Creating Leadership Capabilities for Success within a Rapidly Evolving Industry

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The Challenge

In an increasingly competitive food industry, a long-time market leader realized that it needed to redefine itself in order to sustain the level of growth that its shareholders expected. This required a dramatic shift in focus from managing costs to generating top-line growth. While at one level this was a simple concept, the organization realized that this shift would require significant changes in the performance and capabilities of its senior leaders. Without losing elements that contributed to its past success, such as a strong drive for results, the organization needed to add new capabilities, such as the capacity for innovation, strategic thinking, and a strong customer focus.

The top leadership quickly realized that they needed to address two key issues. They needed to know where the talent existed to meet emerging leadership needs, and they needed to ensure the targeted development of leaders towards the new requirements for success.

The organization took a big step towards meeting this need. For the first time in their history, they hired an experienced senior executive for the sole purpose of ensuring that the executive and leadership talent existed to meet the needs of the organization.

The new executive knew she had to act quickly. She needed to provide leadership recommendations that would be seen as sound and credible by the senior leadership team. One of the first steps she took was to partner with Personnel Decisions International (PDI) in order to meet her aggressive mandate.

The Solution

PDI supported and led the organization through the following actions:

• Through interviews with more than 40 senior executives throughout the world, the organization gained clarity about the emerging strategic context (e.g., competitive advantages, competitive threats, market opportunities, economic environment), and what performance levels and capabilities were needed in their leaders. They also determined the commitment level of the executive pool in gaining a common vision and seeing the organization through this difficult transition.
• PDI used its Strategic Performance Modeling services to create a detailed profile of the performance and capabilities needed to succeed in the future. Two levels of leadership standards were identified, for both executives and middle managers.
• We designed two developmental assessment centers for each leadership level. The centers were customized to reflect the characteristics of the organization, and the strategic context information that was collected from the senior executive group. The scenarios for the realistic business simulations were set in the future.
• Over the next six months, more than 40 senior executives and 70 middle managers were assessed in a customized, developmental assessment center, which compared people's performance and capabilities against the identified profile. Based on realistic business simulations of the company's emerging challenges, interviews, and a 360-degree feedback tool, participants received detailed feedback on where they stood against the model. They also received coaching and suggestions on how to enhance their effectiveness.
• Development planning meetings were held with participants, their bosses, and a PDI coach to create measurable development goals and begin targeted ongoing coaching.
• Out of 70 middle managers, more than 50 participated in a five-day training program that focused on skills where the organization was weakest, but that required the most of its leaders. Through a series of training modules played out within an interactive simulation, teams of leaders worked on skills including strategic thinking, innovation, talent management, and managing culture change. Then over the next four months, these diverse teams of 6-8 leaders from different geographies, functions, and businesses took on an action learning assignment that dealt with high-priority business challenges.
• PDI and the organization created a "talent war room" in which all performance, assessment, and development objectives for each existing leader and those identified as high potential leaders throughout the organization were collected, organized, and presented for review by the senior leadership team.
• Small teams of senior executives led focused strategic talent management efforts for functional groups (e.g., marketing, technical, finance). With the support of PDI consultants and HR leaders, they evaluated and created the talent strategies needed to quickly and effectively align and build required talent capabilities specific to each function.

The Results

The initiative produced several key results:

• Participating executives received accurate, objective feedback on their capabilities relative to projected future needs, which helped them improve their effectiveness.
• Top executives were able to more clearly communicate their expectations.
• The organization gained an objective view of the capabilities of their current executive talent and bench strength.
• The most capable people were promoted into the most critical roles.
• The organization saw a great deal of value in the outcomes of the action learning assignment and took steps to implement some of the recommendations.

As a sign of the value seen in this effort, when the economy became very tight in the following year, the organization began to slash budgets and cut projects. However, the majority of the planned leadership efforts for that year remained intact as senior leaders recognized that this initiative was critical for meeting both short-term demands and long-term priorities.