S.C. port authority initiative aims to change internal culture

The culture change is designed to create a bottom-up decision-making process that empowers employees and ultimately benefits customers, Executive Director Jim Newsome told American Shipper in a recent interview.    Executive Director Jim Newsome has embarked on a two-year process to create a more collaborative and responsive culture within the South Carolina Ports Authority that benefits employees as well as port users.
   The SCPA owns and operates the ports of Charleston, the ninth largest container port in the nation, and Georgetown. 
   “We’re really trying to engage our entire organization, get the best ideas out of our people, and improve our outcomes from engagement of our staff,” Newsome told American Shipper in an interview Tuesday in his office overlooking the harbor entrance. “We’re very fortunate. We’ve got a great team of people here. And what our employee surveys tell us is they want us to lead them better.
   “Cultural change is harder than nuts and bolts of a business because every department has its own culture,” he said. “So we’re talking about aligning the culture across the organization in way everyone can identify with that helps us move faster, make better decisions, be more responsive to our clients, and ultimately make our employees happier.”
   The primary customers at the Port of Charleston are international ocean carriers who pay the port authority fees to park their vessels, move cargo on and off vessels, arrange truck drayage to nearby rail ramps and provide other services.
   “We want to be a great employer where people want to spend their careers and then we don’t have to have a lot of turnover,” the former Hapag-Lloyd shipping executive said.
   Since taking the helm in 2009, Newsome has steered the port authority back to financial prosperity by focusing on smart investment, cost containment and productivity improvements that have led to a big rebound in cargo volumes. Last year, Charleston’s container volume jumped 10 percent to 1.97 million TEUs, marking the port’s second consecutive year of double-digit growth.
   After stabilizing operations, Newsome said he is turning his focus inward to create a better work environment.
   SCPA leadership is currently in the process of translating its mission from the state into a vision statement and then intends to establish core cultural values, such as decisiveness. Mid-level management is being brought into the process now and the value system will be eventually rolled out to the staff, the executive director explained. Workers will learn what the SCPA stands for and how the leadership team plans to realistically deliver on its message.
   Newsome has engaged an outside firm as a facilitator and is using David Marquet’s book, “Turn the Ship Around,” as a template for change. The book is about a Navy nuclear submarine and how to change the traditional organizational model of leader-follower to leader-leader in order to get buy-in and the best ideas from everybody.
   “We’ve been, in a large part of our organization, pretty much command-and-control, do-it-my-way,” Newsome said. The goal is to “let them [employees] make decisions that are within their wheelhouse,” or scope of responsibility.
   Newsome said he was motivated to change the culture after seeing the results of an employee survey. About 430 out of 500 personnel responded to the survey.
   “The message of the survey was: We like it here, we think we can be better, and most pertinently for us, we need you all to lead us better. So I take that to heart,” Newsome said.
   “We have to be better leaders, listen better, respond quicker. And that’s in everything,” he said. “I mean, the business world today moves faster and faster. So you need to have a process for decisions that is both thorough and fast.”