CHAPTER 9

The Winning Never Ends: Anchoring Change

 

When legendary Coach Geno Auriemma’s UConn women’s basketball team won its first national NCAA title, why was he so confident many more would follow? And what did Coach Anson Dorrance know that led him to believe he could create a dynasty of winning women’s soccer teams at the University of North Carolina?

Both coaches had put mechanisms in place to ensure lasting success, not just for a particular team in a particular year, but year after year after year. Both coaches institutionalized systematic ways to mold and educate their players, physically and mentally. They established schedules that extended far beyond the playing season. They had a 12-month calendar of activities for team members, including practice routines, assessment tools, leadership seminars, a schedule of meetings, and off-season events.

For Dorrance and Auriemma, their career won-lost records and championship banners speak for themselves. The changes they initiated when they joined the teams, together with the adjustments and refinements they made over time, transformed how their sports are run. Their systems became the anchors for a new way of doing things: change, winning, and sustainability come together as an enduring concept.

The coaches also became talent magnets. Recruitment became easier as star players gravitated to them. And each new generation was shaped by the systems already in place. “The teams changed composition as players turned over, but the structures and processes remained,” writes Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a leading voice on change over the last 25 years. “The winning teams that resulted were not a force of nature; they were a product of professional disciplines and structures.” She emphasizes the importance of formally implanting these mechanisms into the institution. “The architecture of change involves the design and construction of new patterns, or the reconceptualization of old ones, to make new, and hopefully more productive, actions.” (Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, New York: Crown, 2004)

These disciplines and structures are at least as important as the individuals who install them. Kanter points out that “Nelson Mandela’s leadership in South Africa gained its power not just through his inspiring message, but through the structure of a new government, legislation, and, importantly, formal events such as town meetings on a new constitution, and hearings by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”

Kanter highlights the essential role of leadership: “Leaders embed the winners’ behavior in the culture, not just through person-to-person and generation-to-generation transfers of norms, but also through the formal mechanisms that embed positive behavior in team and organizational routines.”

Imagine the energy, efficiency, and creativity of an organization where everyone thinks to win. Our process alters the way people think, plan, and act. But TTW doesn’t end with execution. Long-term success calls for the same systematic change Professor Kanter describes. It requires embedding changes in the culture to sustain and anchor winning results. As we proceed, we detail several proven approaches to achieve this end.

Let’s start with how the skilled use of symbols and signals can help to anchor changes. Often the visual reminders of a symbol can reinforce concepts even more powerfully than words.

A Recipe for Change

Change is anchored into the organization when leaders are deliberate about how they use symbols and rituals to drive action and behavior. Strong leaders who want to create change and ensure that it sticks are deliberate in how they plan, act, and serve as role models for TTW behavior. In their bestseller Leadership Sustainability, Norm Smallwood and Dave Ulrich (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013) emphasize the role leaders play in anchoring change by the attention they pay to the signals and symbols of their actions.

Jim Holbrook put symbols to work when he assumed leadership at the cereal division of Post Foods. Jim knew that he and his team had to act quickly to put in place a turnaround plan to address both short- and long-term business issues. If done correctly, it would provide the blueprint for the future.

Jim and his senior management embraced the key principles of TTW. They created a growth plan that they branded the recipe. It had all the elements of the TTW process—good internal/external assessment, clear goals, strategic priorities, and initiatives. Understanding of the external landscape as well as internal strengths were identified as ingredients for success. Jim has made recipe and cooking the metaphors and symbols for how the leadership team drives execution through the organization. All Post functions and business units create their own recipes, which drive alignment throughout the organization. The symbolic recipes exist today as living, breathing documents. The recipe-on-a-page is displayed throughout Post headquarters. And the business is responding with solid sales growth in a category that’s declining.

Anchoring Starts at the Top

Change gets institutionalized when leaders champion it and work the change into ongoing training and development programs. We’ve already seen how decisively Michelle Stacy worked at Oral-B and Keurig utilizing TTW at both companies. In fact, when Michelle became president of Keurig, one of her first decisions was to instill the Think to Win process into every department of the company, which at the time was more like two companies.

Keurig, which made the individual coffee brewing cups, was founded by a group of entrepreneurs. It was acquired by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which also was a small entrepreneurial company. Two years later it was still trying to mesh Keurig with Green Mountain to form a new whole.

“We had two small companies that had come together,” says Michelle. “But there was no merging of systems, because neither of them had many systems in place. They were run by extremely bright, entrepreneurial people who were used to putting things together on the kitchen table. If you think about it, entrepreneurs are visionaries. They don’t want a lot of structure, and in fact, they spend most of their lives actually avoiding structure. That’s why they became successful entrepreneurs.”

