Case Study:

An Organization Development (OD) Success Story

By Sherrill Burns

The Situation

A successful national sales division was intent on achieving its strategic goals and performance targets. With the completion of its strategic plan in 2001, it was clear that incremental improvements to current roles and practices would not create the change required to achieve future strategic goals. Significant and sustainable shifts in how the business unit operated were needed. Also, sales reps were concerned that they had too many new programs and too much administration, leaving less time for sales; their sales managers were concerned that people were working too many hours.

What the executives knew from competitive intelligence was that the situation was, in fact, urgent: New competitors were set to enter the marketplace, which would rapidly drive margins out of the business. Unless care was taken, market share would evaporate. Significant cost reductions were required which meant the sales team had to get smaller, and quickly.

The Consultant’s Role

Senior executives wanted to get to the heart of what was getting in the way of sales growth, as well as identify the ‘levers’ to accelerate it. It was necessary to find those changes that would provide leverage to shift everyone’s behaviour toward the new way of doing business. They were also wise enough to want to engage the sales force in diagnosis, redesign and implementation planning. They were willing to invest in bringing a small group together. To be most effective, I chose to do most of the assignment myself, bringing in expert advisors if needed.

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Setting up the Team

Normally with work teams, the output has to be sent up through the hierarchy for approval. To accelerate the project timeline, the sponsoring decision maker was included on the team -- a senior executive, who committed to a rapid decision-making process. Joining him were a sales manager, top performing sales people from each region (which helped build credibility for the team’s recommendations), and the training manager.

Setting up the work team with a project charter helped them understand their contribution and the decision making process. Participants were actively engaged in the assessment of the current situation, definition of the desired future state, development of the redesign, as well as implementation planning. They met each quarter for two days for about a year.  They were mandated to do project work only at these meetings and not back on the job. This upped the ‘design to meeting’ time ratio so that team input was maximized and they remained focused on the most important elements of the redesign.

The Diagnosis

Just because you play tennis and have a sore arm, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have tennis elbow; the root cause may be a compressed disk in your neck. Getting to the root cause of why sales were not growing at the anticipated rate was critical to diagnosing what was getting in the way of achieving targets and what might impact future performance. Separating ‘noisy’ symptoms from root cause was an important step. The work team struggled with this as they had deeply held beliefs about what needed to change.

Through data gathering and analysis, the team came to greater understanding of how the dynamics of organizational practices, culture and leader behaviours worked. From the situation assessment, barriers to success became clear, such as:

1.    Unplanned New Programs: Raining down from different groups within and outside sales, these were implemented through field sales reps, deflecting time from selling. Two key changes were taken immediately:

a.    A Calendar of Events: This was a timeline of all of the programs to be rolled-out to the field during a year. If groups did not gain approval for their initiative, they could not get sales to be part of the roll-out. This was owned by the top executive and was designed to drive more proactive cross-boundary planning behaviours at a time when many new initiatives were being considered.

b.    “Interface Group” Alignment:  A half-day cross-department meeting process was designed for sharing goals, identifying programs and resource implications. This was a new practice intended to more proactively plan the events that were to make it to the Calendar.

2.    A Risk-Adverse Culture: This resulted in lots of compliance checking and administration time. The team identified where opportunities lay for reducing time on these activities and actions were taken.
With this knowledge the team also refined the vision they were developing for the sales team of the future.

The Right “Levers”

The key levers that had the power to drive performance were identified and became the focus for our role redesign effort:

1.    Role Alignment: From the executive level to the sales representative, role descriptions were aligned. The accomplishments for five key accountability areas were articulated with a ‘scorecard’ for each role.

2.    Qualitative Measures: Measures had focused too much on activities and tasks, which were quantifiable and easy to capture data about. However, they were ‘lag’ measures, focused on past success. We reduced the number of quantifiable measures, replacing them with a few good outcome measures and added more qualitative measures, which signalled to the reps the behaviours which would lead to future sales growth. This put considerably more work on the shoulders of the sales managers who had to get into the field and really observe the reps and the coaching they were doing - just what was wanted!

3.    Resource Allocation: Allocation of reps to a territory based on number of accounts did not reflect that some accounts were very complex and others less complex, requiring less time and effort. A territory complexity tool was developed which helped the sales manager assign accounts. In this way one rep had 20 accounts and another had 35 accounts, but the work effort was balanced.

The ‘Amplifier’ Effect

Knowing that no matter how good organizational practices are, leader behaviour can affect their effectiveness, I coached the client to watch for inconsistency amongst his regional sales managers.  He went further, deciding to ‘amplify’ the change as deliberately as possible through the sales managers.

He added accountability for maintaining the ‘integrity of the role redesign’ to their job descriptions and got into the field to observe if they were role modeling and coaching sales reps. He instituted three meetings per year during which he encouraged them to ‘calibrate’ their thinking and behaviours; align their activities to national priorities, and work through the detail of implementation plans. The sales managers then had two weeks within which to hold a similar meeting with regional sales staff.

Capability development (about the redesign) was incorporated into these sessions, often using the work team members as resources. Training prepared them to play an active role in the capability development sessions, to introduce the role changes to the sales reps.

The Outcome & Lessons Learned

For our client, sales growth has exceeded comparable business units in other countries for the past two years. At the same time field cost structure has been reduced by at least 30%.

For me, being able to work with a sponsor who was willing to invest in a good root cause analysis, redesign and implementation planning made this complex project truly a delightful assignment. I learned at lot from this executive:

·    Find the root cause quickly: The client wanted a rapid way to get to the root cause of performance issues. I had trouble meeting this expectation with my typical consulting approaches (interviews, surveys, focus groups), leading my partner and I to design new tools for doing organizational assessments much more quickly.
·    Leadership behaviours ‘amplify’ organizational practices: I now look for ways to deliberately use specific leadership behaviours as an ‘amplifier effect’ to improve the organizational practices which will drive success.
·    ‘Calibrating’ for implementation: I’ve learned that time is needed, e.g. through “calibrating meetings,” for creating alignment and for implementation planning and that providing this time may be one of the keys to accelerating strategy implementation.

This assignment changed the orientation of my consulting practice. Two years ago I decided to take the risk and shift my consulting practice (working with large companies on large scale change management projects) to one specifically focusing on the acceleration of strategy implementation. Through research, tool development and consulting, I hope to find more ways to support ‘creative change and organization development’ in organizations.

Sherrill Burns is an O.D. consultant who has worked in the area of large-scale business change for many years. Recent research and diagnostic tool development has focused on how to accelerate strategy implementation. She can be reached at 905-887-8781 or Sherrill.Burns@sbaconsult.ca.