Consulting
From Reactive to Creative:
How ILS Will Transform Your Culture
Goals of the Change Process
1. Change reactivity to creativity in your culture.
There are two stances you can take in your view about your business: reactive and creative: See the diagrams below:
Reactivity, on the left, starts with a problem that drives fear, which drives reactivity. When we spend the majority of our time looking for problems we can’t control, we put ourselves in this fear cycle. We become stuck trying to seek equilibrium rather than our vision. The results are not sustainable overtime.
Creativity, on the right, starts with a vision. This drives passion, which results in action. We know problems will arise, but we choose to focus on the way around them. Passion is focusing on what you can control. It doesn’t promise that things will be great immediately, but over time you will have more sustainable results.
2. Create alignment of your organization’s mission within your team.
Without a common sense of mission, you can’t form a sustainably successful organization. This point is driven home in the research of Jim Collins in the book Good to Great. The graph above shows the comparison of companies that have their mission, vision and values as a part of the fabric of their organizations (orange line) versus companies that don’t (blue line).
Most organizations look like the diagram on the right. The big arrow is the overall objective of the organization. The small arrows are the focus of the members of that organization. Without an aligned sense of mission, you can’t form a sustainably successful organization. In order to turn the right diagram into the left diagram (align, engaged and focused) we will teach you to do the following:
- Develop a mission/strategy that everyone in the organization understands and buys into.
- Everyone has to get comfortable having difficult discussions.
- Your culture has to hold its members accountable to an agreed upon set of values, or standards of behavior.
3. Improve efficiency and bottom-line results of your company.
Ultimately, this training has to pay for itself. It does. Examples will be given at the end.
Our Process: How We Help the Organization Change
Start by consulting with senior leadership.
Creating alignment and trust on senior leadership team through coaching and team meetings with the consultant.
- Coach all key leaders.
- Focus on stopping reactivity and becoming creative.
- Administer a 360-degree leadership assessment for each leader.
- All leaders will participate in sessions monthly.
- Please see “How to make the most of your coaching experience at ILS” for more information about the coaching process.
- Have a monthly team meeting to:
- Encourage difficult conversations.
- Identify and change cultural problems within the organization.
- Identify reactivity.
- Form committees.
- Committees work in between our meetings to address and overcome cultural problems.
- If necessary, we can help create a mission, vision, values, and strategic plan for your team. See the description of how this is accomplished on page 5 of this document entitled “Creating Your Company’s Future”.
Next, we train middle management using our Leadership Institute.
Once we have accomplished task one, we need to get middle management to buy in to the change. Consider this visual.
This is a visual depiction of a typical dysfunctional organizational structure. Management is giving the orders and employees are doing what they are told. This leads to poor communication, low levels of engagement, mistakes, and high turnover. In order to create a sense of partnership and trust, we have to stop these behaviors. Helping senior leaders become functional leaders is only part of this process. In order to break down the dependent mentality of middle management, we have to teach them to think for themselves, generate creative solutions, and respectfully challenge authority. We do this by putting your middle managers through our leadership institute. In short, each manager participates in one workshop per month, gets a 360-degree leadership assessment, and receives monthly coaching.
The nine workshops are as follows:
Session 1: Authentic Leadership and Introduction of 360° Assessment
Session 2: Authentic Communication
Session 3: Conquering Everyday Stress
Session 4: Developing Emotional Intelligence
Session 5: Building and Sustaining Trust
Session 6: Manage to Lead
Session 7: Transforming Others Through Coaching
Session 8: Building Exceptional Teams
Session 9: Presentation of Individual Projects & Personal MVV Statements
To learn more about the Leadership Institute please talk to an ILS Consultant to provide more details about the program.
Additionally, while we are teaching your middle management, we continue to have quarterly meetings with your senior leaders to help us evaluate the effectiveness of the training and address any concerns that workshop participants are having with senior leadership behaviors.
Bridging the gap
Typically, the combination of consulting with senior leadership and training middle management is enough to tip the scales of your entire culture toward the goals listed at the beginning of this document, but sometimes we have to bridge the gap between what senior leaders are doing and what middle managers are learning in the Institute. We do this by asking middle managers which concepts they have learned that they wish senior leaders to also be exposed to and then we have a workshop with those concepts highlighted where both senior leaders and middle managers are present.