These entrepreneurs were eager to learn more. So the entire management team went through the Think to Win process, starting at the top of the organization. “It did several things for us,” Michelle says. “First, it started to create a discipline about how we would make decisions. Second, it brought a phenomenal training program to the table, which gave these entrepreneurs a really incredible strategic tool. TTW brought groups of 30 people together for two days. It gave everyone the opportunity to not only learn a common language, but also to create team relationships. It got people working together who had never even met before. It was very powerful.”

After going through the workshop, even the skeptics became enthusiasts. They discovered that the process didn’t stifle creativity; it channeled it. The top leadership at Keurig Green Mountain not only went through the training themselves, but they also became faculty, coaches, and mentors to others in the company who attended the workshops after they “graduated.”

The shared TTW experience created a common language and approach to how problems were analyzed that helped to integrate Keurig and Green Mountain.

Meetings—From Wasteful to Productive

Meetings may not be an obvious way to anchor change, especially since so many are unproductive. According to a report by the consulting firm Bain & Company, as much as 15 percent of an organization’s time is spent in meetings, a percentage that has increased every year since 2008. Another study showed that more than 50 percent of the time spent in meetings is unproductive. One study estimated that employees can spend up to four hours each week just preparing for status update meetings.

Yet meetings can be a very productive way to solve problems and align resources. The key is to make meetings productive. When the executive director of a national nonprofit, adopted the productive meeting approach, she reduced the number of meetings and the participants also found themselves looking forward to attending them. Think to Win has an approach that is outlined below.

TTW Meeting Template

In planning any meeting, we need to ask two key questions:

  What is the purpose of this meeting?

  Who needs to attend the meeting?

We need to be guided by five principles:

1. Challenge the assumptions underlying what we are doing.

2. Scope the issues.

3. Focus on the vital few.

4. Acquire a sense of how facts inform outcomes.

5. Provide a linkage that will connect the dots of our plan.

Meeting Guidelines

The following guidelines should be observed:

  Respect all points of view—remember that everyone has a voice.

  Come to the meeting prepared—prework is required.

  Have an agenda with a clear meeting purpose.

  Honor the presenters—don’t allow “sidebar” digressions from the purpose at hand.

  Stay focused: give technology a rest!

  Recap decisions and actions.

  Be on time, and finish on time.

Meeting Process

As the meeting proceeds, we need to ask the following questions and formulate appropriate answers:

1. What do we know?

2. What issues need to be addressed?

3. What decisions need to be made?

4. Follow-ups: Who owns what and by when?

We need to communicate succinctly. Our meeting plan needs to be summarized in key messages focusing in three areas:

  What is the basic situation?

  What action needs to be undertaken?

  What kind of impact will result from this action?

Solving the Accountability Problem

Why is accountability such a universal problem? The main difficulties are that performance management systems don’t link what the company is trying to accomplish and what is expected of the individual either because the system is no good or the managers do a bad job of communicating.

It is critical to establish accountability, and there are easy-to-understand tools that directly tie individual objectives to strategies. When one large multinational company anchored the performance process to its growth plan, engagement scores skyrocketed. Following are the important elements identified by an internal Gallup survey for managers establishing clear expectations:

  Use the performance management process as a tool for accountability (annual objectives and quarterly priorities) and development (individual development plans).

  Delegate responsibility and hold people accountable.

  Lead by example.

  Use periodic staff meetings to review and refine expectations.

To fully align performance and TTW in the organization, regular feedback to individuals is part of the process. In a recent study of more than 47,000 employed respondents in 116 countries, from Canada to Qatar, the Gallup organization (Steve Crabtree,”What Your Employees Need to Know,” Gallup Business Journal, April 13, 2011) found performance feedback sorely lacking, which negatively impacts associate engagement and organizational performance.

Recognition Matters

Recognition matters. Consider Julie’s story. Julie, the head of talent development for a pharmaceutical company, was planning an annual retreat for her function. She wanted to recognize her recruiting team members because they were deeply involved in much of the change that had taken place over the last year. The organization was “rightsizing”—continuously shifting and restructuring—adding headcount to one function while eliminating positions in another.

In the midst of the change, the company also bought a pet-care pharmaceutical company, and Julie and her team had to get the new organization up and running. They had less than 60 days to fill more than 25 leadership roles. Using the TTW process, the recruiting team identified the issues and landed on the right choices.

