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Case Study #1 Developing Managers for Fast Track Productivity Case Study #2 Creating Team Culture in a Manufacturing Plant Case Study #3 Tackling Globalization Issues with a Fortune 100 Case Study #4 Establishing Integration & Trust with a Merger Team
Developing Managers For Fast Track Productivity
This department of 125 people (ranging from data entry personnel to statisticians) maintained important contact with the governmental regulatory agencies, and had every research activity of the entire company passing through their hands at some point in time. Senior management believed that increasing the productivity of this department would have a major positive impact on speed to market and the company's future success. They made the decision to focus on the development of the 25 managers within the department. Most of these managers had been promoted based on their technical excellence; few had training as managers and supervisors.
The goal was to create a 'fast track' development plan for the 25 managers. The content of the development was to be aligned with the management philosophy of the company. The decision was made to bring in external expertise, and the contract was awarded to CPD. However, priority was placed on utilizing in-house resources where available, partly for the cost savings, and partly to assure continuity between the work in this particular department and the larger effort to build an efficient corporate culture.
CPD suggested a three-phase plan. Phase I — Needs Assessment: The needs assessment had three components. We held meetings with senior management to determine key issues and priorities for the data management department and its managers. These interviews were also used to define the evidence procedures for evaluating whether managers were appropriately developed and the department was functioning efficiently internally and with key stakeholders. Also, this time was spent identifying 'key stakeholders' who would be a part of a broader needs assessment process. The second component was a comprehensive needs assessment with these key stakeholders. We developed a questionnaire and conducted personal interviews to gather further information on key issues, priorities, potential solutions and measurement of results. The third component was the design and implementation of a 360-degree multi-rater for the 25 managers. CPD designed a 52-item leadership and management multi-rater based on the input from the previous interviews and questionnaire. This multi-rater covered the following 7 areas:
These 52 items and 7 business results formed the metrics used to monitor and determine the effectiveness of the project. Phase II —This phase of the management development process focused on getting procedures and mechanisms in place to facilitate the management of a tough workload successfully. The skills needed for creating and managing those procedures were identified as priorities, and were placed early in the process. Skills were developed in the following areas:
Phase III —The third phase involved ongoing checks on the development process and coaching of the managers. This feedback was used both to guide the individual managers as well as to adjust the three-year plan as it evolved to ensure that the above named components were completed. A second tier of skills was identified to be developed if time was available. These skills included:
This was a three-year project with an estimated expenditure of over one million dollars. Metrics were established to monitor progress on six-month intervals. By the end of the second year it was determined that all of the goals and objectives had been met. The project was completed in a shorter time period than anticipated and had cost the company a quarter of a million dollars less than originally budgeted. Furthermore, during a major initiative implemented by the company a year later, this department ranked among the highest in the company in implementation of the speed to market change effort. Five years later this department continues to meet it's targets in a timely fashion and its managers receive high marks on their in-house management and leadership 360 degree valuations.
Creating Team Culture in a Manufacturing Plant
The HR department of a manufacturing plant was struggling with a persistent set of complaints. The facility employed 1200 people and annually produced over a billion dollars of product. The plant was well known for being "like a family" and for fostering open, friendly working relationships among the staff... However, there were inconsistencies in the management style of different groups within the plant that led to mismatched expectations and miscommunications between these different groups. There was a sense that the culture of friendliness did not support effective teamwork, because staff were more inclined to be "nice" to each other than make hard decisions or hold each other accountable. Various members of the HR team had tried to influence the plant manager to resolve these issues, but had not yet been successful.
The HR director asked for our assistance in influencing the plant manager and his leadership team to address these issues and achieve two specific outcomes:
It was expected that these two outcomes —a specific vision, and teamwork behavior modeled by the leadership team —would have a significant effect on the culture of the plant as a whole, setting the foundations for mutual accountability and a clearer sense of shared success.
Buy-In
Organizational
Survey This collected survey convinced the plant manager that it was time to act on the suggestions of the HR Director and take the team offsite to work on these leadership issues. Team
Workability
Back at the plant, there was uniform feedback that something significant had changed. Staff noticed that the leadership team actually began to appear as a team, that decisions that were formerly made by one of the directors without input of the others were now made as a team, taking into account each other's different interests. There was a noticeable commitment to ongoing improvement, as well. The team made a commitment to regular follow-up sessions to hold themselves accountable for their new ways of working, and shared publicly that they were doing so. Obviously, one week off-site couldn't answer all the challenges, but there was a universal sense that a key foundation was laid in place for clarifying the direction and culture of the facility, and a long term action plan was created for spreading the new ways of working and communicating throughout the plant.
Tackling Globalization Issues With A Fortune 100
The IT division of a Fortune 100 corporation had created a very aggressive schedule for replacing its regional structure with a centralized organization —globalizing both services and infrastructure. The challenge for the management team was to deliver an improved and more sophisticated service to the business while not relaxing on any of the organization's current objectives... All this was to occur during a business cycle that required a reduction of costs not only in the long term, but in the short term. Their solution was to adopt a matrix management structure in which teams would cross functional and geographical lines. This new structure required radically different individual and team behaviors of the 1200 person organization, and yet the reorganization had to be accomplished in zero time and fit within shrinking budgets. This placed huge demand on both HR —to design and implement a flawless process for guiding the entire organization through the change —and on the IT managers to achieve and model personal change immediately and effectively. CPD had worked closely with this HRIT team before, and they turned to us for support in this mammoth undertaking.
