The Best Practices Institute has defined a six-phase system to leadership and organization change, which may be seen in most of the case studies in this book:
1. Business diagnosis
2. Assessment
3. Program design
4. Implementation
5. On-the-job support
6. Evaluation
Phase One: Business Diagnosis The first phase is usually a diagnostic step in which the business drivers and rationale for creating the initiative are identified. Critical to this stage is enabling consensus and a sense of urgency regarding the need for the initiative. A future vision that is supported by management is a key factor of success for these programs. All of the systems have some model as a focal point for their work. The best of these models capture the imagination and aspirations of employees and the entire organization. Designing the system also leads to strategic questions, such as those taken from the GE Capital example:
• What are biggest challenges facing the business—what keeps you awake
at night? • If you had one message to future leaders of this business what would it be?
• What will leaders need to do to address the business challenges?
• What is it that you want to be remembered for as a leader?
• What was your greatest defining moment that taught you the most
about leadership?
• What excites you most about your current role?
HP conducted a survey on “Reinventing HP.” More than seven thousand managers and individual contributors responded. Several themes emerged that underscored the need to accelerate decision making and collaboration. Respondents throughout the organization recognized the need to accelerate decision making and increase accountability for action, thereby reinforcing senior management’s call for greater agility.
A well-thought-out diagnostic phase is usually connected to an evaluation of the desired business impacts in Phase Six.
Phase Two: Assessment
Assessments range from GE Capital’s assessment system (in which participants complete a 360-feedback survey that includes a question to describe a particular person at peak performance) to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to the Leadership Impact Survey (a survey that correlates leader behavior with organization culture and value) to First Consulting Group’s system (in which individual participant assessment is conducted with five vehicles: participant self-assessment, 360-degree and multi-rater feedback, external benchmarks, managerial style profile, and behavioral needs profile).
Assessment has become a norm for business. The question is how we use the assessment to drive change in our businesses and ourselves. Agilent used it to develop leadership behavioral profiles based on the company’s strategic priorities, core values, and expectations of those in senior leadership roles.
Storage Tek performed an internal scan to determine what components of transformation were lacking. Praxair conducted the assessment process to prepare the organization for future changes by engaging more than five hundred employees: 175 leaders in the top three levels of management and over 325 employees across all fifteen regional businesses. Organizations such as General Electric, Intel, Motorola, McDonald’s, and others use behavioral analysis tools such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or 360-degree assessments. Individual coaching often accompanies this assessment to facilitate behavioral change in participants. This coaching has been extremely successful for firms such as GE Capital, Intel, Agilent, McDonald’s, and others.
Phase Three: Program Design
The following outstanding programs have several unique elements that are worthy of note.
• Coaching. Intel’s coaching and mentoring system features internal coaches and a support network of program participants and graduates. Emmis Communications used coaching to help managers overcome resistance to cultural change.
• Selection of participants. Agilent’s coaching program has a results guarantee so employees are required to undergo a qualification process, including an interview before being allowed to participate. Intel uses an application process to screen out apathetic or disinterested candidates. McDonald’s selects only high-potential candidates chosen by their division presidents.
• Action learning. General Electric, Mattel and McDonald’s use action learning as an integral part of their leadership development systems. In particular, General Electric’s action learning program focuses on solving real business problems, whereas McDonald’s centers around operational innovations. These programs address such questions as What is a “doable” project that still expands thinking? How do we set senior management’s expectations for the business value that the learning will produce?
How do action teams stay together as learning groups over time?
• Leveraging multiple tools. Every organization from Mattel to GE Capital took great care to use a variety of methods to train, develop, and innovate. At Hewlett-Packard (HP), the final design was a fast-paced program that interspersed presentations with small group work, practice, and discussions in order to provide sufficient depth and practice without overwhelming the participants or requiring excessive time out of the office. At Mattel, a small group was recruited to participate in an immersion program that included the use of floor-to-ceiling chalkboards and a twelve-by-forty-foot pushpin wall that acted as living journals, and selfdiscovery speakers to help each participant discover a renewed sense of self and expressiveness.
• Use of current practices. Corning uses past strengths and successes to leverage future success. Through focusing on history and storytelling, Corning is able to increase entrepreneurial behavior. StorageTek was careful to build its organizational changes upon programs and practices that were already in place in order to lend a sense of stability and consistency to its initiatives.
