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Leaders at All Levels: AI Enables Innovation at Cascade Engineering
In this video interview, Cascade Engineering CEO Christina Keller shares how AI tools free workers to think — and why hiring for resilience pays off.
What happens when you deploy AI tools to enhance workers’ capabilities instead of replacing people? At Cascade Engineering, a $400 million plastics manufacturer, “physical AI” — the use of intelligent machinery alongside human problem solvers — is giving people more time to innovate. That workforce management tactic dovetails with CEO Christina Keller’s distributed leadership approach, which has “innovation coming from everywhere in the organization.” The result has been big benefits to workers on the factory floor and to the company’s growth and work culture. In this episode of Leaders at All Levels, Keller reveals how it works.
The Cascade Playbook: Borrow These Ideas
- Innovation is everyone’s job. Every year, an innovation team comprising self-motivated employees from throughout the company conducts a PEST (political, economic, social, and technological) analysis to identify global trends and research topics. One recent result of that process: a new modular flood barrier that can replace 144 sandbags per unit. Another employee-initiated idea: the Pink Cart program, which has raised nearly $1 million for breast cancer research through the sale of pink curbside bins.
- AI tools can help employees do their jobs better. One team member suggested training collaborative robots to capture comprehensive product-quality data more quickly than workers on the production line could. The result has been zero quality defects in the three years since the team began using the AI-driven tools.
- Hire for resilience over experience. Cascade sees an advantage in hiring and training people transitioning out of welfare programs and the prison system. “People who have been through incredibly challenging circumstances have a higher level of resilience than some people who have not had any challenges in their growth,” Keller says.
- Everyone wins when the company wins. Cascade awards quarterly bonuses of up to 15% — and gives the same percentage to production-floor workers and executives alike. Bonuses are based on company performance goals tied to the company’s “triple bottom line”: people, planet, and profit.
How It Actually Works
Listening is one of the most important skills for any leader who wants to practice distributed leadership, Keller said. She meets with at least 10 employees every month to get their input on what the company is doing well, what it should stop doing, and what it should start doing. When people seem reluctant to speak up, ask again, Keller advises. Still nothing? Ask a third time. If you’re persistent, “people are going to start giving you the answers,” she says.
Three things you can do this week to get started applying these practices:
- Listen to your team about the problems they see in everyday work.
- Identify one barrier to their success that you can remove.
- Run a PEST analysis with employees from across the organization, not just leaders.
Watch the whole episode as hosts Kate W. Isaacs and Michele Zanini dig into how Keller’s leadership approach works at scale, uncovering insights that other leaders can apply immediately.
