Shirley Henderson, Packaging Operations Manager, The Seattle Times

By: Jim Rosenberg "I used to spend 60% of my time on packaging issues ? at least it felt like that." No more, adds Seattle Times Operations Vice President Frank Paiva. Not since he hired Shirley Henderson out of circulation, where, she admits, she didn't appreciate what it takes to make a newspaper.

Since then, "it's been a great learning experience," she says, praising the Times for opportunities to advance. A stint in single-copy sales proved fast-paced, and connected sales and newsroom interests ? "what's on the front page." But packaging, she says, is "definitely the most challenging department I've ever worked in. The only norm is that there is no norm," with constant product and staff changes and advertising initiatives bumping up against equipment limitations.

Henderson's first task was turn-around in an area typified by turnover industrywide. "Shirley inherited a depleted management group trying to manage a very difficult department," says Operations Director Katherine Hunter. With a new team of managers and help from human resources, Henderson moved to training and accountability, where formal expectations were previously absent.

Feeling lucky to have her current personnel, Henderson accepts the award "on behalf of the entire group" because successful packaging relies not on a star, but on "a combination of experts" with various skills.

"The managers, across departments, work so well together," without animosity or turf battles, she says. After nine years, she adds, "I still avoid making decisions in certain areas" without consulting the appropriate managers. Noting that some excel at planning, some have mechanical aptitudes, and others possess unusually good interpersonal skills, Henderson says that together they're all responsible for making it work.

For operators, she looks to "knee-deep" training on the job more than formal sessions, reserving meetings to get operators to understand "how vital they are to our success." And two of eight assistant managers were once inserter operators, offering necessary firsthand machine expertise.

"She's tough as nails" in performance expectations, yet is well liked, Paiva remarks. With an operation no longer typical of the industry, Henderson doesn't stand for the industry's typical mailroom disparagement, he says, and she won't let its workers view it or themselves as anything less than an essential part of operations.

"Outstanding" productivity for online double-out daily inserting for single-copy regularly exceeds 35,000 copies per hour, according to Hunter. Interpreters and translation are sometimes provided for the eight languages spoken by packaging employees, who include deaf individuals.

The operations manager says she merely "supports" safety committee members and workers' waste-reduction initiatives. But under her watch, Hunter adds, "the incident rate has steadily declined" and so has preprint waste.

Henderson gives full credit to her staffers for much of the latter. To cope with thin, often small, difficult-to-insert single sheets, operators devised a hose-and-duct-tape solution to separate the sheets with a stream of air. Machinists then volunteered to make permanent, easily activated attachments for regular inserting heads. It works just as well as single-sheet hoppers, says Henderson, but without the hoppers' product-size and capacity limitations and cost.

It was Henderson's idea to adjust schedules for advance runs to enable inserting into them instead of into kraft wrappers, which saved "many thousands of dollars," says Hunter. It was a change that came out of the many periodic meetings held to re-examine schedules and practices to accommodate more complexity (ZIP code zoning) and more work (such as sticky-note application) with the same amount of staff. The paper's managers and operators, Henderson says, have been supportive of the need for those meetings, even when the resulting changes are "painful."

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:

Through a friend, started with a motor route before becoming an employee after her district advisor told her The Seattle Times was hiring

Brought on as an assistant district advisor in 1979 and promoted to district advisor in 1980

Named assistant single-copy sales manager in 1988 and promoted to single-copy sales manager in 1994

Ready for something different, moved to production two years later as assistant pressroom manager

Appointed to current position of packaging operations manager in 1997