently and likely under the influence of the amygdala, he rattled off several factors of the part geometry that would play into this decision. He meant to make clear to her how complex the decision was. But she was listening to every detail.

Recounting the story, he says, “And I’ll be damned if she didn’t take that job, take what I said, and mostly go make the right decisions about how to machine it.”

It was both a blow and a lift to his pride at the same time. It reminded him all over again of the way forward for his shop and the reason why that way forward has to begin with him. It reminded him of the reason, in short, why he had to remain steadfast in not being an a--hole.

The reason is this: Manufacturing is not subjective. Specific technologies produce an item exactly matching the intentions defined by the designer. As a result, the skills are not subjective, either. There are correct decisions to be made in manufacturing and effective ways to proceed. All of this can be defined, and because it can be defined, all of this can be taught. It is absolutely true that years of experience are valuable in the work of manufacturing because there is so much to learn that it could easily fill years. But at the same, the “years of experience” defense can be cover—a tidy explanation for the thing that we often struggle to find words to explain, which is why it can be so hard sometimes for us to relate to one another or benefit from what another has learned. Westminster Tool is addressing what its founder has come to see as the core problem: not the skills gap per se, but the gaps that threaten to isolate us from one another.