Self-Management Pioneers Series: W.L. Gore & Associates
Excerpted from the book BEYOND EMPOWERMENT: THE AGE OF THE SELF-MANAGED ORGANIZATION, by Doug Kirkpatrick, JetLaunch, 2017
There is a reason that W. L. Gore consistently ranks in the top tier of Fortune magazine’s annual list of “100 Best Companies to Work For”: people love to work in an innovative, self-organizing environment. As Alan Deutschman wrote in Fast Company in 2004: “Pound for pound, the most innovative company in America is W. L. Gore & Associates.” [1] Gore’s spirit of innovation extends well beyond Gore products into the existential core of its organizational system. It implicitly embraces the essence of self-management through its emphasis on teamwork, natural leadership, relative freedom, and individual initiative.
Former Gore executive Joyce Bowlsbey met a colleague and I at the W. L. Gore Elk Mills fabric plant in the lush, rolling green hills of the Maryland countryside just west of Newark, Delaware, on a rainy June morning. A manufacturer of high-performance outdoor apparel, Glide dental floss (sold to Procter and Gamble in 2003), Elixir guitar strings, and industrial and insulation materials, Gore became famous in Tom Peter’s best-selling business books for its renowned “lattice” organizational structure.
Joyce had been a Gore associate (all Gore employees are known as associates) for eighteen years. She was the lead internal sales associate for the fabric division, probably the best known of all of the Gore divisions. Her husband had been with Gore for 33-years; he was the 64th associate hired by Bill Gore in the early days of the company. A savvy and articulate representative for the company, Joyce was very open about the famed lattice structure.
Joyce had been a public face for Gore. She was involved in public speaking, active in her community, and was well versed in all aspects of the Gore culture and organizational philosophy. She continued to work at Gore because she loved her job and believed in the Gore ideals and philosophy. She was extraordinarily gracious, generous with her time, and patient with our questions.
The Elk Mills #5 plant, a 250,000 square-foot facility, was only one month old at the time of our visit. A beautiful building and sparkling clean, it had not yet ramped up to full capacity. A handful of associates staffed the entire facility. We visited most parts of the factory including the R&D laboratory, production floor, and distribution area.
The factory would eventually employ about 200 associates per shift on two shifts per day, a technical departure from the original Gore philosophy of employing only 200 associates per factory to maintain familiarity among associates. It was apparent that simple production economics drove the decision to enlarge the size of this newest factory, which would make large quantities of garments for resellers like Columbia Sportswear and Northface. Other significant Gore customers included the Department of Defense, NASA, and various police agencies worldwide.
In Gore’s climate labs, local college students would soon subject themselves to wild variations in temperature and humidity to test extreme-wear clothing. In a two-story “rain-room,” garments — sometimes worn by volunteers — would be exposed to varying pressures of artificial rain to test waterproofing. Quality was assured in a large lab where machines and human researchers stretched, pulled, tore, and repeatedly washed raw and finished fabric.
Gore was justifiably proud of its heritage, highlighted by a large display case containing its most famous garments, including the cold-weather suit worn by explorer Will Steger on his Arctic expeditions, flight suits, ocean sailing suits, football jerseys, and other fascinating examples of “extreme-wear.” Gore also placed a premium on first impressions for visitors. The comfortable and spacious reception area and well-stocked cafeteria were warm and friendly, staffed by gracious and friendly associates who made us feel welcome from the moment of our arrival.
The production area and inventory storage and shipping areas were, in a word, huge. These areas comprised the bulk of the giant facility. Large fabric storage racks, partially filled with large rolls of various fabrics, dotted the facility. Giant automated looms, expertly operated by a single associate, hummed in the background. The basic process involved converting raw fabric into Gore-Tex water-resistant material to make parkas, pants, boots, socks, and other garments. The cavernous empty spaces would soon be filled with raw and finished inventory in the run-up to full production. The production processes appeared to be fairly standardized to limit variability and error. Line balancing seemed to be the primary production challenge. Gore cross-trained associates and taught them to assist with production bottlenecks if necessary to maintain smooth line flow.
Freestanding modular offices occupied another part of the facility. The office spaces were organized by function: Administrative personnel were grouped together, as were sales associates. There were temporary office spaces set aside for visiting associates needing a workspace with a desk, phone, and computer link. Scattered throughout the office area were mini-conference rooms — with tables, easels, and phones — for meetings to accommodate two to seven people. There were even smaller equally equipped meeting rooms for use by one to three people. It was in one of these smaller rooms that we met with Joyce to discuss Gore’s organizational philosophy following our tour. The only traditional offices we observed belonged to human resource associates (for privacy reasons) and for quality assurance researchers near the laboratories. The large main office was clearly designed to promote interactive communication and information sharing.
