Organisational Change

CLIENT: Semi-Conductor Manufacturer

SECTOR: Electronics

PROJECT: The Leadership Journey

THEMES: Culture Change

AUDIENCE: Senior Managers

LOCATION: USA, The Netherlands, China

The Organisation

Our client is a worldwide semi-conductor manufacturer and supplier, created as a separate company by its owner in 2006. In addition to supplying semi-conductors for use in domestic appliances, vehicles and identification systems, they also manufacture and market contactless card technology used by many major transport systems.

The Project Context

The company was seeking to build an organisational development programme that had its heart in leadership development, structured around the company’s own specific values.

The Requirement

Our client’s specific requirement was to move the business culture – and its leaders’ behaviour – from a task focus to a task and people focus, from directing to engaging, from using capability to developing potential, and – most importantly – from managing to leading.

The behavioural change programme to deliver this objective had an in-scope audience of over 450 leaders in a number of global locations. The goal would be to establish a forward behavioural strategy that would demonstrate the link between behaviours and results, and embed the company’s values within the behaviours of its top leaders.

Supporting a change of culture from critiquing to encouraging, the programme would also need to engage the whole leadership team and improve dialogue to optimise learning. Mindful that cultural change is a long-term challenge, rigorous support of the transfer of learning back into the workplace would also be essential.

Our Solution

The Leadership Journey was an innovative six-month behavioural change programme comprising of four phases – Check-in, Boarding, Travelling and Landing – at the heart of which were two workshops.

The process was supported throughout by 1:1 executive coaching, and implementation of learning driven through online follow-through technology.

The programme was designed to uncover participants’ current habitual leadership behaviours and the personal mindsets that underpinned them, and to explore the ways in which the business has been moulded and shaped by these personal, corporate and cultural value systems.

By demonstrating the link between behaviours and results, it enabled participants to experiment with new ways of thinking and working to enhance personal leadership skills, create clarity around the difference between management and leadership skills, and connects individual career and life stages to the flow of the organisation.

The development of Personal Development Plans, with benchmarks to evaluate progress, developed a forward ‘behavioural’ strategy that improved the dialogue between people to optimise learning and engaged, both directly and indirectly, the entire leadership team, including the CEO.

After the project was launched as a pilot, 30 cycles were run in three locations: the Netherlands, Shanghai and America.

The Results

On completing the follow-through process, 87% rated themselves ‘more effective’, while 61% said the programme had made a significant impact on the business. 97% of delegates’ learning goals were either completed or being progressed, and 80% had specific measurement processes or targets. Hard impact data supported these assessments: staff turnover – at 5% – was 75% lower than anticipated, while productivity had increased by 50%.

Feedback and Reviews

An Employee Engagement survey – conducting during subsequent restructuring after a change of ownership – showed a drop of only 2.5% against an industry benchmark of 10%, while the People Management Index continued to rise.

Delegate Quotes

“Humbling, challenging, exciting, touching and hugely beneficial to my personal growth and leadership development.”

“It was really great to work in a creative and inspired team for 3 days. It was intensive, but worthwhile to invest in.”

“Exceeded my expectation – well structured, intense, challenging. Forced me to stretch and look at my performance in new ways.”

“It has been a real learning journey. I was able to understand myself better and how others perceive me.”