• Connection to core organizational purpose. St. Luke’s Hospital and Health System embraces some basic concepts that foster a culture of service excellence and form the basis of its models for leadership development such as its management philosophy, vision for patient satisfaction, PCRAFT core values, service excellence standards of performance, and performance improvement plan. These concepts include
1. Employee satisfaction yields patient satisfaction yields a successful “business” (Build your people . . . they build your business) cart_14399_flast.qxd 10/20/04 12:36
2. Employee satisfaction begins and ends with effective leaders who provide vision, clear expectations regarding care and service, development and education, effective communication, role modeling, constructive feedback, and recognition
3. Effective leaders can and need to be developed
4. Leadership development and education is based on educating to
change behavior
At Windber Medical Center, there was a clear program built on the following transformational changes. The organization determined that it would focus on patient-centered care as the number-one priority of the organization; provide a loving, nurturing environment to the patients and their families; address all patient and patient family issues quickly and efficiently; and become recognized locally, regionally, and nationally for this new type of commitment to care that did not compromise the patients’ dignity.
Phase Four: Implementation Almost all of the initiatives have a formalized training and development program or workshops to propel the change or development process into action. The following are components of several noteworthy training and development workshops:
• Lockheed Martin trained leaders to teach new behavioral competencies to
their employees in order to overcome their own resistance through public commitment to the behavioral competencies. Lockheed Martin also focused on a group of opinion leaders within the company to influence their peers during the cultural change effort.
• First Consulting Group’s program, Leadership First, prides itself on employing a situational approach rather than a more typical subject matter approach by incorporating case studies based on actual FCG work and scenarios. Unlike many other programs that focus on motivation and communication, FCG’s program focuses on various skills. For example, when completing a merger case study, the potential leader must focus on a variety of issues: financial, legal, business and revenue implications, emotional, motivational, and communication. FCG is also unique in that the firm’s CEO and executive committee serve as facilitators to the sessions, and one member is required to be a sponsor for the participants.
• Mattel’s Project Platypus centered on individual development in order to maximize creativity directed toward product innovation. Trust, respect, and communication were all encouraged through the use of storytelling, creative culture speakers, and “face-to-face” connection. Outside experts such as a Jungian Analyst and a Japanese Tea Master helped hone the team’s observational skills. Using the concepts of postmodernism and the company as a living system, the original group of twelve brainstormed, bonded, branded, and even researched in nontraditional ways; their efforts resulted in “Ello,” a hybrid building toy for girls that is expected to be a $100 million line.
• To ensure that dynamic leadership principles were put into practice, HP implemented a rigorous postcourse management system using a commercial follow-through management tool (Friday5s®). In the concluding session of the program, participants were asked to write out two objectives to apply what they had learned to their jobs. The following week, participants were reminded of their goals by e-mail. A copy of each participant’s objectives was e-mailed to his or her manager to ensure that managers knew what their direct reports had learned and intended to work on. The system made each participant’s goals visible to all the other members of his or her cohort to encourage shared accountability and learning. These were entered into a group-specific Friday5s® website. The following week, participants were reminded of their goals by e-mail. Other companies implemented change-catalyst programs to help prevent systemic dysfunction.
• A key exercise in MIT’s transformational program was a visionary exercise that focused on helping developing leaders envision change and see themselves as a part of the whole system. Envisioning the department operating in a healthy and productive way in five years stimulated participants to discuss what they are doing today to help ensure that transformation. Participants became involved in thinking in a new way and realized the impact their decisions had not only for the future of the department, but also on each other.
• At Corning, an innovation task force was established to focus on the company’s successes and also identify short-comings—both considered an untapped resource that needed to be made more visible and understood by employees in order to champion and embrace the concept of innovation. Formalized training programs for employees of all levels were set up and became part of the basis for promotion, reviews, and hiring. Corning also instituted a program named Corning Competes, which is designed for continuous improvement of business practices through reengineering.