Joyce described the overall corporate culture as being in transition. Bill Gore, the entrepreneurial dynamo who created W. L. Gore and Associates with his wife and partner Genevieve (“Vieve” to Gore associates) in the basement of their Newark, Delaware home in 1958, had passed away several years earlier. His son, Bob Gore, was the president at the time of our visit. The company was in the process of identifying non-family members within the organization who could provide the energy, vision, and strategy to take the company into the next century. [2]
Joyce described the Gore Company she knew when she first came to work eighteen years earlier when Bill Gore was still the driving entrepreneurial force in the company. Bill would spend countless hours in the factories talking to associates about every aspect of their jobs. His personality was competitive, driven, and hands-on. At that time, the company had a very familial and paternalistic feeling, where everyone worked and socialized together. Since Bill’s death, the company outgrew its small family business atmosphere, becoming slightly more impersonal with less socializing (other than the annual company picnic and Christmas party). Another force detracting from the original open and fun atmosphere, according to Joyce, was the increase in employment-related litigation — problems obviously not unique to W. L. Gore. Joyce felt that more time would be needed in the future to orient new associates around the idea of commitment to the mission and principles.
Gore’s basic organizational structure is flat. Anyone can discuss any issue with anyone else, up to and including the CEO. They describe this as a lattice organization — defined as a horizontal network of peers. Gore likes to emphasize that no one at Gore is anointed a leader. Leaders emerge naturally, defined by their followers.
Each Gore division has its own mission statement, and each individual associate creates their own personal commercial mission statement. The individual mission statements are ideally reviewed and revised annually. More important than mission statements, however, were Bill Gore’s four key principles, which Joyce easily recited from memory:
• Freedom: We encourage each other to grow in knowledge, skill, scope of responsibility and range of activities. We believe that Associates will exceed expectations when given the freedom to do so.
• Fairness: Everyone at Gore sincerely tries to be fair with each other, our suppliers, our customers and anyone else with whom we do business.
• Commitment: We are not assigned tasks; rather, we each make our own commitments and keep them.
• Waterline: Everyone at Gore consults with other knowledgeable Associates before taking actions that might be “below the waterline,” causing serious damage to the enterprise.
To assist every associate at Gore to adhere to these key principles and help them fulfill their mission, each new associate is assigned a sponsor. The role of sponsor is not synonymous with hierarchical management or traditional supervision. Sponsors are generally selected because of their people skills — the ability to convey trust and confidence — and are people to whom others naturally gravitate for support and help. Generally, sponsors are responsible for about five associates at a time. To an associate, a sponsor is part coach, part mentor, part sounding board, part advocate, and part sherpa. Sponsors play a crucial role in bringing new associates on board and keeping them on track. They have the formal role of proactively tracking an associate’s progress and assisting them as needed — but as an advisor, not a boss. The sponsor will usually give a new associate a verbal six-month evaluation and a written evaluation after twelve months. A twelve-month evaluation is given to all associates. Joyce felt that formal sponsorship was a powerful shaping force to promote Gore values and principles.
Every associate at Gore, whether new or incumbent, has a sponsor. When an associate comes to a sponsor with a problem (such as a conflict with a fellow associate) the sponsor is trained in role-playing potential scenarios to help the associate visualize and solve the problem herself. All associates are trained to use “I” messages with fellow associates. For example, not “you always make me mad!” but rather “I feel upset when you do that.” There are three types of sponsors: starting sponsors, contribution sponsors, and compensation sponsors. These roles may be divided among different sponsors or embodied in a single sponsor. Associates do have the right to request a new sponsor based on personality fit.
As in all human organizations, Gore has its share of personnel problems, ego trips, and personality clashes. As the first ones to encounter these issues, sponsors carefully document and appropriately mentor associates. Every attempt is made to resolve a problem to avoid dismissing an associate. Gore strongly encourages and trains its people in effective interpersonal communication. For example, all associates undergo Leadership Effectiveness Training (LET) during orientation to learn problem-solving and conflict-resolution techniques. This training appears to be extraordinarily influential in teaching constructive solutions to problems before they escalate.
Apart from its unique organizational philosophy, Gore is widely known as one of the planet’s most innovative companies, delivering amazing results to customers. (After all, if the world didn’t value Gore products, its organizational structure wouldn’t matter very much.) But it seems clear that Gore owes a large part of its reputation for innovation to its flexible lattice organization.
As evidence of the symbiosis between Gore’s reputation for technical innovation and its self-managed organizational structure, associates in research and development have the freedom to form flexible teams around specific research projects. Researchers at Gore freely band together to study and research a particular innovation to a logical conclusion, then disband and form new teams based on new innovations.
One of the best innovation examples is the invention of Elixir guitar strings, summarized in an article by Gary Haber at DelawareOnline [3]:
Elixir, which debuted in 1997, sprang from the mind of a W. L. Gore employee in the company’s medical products division, a musician who honed the idea during what the company calls “dabble time,” the unscripted hours it gives employees to spend poking into projects that interest them. Joyce beautifully summed up the Gore organizational philosophy with her own list of bullet points:
• No fixed or assigned authority
• Natural leadership defined by natural followership
• Objectives established by consensus
• Person-to-person communication encouraged
• Tasks and functions organized by commitments
W. L. Gore & Associates is an obvious pioneer in espousing and successfully implementing concepts that have made it an icon of workplace freedom.
[1] Alan Deutschman, The Fabric of Creativity, December 1, 2004.
[2} Terri Kelly became President and CEO in 2005.
[3] Gary Haber, W. L. Gore:Weathering 50 Years of Change, The News Journal, 6 January 2008, http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080106/NEWS/801060346/1003
