Directions - January 2005

Directions is a quarterly newsletter published by the Bresnahan Group, in cooperation with the Integro Leadership Institute. It provides information on what organizations are doing to get employees engaged and committed to achieving the company vision.

In this issue of Integro Directions we have stories about two companies from opposite sides of the globe and in completely different industries. Both of these organizations were successful at the time they embarked on their transformation journey with Integro's processes, and had realized that they had the potential to achieve so much more if only their people were more engaged.

The leaders of both these organizations, the AAA Club in South Jersey and Rondo Building Services from Sydney, Australia, realized that turning managers into leaders would not happen as a result of a single training event. In fact both organizations have taken two to three years to get to where they are today, and have achieved some remarkable results in the process.

Organizational transformation, like leadership transformation, is a process not an event. In fact the extensive research conducted by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, authors of Primal Leadership, shows that the two should be linked together. That is, it doesn't make sense to do leadership development in a vacuum... it should be linked to organizational transformation. Here is what they say:

"... although we've sometimes referred to leadership development "programs" in these pages, in fact what many organizations need aren't just one- time programs but a process built as a holistic system that permeates every layer of the organization. The best of these leadership development initiatives are based on an understanding that true change occurs through a multifaceted process that penetrates the three pivotal levels of the organization: the individuals in the organization, the teams in which they work, and the organization's culture. Based on the principles of adult learning and individual change, such processes take people on intellectual and emotional journeys- from facing the reality to implementing the ideal. We've found that the design of this kind of leadership development differs in fundamental ways from what one typically finds in most business schools or executive training centers."

The Integro Leadership Institute does not have any connection with the authors, and yet we came to the same realizations during the design of our leadership development and culture transformation processes eight years ago. The authors go on to say:

"Strong leadership development processes are focused on emotional and intellectual learning, and they build on active, participatory work: action learning and coaching, where people use what they're learning to diagnose and solve real problems in their organizations. They rely on experiential learning and on team-based simulations, where people engage in structured activity that they can use to examine their own and others' behavior. Exemplary processes are multifaceted, using a bold mixture of learning techniques; they are conducted over a period of time; and they take the culture head on."

The two clients we have featured in this issue understood that to transform organizational results, they had to start with their leaders. They chose Integro's leadership development process to give them the skills and the tools they needed to transform the culture... to create a work environment where all employees want to perform at their best.

Leadership Transformation at Rondo Building Services

By John Wintraaken, General Manager Rondo Building Services Pty Limited

Rondo is a medium sized business with sales in excess of $100m, manufacturing and distributing a range of rollformed metal products and systems, primarily for the construction industry in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. We have around one hundred and fifty employees as well as up to thirty contract people. While the business has been jointly owned by two shareholders, CSR Ltd and BORAL Ltd for forty years, we operate largely as an autonomous and highly focused business and enjoy clear leadership in their particular market segment.

The Challenge

We are successful by most measures, with quality products, processes, brands and financial outcomes. However, we recognized some years ago that to support the continuing growth and development of the business we needed to invest to a much greater extent in management leadership development and upskilling of all our people.

Being relatively small and without substantial internal human resources, we began to develop what has proven to be a very successful partnership with Integro dating back about four years.

It was clear that if we were to move along our desired pathway of becoming an organization where Accountability and Trust underpinned the environment our people work in, we needed to start with our Senior Leadership Team of twelve.

The Process

It was for that reason we embarked on Integro's leadership development process over a two and a half year period as the starting point to help us firstly understand ourselves better in order to better understand the needs of all our people. Since completing the initial leadership development process we have continued to work with Integro on a range of personal development issues including revisiting aspects of the initial program to benchmark how we are progressing - to some extent you could say we have outsourced aspects of our HR needs because Integro provides a better service than we could internally.

The Results

So what are some of our key learnings?

Firstly, I have no doubt that without the changes we have made in our organizational learning and leadership capabilities we would have been unable to provide the excellence in customer service and relationships that we strive for, enabling us to double sales in our core business over the past three years while increasing staffing levels by just 29%.

Also critical is the fact that you need a combination of factors to make it work - a sound process supported by facilitators who effectively become a part of your business, and a senior leadership team committed to a clear vision of the type of workplace they are trying to create for the future.

A third interesting observation is that when your aspiration for the future becomes part of your culture it clearly also becomes bigger than the individuals that are part of it any point in time - this is critical for any organization where constant change is part of business and in our case four of the twelve senior team members are new to the team since we first started, yet the momentum has been maintained.

Finally, we have all realized that this process is simply part of a long term journey - no matter how much we learn and improve there is no end as you and your people continue to raise your expectations for your future workplace environment - which is just as it should be.

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AAA South Jersey Increases Customer Satisfaction and Employee Accountability

The AAA Club in South Jersey serves members in Camden, Gloucester, Salem, and Cumberland counties with 130 employees through two Branch Offices and a main office in Voorhees NJ.

The Challenge

Over the next few months it was apparent that this approach was not working. Both middle managers and employees were focused on performing their daily activities without seeing any connection to the plan, and so were not committed to its implementation.

A management task team determined that the reason the managers were not getting employee buy-in for the changes was that they lacked the skills and the tools to effectively lead people. Many of the middle managers had been promoted into their positions because of longevity, or because they were good at their jobs. This exercise with the strategic plan helped them to realize that they needed education in leadership, and particularly in how to communicate with employees more effectively.

The Process

AAA South Jersey's President, Joel Vittori and Executive Vice President, Carol A. Scott made the decision to embark on Integro's leadership development process in late 2002. A key factor in that decision was that the process would be spread over a two year period, allowing time for managers to apply what they were learning from each stage before moving on to the next.

Another key reason for choosing the Integro process was that it provided the opportunity to get all employees involved and learning through the distributive learning process. The needs assessment done by the management task team had also identified that expectations were not clear. Employees were not clear on what management expected from them, and management was not clear on what employees' expectations were.

During the first stage of leadership development, the managers learned how to use Inscape Publishing's Work Expectations Profile with their team members to get expectations out in the open. Once all employees had taken the expectations profile, communication across the organization improved significantly.

As Carol Scott put it:

"This exercise has really made me feel more comfortable with each of my direct reports. I feel like I tapped into a wealth of information that will allow all of us to perform better personally as well as professionally. I personally have gained so much from this process."

The Results

The most important results the organization has seen since embarking on this process have been in customer satisfaction and employee accountability.

The Roadside Service now has the second highest level of customer satisfaction of all areas of the club. Over the past year this group has moved from 71st place to 35th place in customer satisfaction across all 81 clubs in the Association.

In the Travel Department they have moved from 69th place to 41st place in customer satisfaction and there has been a noticeable increase in the number of customer response cards coming back marked as Totally Satisfied.

One of the reasons the senior managers did not get the buy-in to the original strategic plan from the middle managers or employees, was that they had no involvement or input into the process. Now, task teams put together to plan change initiatives consist of senior managers, middle managers and employees, and the results are very different. Employees are now taking ownership of critical results such as membership retention and customer satisfaction, and gaining a great deal of personal satisfaction as they see the results improving.

To quote Carol Scott, Executive Vice President again:

"We are finding out that there are so many talented people in this company who are capable of accomplishing so much more if given the opportunity. We are now able to allow them to take so much more responsibility than we were able to before."

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More Information

For more information about any of these topics contact us at 505-922-1973 or email BresGroup @ 4u.net.

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