At the retreat, Julie called on the members of her recruiting team and asked them to list the results they delivered. Once they detailed the list, Julie asked a follow-up question: Why was their effort so important to the long-term health of the organization? The ensuing discussion, which highlighted more than a dozen direct and indirect benefits, was so illuminating that Julie shared a reprise with the leaders of the sales group. And they were so impressed that they passed it on to the president of the division.

The result: The division president rewarded the group with a special dinner in which he honored their accomplishments and how they were done. Later that month the recruiting team showcased its use of TTW to the president’s direct reports. When people are recognized for the accomplishments resulting from TTW, the approach spreads and becomes part of the company culture.

Rewards can also be used to acknowledge and reinforce change. Rewards can take many forms and are an important lever. Often part of an overall compensation system, rewards can be in the form of salary increases, bonuses, and other types of financial incentives. They can also take other forms including time off to spend with family, gift certificates, and many others things. The key to their effectiveness is tying them to do what’s important to the individuals.

HR Practices to Sustain Winning

Management systems that enable sustainable behavior change will work, according to Ulrich and Smallwood, because they “signal, reinforce, and encourage it.” (Leadership Sustainability, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013) In any organization or any team, winning cannot occur if leaders are torn between what the organization wants and what they must ultimately do. On the organizational scale, polices that anchor change are found in HR practices. Ulrich and Smallwood summarize these as being present in four flows. (See Table 9.3.)

TABLE 9.3.   THE FOUR FLOWS

HR Practices Help Sustain Winning

When Dave West was recruited from Hershey’s to run Del Monte Foods, he had a track record of success. During his tenure at Hershey’s, he had cut costs, consolidated operations, accelerated product innovation, and put Hershey’s on a path for success. Dave, a longtime user of TTW, knew that even more change would be needed at Del Monte.

Founded more than a century ago, Del Monte has been one of the largest producers, distributors, and marketers of foods, generating billions in annual sales. For generations, Del Monte was known for its popular lines of canned fruits and vegetables as well as its Contadina Italian-style sauces. Over time, Del Monte’s reputation for high-quality products began to morph into a perception that while Del Monte continued to be high quality it also had become old-fashioned, bordering on stodgy. It was one of many factors that made a turnaround and rebirth essential.

Dave and his team recognized that Del Monte needed to increase its investment to build its brands and also reshape its image. As Del Monte’s reinvention began, the company was reorganized around four major sectors: operations, growth, finance, and human resources. The vision was to become a best-in-class consumer packaged goods company, with go-to-market and supply chain excellence, underpinned by a high-performance culture and an engaged workforce.

One of the key players that Dave wanted to work with him was an HR executive who could hit the ground running—someone who understood how to think, plan, and act. Importantly, Dave also wanted someone who could speak the TTW language and take on two key challenges: (1) create an HR function that served as a partner to the business in tackling its issues, and (2) create the systems and practices that would help it to win. Dave wanted practices that would not only change the company, but that would also help guide its long-term success.

Dave found the person he was looking for in Asad Husain, a seasoned executive who had used the TTW process while a senior HR executive at the Gillette Company and then at Procter & Gamble. As a member of the HR operating committee at Gillette, he was instrumental in the successful transformation of the Gillette organization during its turnaround. He was also well respected for his role in the integration of Gillette when it was acquired by P&G. Following P&G, Asad had served as the global head of HR at Dun & Bradstreet.

HR plays a critical role in anchoring change in any organization, and Asad Husain faced many issues when he joined Del Monte. There was no comprehensive talent management system to attract, select, develop, plan, and manage a high-performance workforce. Employee turnover was high, and employee engagement was low. Critical managerial vacancies had gone unfilled for months. Plus, the focus of HR had remained largely administrative. Internal surveys showed that HR was overinvested in administrative activities and underinvested in attracting and retaining quality talent. In other words, it was doing a good job on relatively unimportant matters and not reaching expectations on the things that mattered most to the business.

It became clear to Asad that for Del Monte to win, the new human resources capability would have to operate more strategically than it had in the past. It would have to refocus on attracting new talent and building team member engagement at all levels of the company. This meant that he must accomplish two tasks. To achieve the enterprisewide business goal, the HR team had to rise to a different level. To enable the change throughout Del Monte, HR had to focus on all the people systems. To support the Del Monte businesses, changes were required in management systems—talent acquisition, rewards systems, performance systems, and also changes in how HR saw itself, a change in its understanding of the role it played. It had to move swiftly and vigorously from just supporting the current structure to becoming a leader of change throughout the company.

