Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/65226
Thought Leader behaviours and the behaviours that would lead to success. The fourth step was to act on the organisation to eliminate barriers to change. We identified that one of our barriers was people working in silos. To address this, we created cross-departmental projects where people from different teams had to come together to solve a problem or develop a product. We also asked each department to invite neighbouring departments in for a day to demonstrate what they do and how they are developing their area of expertise. We wanted to do this before we asked people to change their behaviours. The fifth step is to communicate what you want to achieve. Eight years ago, we did not have an internal communications team as everything was focussed on products and customers. Knowing that communicating effectively is a vital part of a change programme, we established an internal comms team that focused on driving information down from the management team and also on collecting and passing information back up the ladder as well. The CEO and the management team must lead the change programme, but it is important that everyone in the organisation feels that they can be heard. Steps six, seven, and eight support the change. For step six, we set objectives for the company, each business and each individual involved in the change. To support the new objectives we created performance and development systems (step seven) and compensation and benefit schemes (step eight) to make sure that we were not rewarding behaviour based on the old paradigm. These were not drastic changes, as we already had systems in place, but we wanted to make sure that everything was aligned. The ninth step was training and development, but I like to call it "feeding the new order." We knew that some people did not have the skills to be successful in the new order and were either too scared to admit this or not intelligent enough to realise it. We provided training through workshops and role-plays to demonstrate the new behaviours we wanted to see. Are any of the steps more important than others? Or more difficult to implement? The most difficult one to implement is probably the "define the new paradigm" stage. It is difficult to ensure that it describes what is wanted, while taking into account the opinions of all the different people participating in the development of the programme. The most critical step may be "communicate what you want to achieve," because this is not only about communicating but also about getting people to participate and buy into the programme. What was the timeline for the whole project? Conventional wisdom says you shouldn't expect change to be effective until five years after having initiated it. So we were not too anxious about seeing immediate results. One issue that normally arises is that you may think that things are going backwards not forwards. Our experience is that this is natural and that you should not pause or change the programme. If you keep your nerve, the illusion of going backwards will slowly disappear. For us, having a roadmap and communicating what you expect helps everyone to be patient. When people lose patience, they lose control of the situation, and this can be exhausting! Are you on track to achieve your goals? And how do you measure progress? We have achieved sustainable change in behaviours, and that has been a great benefit to our business. We have tried to measure everything from production to teamwork and we have assigned indicators for each type of change that we want to measure. For instance, we have measured the number of interdepartmental projects throughout the year to better understand if we are breaking down the work silos. And how did you communicate the progress of the programme over such a long timeframe? I should have said there was a fourth piece: celebrating success. To be honest, we're not very good about celebrating success. It is one of the things that we need to improve. We use global meetings to celebrate and say thank you for best practices. On a daily basis, people can check the intranet where we post weekly updates on how are we doing in relation to expected results. Other internal communication tools (Group Magazine, Weekly Video, etc.) help give visibility and therefore reward both teams and individuals. Any last pieces of advice from your experience with Grupo Codorníu? I have two. The first is to focus on the management team, as they are role models for the rest of the organisation. You need to stress to the management team that it is a long and difficult project to change behaviours but that they will succeed if they are committed, consistent, and they communicate continuously. Second, when asking people and an organisation to undergo change, you need to have something stable that people can hold on to. For us, it was our corporate values of effort, openness, passion, and respect. Everyone knew that, no matter what we asked of them, these would be the core values of the organisation before, during, and after the change. WINTER 2012 | www.hroglobal.com [39]