Creating Your Company’s Future
The process of tackling the obstacles identified in stage one usually takes several months. Once the major problems facing you have been tackled it is natural to want to stop the consulting process, and some companies do at this point. But we know from research that this is not enough to make you great and keep you at that level. The organizations that sustain greatness over decades create a plan that keeps them at that level. The creation of that plan is the focus of the next phase of consulting. Here are the five key elements that you will develop with your ILS consultant. If you already have such a plan, we will work with you to tighten it up and make sure it becomes the core focus of your organization’s existence.
- Your company’s mission, vision, values (MVV)
- Your company’s strategic plan
- Good communication within your organization to insure alignments between individuals and departments.
- Well-written job descriptions
- A good review system with individual employee objectives
Developing a well-executed strategic plan for your organization should begin with developing mission, vision, and values statements for your organization. These three statements are the foundation upon which you set for your company’s growth for the foreseeable future. The mission statement answers the question, “Why do we exist?” The vision statement answers the question, “What are we trying to accomplish?” The values statement answers the question, “How will we do business?” It is not enough for top management to develop these statements in a short meeting. Consider that you are setting the foundation for the future of your company. If your employees do not help you write these statements it is unlikely that they will take ownership of them.
Once the MVV is written you can craft a strategic plan to give more specific directions for the next one to five years to make the MVV become a reality. A good strategic plan should address the needs of four groups: employees, customers, owners, and the community. Thus, your strategic plan should have four sections with goals in each section. Take a great deal of discipline in crafting these goals as they will direct your employee’s behavior over the time period in question. Under each goal you should list action items which are assigned to individuals. Each action item should have a date set for its accomplishment. It is critical that the leader of your organization refers to this plan regularly and holds people accountable to the timetable. If no one is held accountable, then your plan will collect dust and all of your planning efforts will be wasted.
Once your strategic plan is complete it is necessary to align your company’s job descriptions and review process with the strategic plan. Each employee should have a formal review annually. In this review their performance should be evaluated as it relates to your company’s MVV and strategic plan. Each employee should have a direct line of sight between their behavior and the success of your organization. Part of the review process should include setting individual employee objectives designed to help that employee create this “line of sight” connection with the organization.
Examples of How This Worked for Past Clients
Example #1: Midwest construction firm
The situation: Ninety-year-old construction firm had flat revenues and negligible profits. Morale and accountability were poor. Several of the top managers were not engaged. Leaders were indecisive and reactive. The company had a strategic plan, but no mission, vision, and values. The new CEO hired ILS to address these concerns and change the culture toward the goals listed at the beginning of this document.
What we did: Fairly quickly, we identified those managers who were disengaged, and they were removed from their leadership positions. Younger, more hungry leaders took their places. That group then went through a year of consulting. As a part of that process, we helped the leadership team create a mission, vision, values, and a strategic plan for their company. Over the next six years we trained virtually all of their middle managers though our Leadership Institute.
Results:
Over an eight-year period:
- Revenues more than doubled to nearly $500M
- Profits increased by 2000%
Example #2: Midwest oil refinery
The situation: Refinery had many safety incidents and shutdowns. Morale was poor. Senior leaders we not aligned, and they were indecisive. They had a low-trust environment.
What we did: We started with consulting the senior leadership. Once this was accomplished, we then trained 80 middle managers through the Leadership Institute in groups of twenty. Slowly, they developed a culture where difficult discussions were encouraged. People become aligned and engaged around running a safe, efficient refinery.
Results:
- Plant efficiency went from 77-88%
- Safety incidents were cut in half.
- Profits increased by $100,000,000 per year on $4 billion in revenues.
Example #3: Midwest rural Hospital (150 beds)
The situation: Morale and engagement in this hospital were poor. Leadership avoided difficult discussions and was reactive when challenged by middle management. Some leaders were disengaged, and they were not being held accountable. The hospital was losing money and was in danger of being sold.
What we did: We followed the process shown above. The original CEO was not able to make the necessary changes and was relieved of his duties by the board. ILS helped the board select his replacement. The new CEO was very aligned with the goals ILS had set at the beginning of this document. We consulted with senior management and then trained most middle managers with our Leadership Institute.
Results: While revenues remained constant, profits increased $24,000,000 per year. This was done by increasing accountability, engagement, improving the rev cycle and renegotiating the debt through some difficult discussions with their financial institution. The financial institution only agreed to renegotiate the loan rate because they noticed the changes in the culture in their discussions with hospital management; in short, they realized their risk had been reduced because the hospital was being well-managed.