To begin the transformation process, Asad engaged his HR team with the TTW approach, with an overall goal to develop a high-performance HR organization that could help transform Del Monte. He brought his key managers together to conduct a fact-based situation assessment of internal strengths and weaknesses, and external opportunities and threats. They identified key issues and strategies to set up the HR function and deliver business plans. Using this process, Asad got a true picture of what was needed. He knew that if the HR organization didn’t think and act differently, it would not be able to meet the changing needs of the business.

He communicated his strategic priorities to Dave West and began to implement the changes. The Del Monte organization tackled each of the following areas of flow by modifying HR practices identified in its strategic plan to accelerate turnaround and sustain winning in the marketplace:

  Flow of information. Used specific communication and training to better provide line of sight and clarity to company’s strategic direction and alignment on organizational priorities. Got everyone on same page.

  Flow of work. Focused on why design changes would help strengthen interdependencies and ensure performance linkage. Linked performance measurement to strategic goals across the board by organizing around process and workflow.

  Flow of people. Shifted from disparate process and systems to the Del Monte way—an enterprise approach for talent processes (that is, how to: hire, promote, develop, retain, assess, and so on) with defined linkages (inputs/outputs). Positioned competencies as the foundation for talent management processes (leadership and functional)— change from silos to create an environment where talent is considered to be an enterprise resource and leaders are transparent, collaborative, and act cross-functionally. Established a more formal approach to employee development by ensuring that all employees have an individual development plan. Some plans will call for accelerated development.

  Flow of performance management. Simplified the high-performance culture performance management process for improved goal alignment, accountability, and line of sight to the strategy of the company. Provided additional manager education on effective performance management and coaching.

The result was the creation of a capability that influenced the business and played a significant part in the transformation of the company. And importantly, it set the company up for changes that were to come. Within a year, the company acquired and successfully integrated the Natural Balance business, and the organization was prepared for its bigger role.

Then, in 2014, Del Monte Foods sold its food businesses—and its name—to an unaffiliated company—Del Monte Pacific Ltd. On the day after the sale, the legacy Del Monte operation renamed itself Big Heart Pet Brands and became the largest stand-alone pet food and pet snacks company in North America. With solid HR practices anchored in place, the organization was ready to face the future.

Chapter Summary

  TTW doesn’t end with execution. Long-term success calls for the systematic change, embedding it in the culture to sustain and anchor winning results.

  Skilled use of symbols and signals can help to anchor changes. Often the visual reminders of a symbol can reinforce concepts even more powerfully than words.

  Change gets institutionalized when leaders champion it and work the change into ongoing training and development programs.

  Meetings may not be an obvious way to anchor change, especially since so many are unproductive. Yet meetings can be a very productive way to solve problems and align resources. The key is to limit them and make them productive.

  Establishing accountability is critical, and there are simple, easy-to-understand tools that directly link individual objectives to strategies.

  Recognition matters. Once people know they are recognized for using TTW, it spreads quickly and becomes part of the company culture.

Chapter 9 Exercises

Mastering Think to Win

We need to focus on change.

Anchoring Change

Anchoring changes into the organization means pushing or pulling levers that drive behavior. TTW provides several powerful tools, each of which helps you think about how to sustain changes in your organization.

Ask the following:

  How am I recognizing and rewarding others?

  Do we have the policies and procedures in place to help us drive the appropriate behavior?

  How are we investing in building TTW capabilities?

  What can I learn from the world of sports teams that have been successful over the long run? What mechanism have they put in place to anchor change?

Change is best anchored by the levers that we are able to push in an organization. We have identified what we call soft levers (those that are easier to put in place) and hard levers (those that take much more effort to change). All are important and must be considered as a way to win!

Exercise: Steps to Anchoring Change
(Can be done at individual or group level)

Choose a lever that needs to be pushed. Identify at least three potential actions that could help improve the way people behave in the organization. Consider the following criteria and assess and rank order your initiatives against the criteria.

  Impact

  Ease of implementation

  Time

  Cost

Choose which actions you are recommending and why:

  Discuss

  Review for clarity

  Align on action

The deliverable are actions that can be put in place to help anchor changes.

Organizational Assessment

Use the following table as a checklist for identifying TTW principles and practices. This will help you to better understand where you and your team need to focus your energies. To get an idea where you believe your organization stands, read through each statement and jot down a rating:

Review individual items. Look for items where you scored lower (3 and below) and think about the following questions:

  What do I believe is driving the score?

  What do I need to stop, start, or continue doing?

  What do I hope the result to be?