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(The name of the firm and certain situations are disguised due to a confidentiality agreement. The actual client approved this case study)
Unlike many in its industry, Baier-Takata, a Charlotte, North Carolina - based chemical manufacturing organization, was growing despite increased competition and governmental reforms. But growing pains, left unattended, can be dangerous. If BT were to continue to grow and succeed, concluded its new CEO William Green, the company had to change.
BT, a USA-Japanese joint venture with $450 million in annual sales, is composed of four separate divisions acquired through purchases. Seven unionized manufacturing plants are located in the East, Central, and West USA. If it were to evolve from a smorgasbord of companies, cultures, and values into the unified "billion-dollar hassle-free company to work for and do business with" that its owners envisioned, it would have to reshape the way it worked.
"When I first came aboard," Green says, "I found myself running very different companies. While individually these differences seemed minor, together they added up to some major barriers to excellence." To effect the metamorphosis, Green turned to Moravec and Associates to help align the organization and, at the same time, help him grasp the parameters and reins of his new job quickly.
BT managers at first thought they required only a new performance management system and a quality initiative. But Green immediately saw the necessity to go further. "We needed an innovative approach to change management and transformation," he said. "This was going to require dismantling the systems and bureaucracies that make it difficult for people to do a good job and creating a culture that makes the most of their talents and contributions."
Getting everyone on the same page was going to be a challenge. "Many efforts to become a world-class competitor in this industry are short-sighted and overly simplistic," said Moravec and Associates' lead consultant. "Draw a new org chart, lay off employees, give the remaining ones new titles, proclaim them empowered, publish a set of new values, and-magic-there you have it: the new high-performance enterprise. For change to deliver real outcomes, it has to be viewed as part of a system in which not only the organization is transformed, but also its strategies, culture, operations, and people."
Dick Straw, Vice President of Finance, saw the change as "preparing to compete for our future." In order to move forward, he says, "we needed to make sure where we were going. Everyone at BT had to understand the needs of the owners, the customers, and our employees. By aligning everything so that we were all moving in the same direction, we'd gain a significant competitive marketplace advantage."
The first step was a four-day Business and Organizational Renewal process for senior management. By the end of this process, participants began translating their mission into strategy and budgeted outcomes. Rather than preparing a detailed plan on paper and then communicating it for "buy-in," management elected to use Moravec and Associates' Align - Accelerate - Transformation framework to get everyone on board quickly.
"The clear line-of-sight accountability from top to bottom is what convinced us that this high-engagement cascade was just what our old-line functional organization needed," says Straw. "The assess, focus, align, and execute parts of the framework gave us the outcomes we targeted to achieve throughout the business."
Take Green's vision, for example, of everyone as an associate who must be connected and work as part of a high-performance team. This concept is difficult to grasp even at the corporate level, and imagine being a mechanic at the plant in Black Falls, Arkansas, who has for years functioned as an individual whose job was narrowly defined as "just repairing and servicing equipment." However, with the cascading of strategic initiatives, stretch goals, and measurements, all linked to teamwork, Green's concept began to turn into shop-floor action.
Was it easy? No. Did unpredictable things happen? Yes. Did the high-engagement framework replace the old functional culture? It took a while and in some cases it was faster than others. But the comprehensive format left no stone unturned. Now the mechanic, along with other members of his team, is responsible for safety, quality, supplies, and the environment-not to mention costs and productivity.
A Leadership Team (so named to emphasize responsibility rather than chain of command), made up of general managers and division vice presidents, has taken on the responsibility traditionally held by the Chief Operating Officer. Team accountability for outputs is so important that other teams are slated to run business units. With the direction of the Leadership Team, BT designed a new organizational structure, based on self-directed work teams, that cut management layers from 11 to 4. As accountability for outcomes increases, individual titles are becoming irrelevant.
BT and Moravec and Associates together are analyzing major processes, leader development, employee engagement and identifying new key processes and measures to determine their effectiveness. Out of this will come the reorganization of work, as well as a recasting of the roles required. Then, newly launched self-managed teams will be trained to deliver the outcomes from the new processes. And yes, a new performance management and quality program, BT's initial concern, will be implemented.