• StorageTek knew that for its initiatives to be successful they would need to instill a sense of urgency, as well as ensure buy-in at all levels. They partnered with a company specializing in transforming strategic direction through employee dialogue to create a learning map called “Current Reality: The Flood of Information.” The map was extremely effective in engaging not only top-level leaders worldwide, but all StorageTek employees in discussion about the company’s competitive environment. The next step, which included additional communications and initiatives around achieving a high-performance culture, served to sustain the sense of urgency. cart_14399_flast.qxd 10/20/04 12:36 PM
• At Praxair the assessment phase lasted over fifteen months and was far more than a few surveys or focus groups. It was an intensive set of actions, engaging more than five hundred employees and simultaneously laying the foundation for implementation actions endorsed by those whose behaviors were expected to change. Resistance during the implementation phase was virtually nonexistent.
Phase Five: On-the-Job Support These benchmark programs reach beyond the boardrooms and classrooms and provide on-the-job reinforcement and support. Work in this phase defines the follow-up support that determines whether change and development will transfer on the job. In several of the programs, the support system outside of training is one of the most salient elements of the organization development–human resources development (OD-HRD) initiative. Motorola installed a performance management system to help transfer the shared goals of the organization to individual behavior. McDonald’s integrated program-specific insights with the overall organization’s ongoing personal development systems and processes. Emmis Communication celebrated individual achievements during special events and used a balanced scorecard measurement system to incorporate the desired behaviors to measure the company’s performance.
Agilent uses a slightly different approach in its coaching system, involving periodic “check-ins” with the participants’ constituents throughout the coaching process. The check-in is important in part because the developmental goals addressed by the Accelerated Performance for Executives program often pertain to the relations between managers and their supervisor, peers, and supervisees, and so forth, and also because these constituents are the ones that determine whether or not a participants have been successful in their development. Along similar lines, Mattel increased manager participation in its innovation process so that when employees returned to their original roles after participating in Project Platypus, there was smoother reintegration and improved utilization of new skills.
The coaching and mentoring case studies in this book are specifically designed to provide ongoing support and development for leadership development initiatives. Both the coaching and mentoring case studies, Intel and General Electric, are excellent examples of organizations that provide ongoing support for leadership development and more specifically the organization’s strategic business goals and objectives. Other organizations take a more direct approach to providing ongoing support and development for change by installing review processes. First Consulting Group, Motorola, MIT, and Praxair have ongoing review, monitoring, and analysis processes in place to ensure that cart_14399_flast.qxd 10/20/04 12:36 PM the new policies and procedures are being followed. Delnor Hospital helped teams stay on track by requiring department heads to develop ninety-day plans that outline specific actions to be taken each quarter in working toward annual goals. This principle is also built into the hospital’s review and evaluation system so everyone is held accountable for his or her performance in achieving individual, team, and organizational goals.
Phase Six: Evaluation Evaluation is the capstone—the point at which the organization can gain insights on how to revise and strengthen a program, eliminate barriers to its reinforcement and use in the field, and connect the intervention back to the original goals to measure success. Several initiatives deserve noting in this stage:
• McDonald’s uses behavioral measurements to assess the participants’ performance after the program, including the rate of promotion and performance evaluations.
• Emmis Communication measures revenue per employee, employee survey results, and the rate of undesired turnover to measure the success of the change effort.
• Lockheed Martin used employee surveys to track changes in critical behavior. The results indicated that units that achieved significant improvement in critical behaviors also improved in their financial performance.
• Intel Fab 12’s leadership development program measures the effectiveness of its program based upon increased participants’ responsibility after graduation, postprogram self-assessments, peer recognition letters, and results of WOW! Projects implemented by participants while in the Leadership Development Forum.
• GE Capital surveys participants about actions taken at the individual, team, and organizational levels to drive change. The surveys follow the original construct of the program around the three levels of leadership after graduation. A mini-360 is conducted around each participant’s specific development need; 95 percent of the participants show an improvement as viewed by their original feedback givers. Program evaluations are also conducted to ensure that the design and content remain relevant and adapt to a global audience.
• Agilent used a combination of mini-surveys, telephone check-ins, and face-to-face interviews to determine perceived improvement in a leader’s overall leadership effectiveness and specific areas for development. The INTRODUCTION aggregate results were impressive in that close to 80 percent of respondents felt that the leader rated had been successful in his or her development. That coaching results are guaranteed is another testament to the effectiveness of the program.
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