Faster time management

NASCAR team turns to Olathe company for help on working together toward a quicker car.

By JIM PEDLEY
The Kansas City Star
Sun, Oct. 01, 2006

Racing is a search for time.

Small amounts of time. Those tenths of seconds that separate the winning car from the 10th-place car.

As parity creeps into the Nextel Cup series, as competition tightens to the breaking point, the search for time has taken some race teams to some interesting places.

One of those places is Olathe, where a company called Management By Strengths is located. And that is where the team of driver Jimmie Johnson thinks it has found some time.

Asked whether he thought working with Management By Strengths was producing results on the race track, crew chief Chad Knaus said, “Yeah, I think so.”

Management By Strengths coaches companies on how to improve communication among their employees. It does so “through an improved understanding of how to work more effectively together,” the program’s Web site says.

The company has worked with such companies as Hallmark, Delta Air Lines, Kansas City Power & Light, Honeywell and Hendrick Automotive Group, which is the automobile-selling arm of Johnson’s team owner, Rick Hendrick.

Mike Postlewait, the president of the company, explained how it was applied in the Hendrick Motorsports situation.

“First, it helps each member of the team to learn to understand themselves better,” Postlewait said. “Most importantly, it helps them understand other people on the team so they don’t take suggestions and comments the wrong way.”

Postlewait said that when people work under pressure, their words and intentions can be misconstrued as rude and abusive.

I do everything I can to try to find an advantage.”

Chad Knaus

“It teaches people not to take things personally,” he said. “That translates to working better under pressure.”

Knaus opted to bring the program to his team this season.

“The biggest reason was because I had actually done it back in the mid ’90s at HMS when I was working for the 24 car” of Jeff Gordon, he said. “I thought it was a good team-building experience, and I felt as though it helped us kind of identify with ourselves and with each other just a little bit better.”

Knaus said he also figured the program would be fun for his guys.

It wasn’t at first.

“You know how the typical deal is,” Knaus said. “Nobody likes being told or likes having to sit down, especially in a classroom type environment and actually have to do some studying, until they see that it starts to relate. Once it gets to a point where they can actually identify with what’s being done, then it works out pretty well.”

Knaus is known as one of the most creative crew chiefs in the business. He says he thought bringing in Management By Strengths was just another example of exploring ways to go faster.

“I do everything I can to try to find an advantage,” he said. “I don’t know if this is really an advantage or not, but I think it helps with the team a little bit. I think the guys see where other guys on the team stand. An advantage is an advantage, whether it’s a race car you find a tenth of a second or a driver who happens to be just a little bit better or a little bit stronger or a little bit more endurance or whatever it might be. So, yeah, I’m always looking.”

Marshall Carlson, Hendrick Motorsports’ general manager, endorsed applying Management By Strengths techniques to one of his teams.

“On a championship level, there are 10,000 little buttons that they got to push, and this is one of them,” Carlson said. “They’ve been pushing a lot of them very well for a long time. Now they are finding these other tools, these other mechanisms they can apply to take it to the next level.”

Johnson spent 22 weeks leading the standings this season. He had tough luck in the first race of the Chase for the Nextel Cup Championship at New Hampshire but came back from potential disaster the next week at Dover.

Friday, Johnson topped the speed chart in practice at Kansas Speedway. He then qualified third.

Management By Strengths could be earning its money this weekend in its home state