wol customer stories
Building a Culture of Agility and Self-Leadership in a Just-in-Time Industry
How a corporate learning expert empowers employees to take initiative and collaborate across locations, divisions, and hierarchy levels
IT’S A CHALLENGE to balance the operational demands of systems, standards, and routines with the market demand for innovation. Organizational development leader Katja Völcker describes this challenge at Blum, a 9,000-person company that manufactures furniture fittings. “For a manufacturing company, it’s important to have stable pro- cesses, with zero mistakes going outside of the company. At the same time, we need a lot of experimentation, learning, and ad- justing to how the world is changing,” she says. “In the one world, we need to be absolutely sure about what we’re doing, and in the other we need to be very open, very resonant—and it must be okay to make mistakes and learn from them... so long as you are not ‘learning’ in live production.” Working within Blum’s International Consulting group, Katja is in a perfect position to introduce a more flexible mindset into the larger Blum Group. “Blum is a very traditional, family-run business with a long-term entrepreneurial focus. Safeguarding the company for the people who work for and with us is our explicit goal. That’s why Blum invests a lot in people and in coordinating employee de- velopment efforts.”
Supporting growth and agility within manufacturing requires a lot of trust and a lot of communication. “I think perhaps why companies
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