Recently, I read a very engaging novel: Empire Rising. Thomas Kelly is the author. Empire Rising is a story about New York City in 1930 – just after the stock market crash of 1929. It is a love story, a story about political corruption, an immigrant experience story, and a story about organized crime. But most of all, it is a story about building the Empire State Building.
Michael Briody, an Irish immigrant, is the central character. He has the good fortune to be working on a rivet gang on the Empire State Building construction site. One of the passages was particularly poignant for me, as I spent the summer of 1970 working on a rivet gang. Riveting is a lost art today. Welding is cheaper and faster. However, as Kelly describes so well, riveting was a team job – all rivet gangs have four members and all four members have a specific and important job to do.
“The steel had been rigged before lunch with temporary bolts; now it was time to rivet it in place…Skinny used the bellows to fire his hot coals, which were soon red, molten. Briody, the gunman, took hold of the rivet gun and set himself on the opposite side of the column from Armstrong and Delpezzo. Armstrong nodded to Skinny, who grabbed a burning rivet out of the forge with a pair of yard-long tongs and tossed it end over end in a glowing arc to Armstrong, who caught it in an old paint can, plucked it out with his own short pair of tongs, tapped it on the edge of the beam, and stuck it in the hole. Delpezzo used a short metal tube that grabbed the rivet, bucking it up from the other side. Briody swung the rivet gun onto the head, wielding it like a weapon at hip level, and with a yank of the trigger and a pneumatic blast that shot a rain of sparks, fused it in place.
“The other crews were at it now, creating an infernal racket, a howl that drowned out all talk, all thought except — the work. Armstrong’s gang moved along at a nifty clip, rivet after rivet, fast but deft, practiced in their endeavor. On a good day, they might pound in five hundred of the inch-and-an-eighth-long rivets, more than one a minute.”
Thomas Kelly is an excellent writer. When I read the two paragraphs above, I was taken back in time and space to 1970 and the American Bridge plant in Ambridge, PA. I’ve had many jobs over the years, but I don’t think I enjoyed any of them as much as I enjoyed my summer on a rivet gang there.
I was a “sticker” – the guy who caught the hot rivet, and stuck it into the hole. It was just like Kelly described. The rivets are white hot when the “heater” pulls them out of the furnace. They begin to cool immediately. By the time I caught a rivet, it had a layer of “scale” on it. I caught the rivet in a specially designed bucket that looked like a funnel with a flat bottom and had a handle. After I pulled it out of the bucket with my short tongs, I whacked it on the steel to rid it of the scale, and stuck it in the hole where it would be bucked and driven.
Sometimes a piece of scale would bounce up and down into the inside my glove. 35 years later, I still have a few scars from the molten scale that found its way into my glove. I didn’t stop when this happened, because by the time I had one rivet in the hole, another was on its way from the heater.
A rivet gang that is working well is wonderful to watch. Four guys working almost as one – each with his own responsibilities. If one guy doesn’t perform, the entire team doesn’t perform. When we were clicking – and we were most days – I felt as if I were part of a well oiled machine.
Thinking back on those days reminds me of the importance of teamwork in organizations. I realize now that our rivet gang worked well as a team because:
- We had a goal. We knew our daily standard, and our bonus target.
- We had clearly defined roles – everyone had a specific responsibility. The team didn’t perform well if one of the parts – the heater, sticker, bucker and driver – didn’t do his job and do it well. Every role was equally important -- if not equally compensated.
- We were all good at our jobs. Admittedly, learning how to be a good sticker is not as difficult as learning how to be a good bucker or driver. Still, if I wasn’t proficient at catching the hot rivets and getting them into the hole, the team wasn’t going to perform well. I had a personal goal of catching every rivet that was thrown to me. On the other hand, the heater worked hard at making it easy for me to catch the rivets.
- We trusted one another. Occasionally, a rivet would get away from the heater – usually because he waited a split second too long to open the tongs as he swung them. Once I caught a red hot rivet no more than an inch from my face. If I had missed, and it bounced off the side of my catching bucket, I would have had a scar for life on my face from the burn. Fortunately, I caught it. We didn’t stop when this happened, we kept on working. I trusted that he was trying to get the hot rivets to me in an easy place to catch them. He trusted that I was good enough at my job to catch the ones he threw that were a little off course. We all assumed that the other three guys were doing their best.
- We had an effective leader. The driver is the leader of a rivet gang. He sets the pace. He lets the other members know when it’s time for a break. He brings them back to work. We followed him not because of his position, but because of the knowledge and skill it took to achieve that position.
- We had groundrules – they were unspoken but very powerful. When we worked, we worked. Horesplay was not tolerated. Someone could get hurt and worse yet, we might not make our bonus. We all abided by these unspoken but powerful groundrules.
- We had a sense of spirit. We were good at what we did, and were proud of what we accomplished. At the end of the day, individually and collectively, we knew we had done good work. This sense of spirit and pride made the hot, loud, dirty and dangerous work fun and enjoyable.
The common sense point here is that the characteristics that made our rivet gang successful – clear goals, defined roles and responsibilities, skill and proficiency in our individual jobs, trust of one another's skills and motivations, effective leadership, clear groundrules and a sense of spirit – are the same characteristics that will make any team successful.
If you work hard to put them into play on the teams of which you are a member, you’ll find that not only will the team succeed, but that you’ll be much more happy and satisfied in your work.
Check out my website, www.BudBilanich.com for more common sense advice about teams and teamwork.
Please feel free to comment on these posts. I’m always interested in hearing what you have to say.
I’ll see you around the web,
Bud
Comments