The outcomes for the organization were very clear. Within a year they needed to:
The HR organization was going to be more than busy carrying out the reorganization, and they asked us to be responsible for carrying out the paradigm shift. Specifically, we targeted the top three levels of management within the organization —70 people in all. The objective was to have every member of this group aligned with the new direction and exhibiting the new attitudes and behaviors required to operate effectively in the new environment.
The size, complexity and speed of this project required us to shed the framework of an external consultancy. We joined HR as full partners in a matrixed project team that shared decision-making and all relevant information. This required us to live and practice the same type of paradigm shift we were asking of the IT organization itself. A project plan was co-written, and parallel project managers were assigned within the organization and within CPD. Ten CPD consultants served on the project with well-defined roles. The project was composed of several phases and concurrent streams, but the principle mechanism for achieving the desired results was the assignment of CPD coaches to the organization's senior managers Each division leader worked with their CPD coach to develop a planned program of intentional change for their division leadership teams within the framework of the larger team. Each coach supported both the division leader and his or her whole team, and supported the various steps of bringing the different divisions together within the new matrix. We designed and delivered trainings to address the particular areas the group needed to succeed in the new matrix, as well as helped guide the individual members to trainings already available through their HR department.
At the end of the year, the project was deemed a complete success by the organization's vice president. Their group achieved their strategic deliverables, met their goal of reducing overall costs while increasing service volumes, and had the new organization up and running effectively within the scope of that first year. . Our partnership with the HR team was so successful, that they asked us to stay on as virtual members of their team for the following year.
Establishing Integration & Trust with a Merger Team
Two international pharmaceutical companies had announced a merger. In addition to the cost savings that the merger promised to generate, senior management was intent on delivering a strong, team-oriented culture, and they wanted this culture to take root immediately, knowing that the typical expectation would be a couple years of “storming” before teams from the separate companies fully integrated. To support this objective, they created a team of managers, The People Team, from across the two heritage companies to strategize and implement an approach for quickly defining and growing this new, integrated culture. They also set aside a significant budget for the ongoing implementation of the new company culture.
It was clear that for the company to succeed in rapidly integrating employees from the two heritage companies into “one team,” the People Team itself needed to integrate rapidly and powerfully, both to do its work well, as well as to model for other teams how it could be done. Their hope was to schedule a single kick-off meeting to set this tone for the team, and build enough trust across the lines of the merger to be able to work effectively as a unified team guiding the unification of the rest of the company. Research shows that companies who merger are successful faster to the extent their leaders are integrated with the new culture.
First we interviewed all of the members of the People Team to get an honest and accurate read on the team’s true current state. These interviews confirmed that there was indeed an significant amount of distrust among team members – not only of the people from the “other” heritage company, but in some cases of colleagues from within the same company. It was clear that the perceptions and issues connected to people’s trust, or lack thereof, needed to be explored, not glossed over. These pre-interviews, however, also demonstrated the high levels of hope and possibility that the team members carried, and the interviews gave the CPD consultants the chance to solidify the commitment of the individual team members to do whatever was in their power to work towards the fulfillment of these hopes and possibilities. After interviewing the team members and sharing the aggregate themes from the group with the People Team’s co-leaders, we scheduled an intensive offsite meeting to facilitate a customized CPD TeamWorkAbility™ with the objectives of establishing trust and creating a beginning strategy for how the team would work together to accomplish the same throughout the new company. Over the four days of TeamWorkAbility™, the CPD facilitators and participants worked together to create a climate of open and honest communication. Participants talked about themselves, their past experiences, their hopes and fears, and most importantly, their commitments and desired outcomes going forward. This sharing helped create the basic foundation of safety for discussing the issues at hand – the team could discuss the different issues and tensions knowing that each and every member was deeply committed to the team’s success, and ready to learn or shift or change as individuals to create that common team direction. In addition to the open conversations among the team all together, every participant took part in coaching sessions in the evening. Additionally, we used a process called Walk and Talks to pair up each team member with every other team member for brief, focused conversations to clear up misperceptions about each other, and set the stage for every single relationship among the team members to be productive. Specific tools created by CPD were provided to provide processes to use for having different types of conversations during their Walk and Talks. Once a foundation of trust and partnership was established we worked with the team through processes allowing them to determine short- and mid-term strategic goals, set action plans and creating operating agreements.
The team fulfilled and exceeded their goal of integrating rapidly and establishing trust. By the end of the four days, there was no question that they had resolved their initial concerns, were fully aligned and prepared to take on other challenges as they came up, and they had a basic plan for how they would proceed to guide the team integration across the entire new company, and used some of the processes and key words from their experience as anchors for the company integration in general (“positive intent,” for example). In fact, the week was so powerful that the people who were part of it, facilitators and participants, remembered it and told stories about it for years afterward. CPD was invited as an external vendor to partner with The People Team to assist in designing and implementing similar programs globally, from the senior team on through the organization. TeamWorkAbility was adopted for use with new teams experiencing a significant level of mistrust or conflict. CPD designed a two-day off-site, New Team Alignment™, for teams that needed to integrate and create plans quickly but did not necessarily have a great deal of mistrust or conflict to work through. Over the next few years, CPD was often thanked and credited for making a significant contribution to the smooth and timely creation of an integrated culture at the new, merged company. Ongoing Learning and Research CPD has conducted its own research on accelerating the merger-and-acquisition process through leadership integration. If you are interested in ‘talking points’ from this research, please contact us. Also, an in depth study of best practices is available, and we highly recommend, Merger and Acquisitions Integration Excellence, published in 2000 and can be found @ (www.best-in-class.com). In fact, the company discussed above is included in this study. As a result of legal commitments we are not at liberty to advertise said company and are free to discuss the particulars with you.
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