Aluminum Industry: Essay On Leadership Changes At Alcoa (Essay Sample)

LEADERSHIP CHANGES AT ALCOA
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Aluminum industry celebrates Alcoa for the father and founder of the Hall process of extracting Aluminium from its original ore. This company is ranked third, after Rio Tinto and Rusal for being the world’s big Aluminium producers. The company magnificently was grown and expanded its products in the US and other parts of the world.
The company has hugely invested in the magnesium production sector, with over 47 locations containing running productions plants. The management exhibited by its authority is positive towards their employees as a result of the crisis that occurred in Addy, Washington. The changes that occurred paved the way for improvements in its productivity, safety, and profits. For five consecutive years, the company experienced lots of injuries and unprofitable operations making it lay off over 100 employees to curb the situation (Aluminum Association, 1999).
Over the recent years, several reliable resources have clearly elaborated on how the prices of magnesium have drastically dropped plus the quality fade off. This has affected the market targets and the difficulty in recovering of the 72% of the total raw material used. The plant management of quality is very poor, there is no accountability, hourly employees have lost the morale for work, and there is weak exhibition leadership within the working environment. Therefore, this problem made resulted to the tapping of Don Simon as the manager and inclusion of outside consultant experts; Robert, Patricia Crosby, and Tom Combs to help the company regain its lost glory (Weiner, 2016).
Alcoa Inc. has been perceived positively as a leading edge organization that incorporated a team of culture based founders with adaptable system related to Gamble and Procter soap plants of companies. The company started by using very advanced technical skills of manufacturing of magnesium the following structure followed by the organization.
First, the systems of operation were purely autonomous as there was no total supervision done.
Secondly, to enhance smooth operations carried out by the hourly employees, the company has coordinators and training personnel as well as safety persons who all work together with the internal facilitator.
Lastly, the company encourages working in shifts. Therefore, shift coordinators are responsible for team building and managing of those teams. In the case of problems, they don’t intervene for the teams so that trouble is avoided.
Therefore, the company did not involve the empowerment of employees as part of crisis since there was no clarity and those in top management were to blame. This resulted in the following changes in decision making: clarity in goal setting, decision making in a consultative manner, and cutting of costs (Aluminum Association, 2000). 
The situation in Alcoa, Inc. forced Simon to ensure that he cuts off his stuff for them met the new set goals for the company, victimizing both temporary and contract workers. The act of terminating the employment of hourly workers was stopped after the introduction Single Minute Exchange of Dies, a Japanese manufacturing approach was revealed by one of the hourly employees. This manufacturing approach reduced much time despite requiring more workers. It saved lay off for the 100 workers after its implementation that involved a lot of decision making between salaried and non-salaried employees (O'Kane & Cunningham, 2014).
Therefore, McCombs, who was an outside consultant had to bring a matrix previously developed to reflect the kind of decisions to be made by both supervisors and team members, living the authority with supervisors. This approach gave the company to choose giving individual persons to manage projects or tasks for easy accountability. Those were among the changes that the company implemented after the crisis period. After this changes had been implemented, the company experienced more changes in 18 months. It also witnessed an increase of ma...