New attitudes, behaviours and ways of working - Case Study

Transforming a support service to a commercial operation

A large international trade association needed to reorganise key activities so that it could cease to be dependent upon membership fees and generate sufficient profits to reduce the fees charged to Members for other support services. A key factor in this change was the centralisation of a newly created division and the removal of local control by panels representing users. Local users would now become customers, and Member control would be exercised only at Board level.

We designed and facilitated a change programme for the Managing Director of this new Division and his team. The purpose was to reorient the entire workforce of several hundred people based throughout the world to support the achievement of the new commercial goals.

Major challenges included not only the transitioning of key local relationships from controller to customer but also the management of a major technical change programme based on new electronic distribution and data collection systems and the requirement to implement these changes in a corporate context of needing to reduce costs.

We developed a three level approach to this assignment:

Working at Divisional Board level we facilitated the continued alignment of business, IT and leadership goals. One element of this was the feedback of the effectiveness of perceived behaviours and the use of case history and practice to cement organisational learning.

Working for the Operations Director we designed and facilitated workshops where complete teams embraced the new requirements and worked in detail through the actions and behaviours that would be necessary to deliver them. These outputs were quantified and the ensuing goals incorporated into the Division’s programme. Since they were led by the local managers, an important output from these workshops was that they provided an experiential base for the new management cultures.

Lastly we supported individual managers through face to face and on-line coaching, addressing issues as diverse as managing cultural diversity, improving customer service, developing marketing plans, and implementing new IT and communication systems.

Since the assignment was completed we have continued to provide occasional training and coaching at the request of the managers.