Creating a one company culture for greater success

Creating a one company culture for greater success

Maximize teamwork, achieve greater synergy by instilling an enterprise mindset and values One company, one team, one culture, aligned around the same vision, living by the same values, making decisions for the greater good, getting the best synergy and collaboration across all divisions, business units, product and customer segments. Does this describe your organization? Or does this describe a state of being that you would like for your organization but you continue to be frustrated that it falls short of this ideal? Based on Senn Delaney s work for 40 years with companies globally around these issues, we know that most CEOs are seeking to overcome challenges in how people work together to improve bottom- and top-line performance. At a time when organizations have to perform at their best, they are often stuck at average, trying to manage through turbulent change, or create greater cohesiveness across a complex or matrixed structure, with a geographically dispersed workforce, complicated reporting reltionships, a lack of overall company clarity and alignment, competition for resources, turf wars and often poor communication. It is rare to find organizations with product and geographic diversification that is fully integrated, aligned and executing synergistically. Most companies operate somewhere in between. They have business units, product or customer segments as well as geographic units. Somehow, all these elements need to work together. How do you best utilize the functions or centers of excellence? How do you maximize shared services? How do you serve customers more seamlessly? How do you get everyone working towards a common vision, thinking for the greater good? Answering these questions can add billions of dollars of value to Fortune 500 companies and tens if not hundreds of millions to smaller ones. The real solution is not just about changing the structure or changing the leadership team, but rather, refocusing the culture around a one-company approach. The lever to drive the change is the functioning of the senior team (the CEO and direct reports). Some benefits of creating a one-company culture Faster execution of strategies, better decision making Improved business results Better team dynamics with more alignment, collaboration, trust and mutual support Greater agility to move faster with change An enhanced total customer experience Greater levels of accountability at all leadership and management levels Stronger cross-organizational collaboration to create greater value across the enterprise The following behaviors are among the overriding imperatives: 1. A commitment to the greater good versus a self-interest mindset. 2. An increased emphasis on open communication, trust, common language, flexibility and focus on breaking down silos between units, functions, departments and operating business units. 3. Developing a supportive team together, team apart culture among top leaders. Here are three examples of organizations that have worked to create this culture. Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare: Creating a Power of One' culture to maximize system performance Memphis-based eight-hospital health care system Methodist Le Bonheur worked to drive a Power of One culture throughout the organization. It was a number of years ago that we really decided that the vision for the organization needed to be one that created a health care system that was one of the best in the country, said Gary Shorb, who led the culture transformation while serving as CEO. We knew that the missing ingredient was our culture; that we really had to address that. You can have all the best talent, the best plans and you can have the best strategy, objectives and goals. But without the culture piece being absolutely right, we were not going to achieve the kind of results we needed to achieve. It is the magic that makes everything else work. Goals of the Power of One culture The goals of the culture transformation included creating a system mindset so that decisions are made for the greater good, building and broadening accountability, and having more open and candid dialogue to handle tough issues. Other goals included: Create a consistent, patient-centered brand experience across all hospitals and systems Improve teamwork and interaction among the senior leaders as well as other leaders within hospitals within the corporate structure Improve financial performance Increase patient satisfaction Improve employee engagement scores Creating a one company culture for greater success [2]

The Power of One culture reinforced the one culture approach based on MLH s organizational values: Service, Quality, Integrity, Teamwork and Innovation; and connected to their goal of putting patients and their families at the heart of everything they do. Key principles to successful change 1 2 purposeful leadership personal change Results of the culture transformation As a result of this focus, the executive team saw improvements in strategic alignment, annual planning and budgeting, broader system thinking, a climate of trust and engagement and sharing of best practices. There was improvement on every goal. The system is in the top five percent in the nation on associate satisfaction. In clinical quality, scores are in the top quartile. The system went from a BBB bond rating with Standard & Poors and Moody s to an A+ rating. Patient satisfaction scores achieved top quartile. The CEO and senior leadership must own and lead the cultureshaping process. broad 3 engagement 4 Momentum, energy and critical mass are needed to engage all employees in the desired culture. People need to unfreeze existing habits and make personal behavior change. focused sustainability Systematic reinforcement is needed at individual, team and organization levels to embed the culture. It was ranked one of the 2016 Best Workplaces in Health Care, by Great Place to Work and Fortune magazine. For the second year in a row, it was named to Becker's Hospital Review 2016 list of its 150 Great Places to Work in Healthcare in the United States. Le Bonheur Children s Hospital became among only seven percent of hospitals in the country to have earned the distinction of Magnet status in 2016 by the American Nurses Credentialing Center. The Power of One serves as the touchstone for Methodist LeBonheur s culture. At the heart of Power of One are the MLH values: Along with the guiding behaviors, the values help people understand how to work together to serve patients, their families and the community by living them each day. Operating as one team and one organization has given Methodist a strategic advantage in an increasingly competitive and volatile market. It has also enabled the healthcare system to create a consistent brand experience from hospital to hospital and across its corporate functions by building on an already strong foundation to take performance to an even higher level. Iglo Group: Creating a competitive, collaborative culture to enable growth Iglo Group grew to become the marketleading frozen foods business in Europe, operating in 11 countries across Europe. It acquired the Italian Findus business, making Iglo a truly European business. With a relatively new executive team and an ambitious plan to create a centralized product and marketing function, Iglo Group had a clear need to create a common culture based on speed, high performance and collaboration. Then CEO Martin Glenn created a highperformance culture throughout the company to support the ambitions of aggressive top-line growth and improved synergies and productivity. We built a platform for growth and we wanted to accelerate, said Glenn. We realized that our biggest barrier was us, not the marketplace, not our competitors, but how we were operating, how we were behaving with each other. We needed to take a good fresh look at trying to make a modern, progressive culture work for us across the European business. Goals of the culture transformation There was a matrix organization that needed a common language and values to enable idea sharing, leveraging best practices and making decisions across the enterprise. An expanded leadership team, with new members, needed to be aligned around the common culture. Multiple Creating a one company culture for greater success [3]

legacy cultures, especially at the top, had to be integrated. Other goals included fostering a culture positive energy and outward competitiveness with inward collaboration to enable achievement of business goals and effective operation in the matrix, connecting people with the compelling purpose of the business and create an environment of teamwork, focus and decisiveness, not just at times of crisis but during usual business operations. Glenn and the executive leadership team created a fresh set of values called PACE (Performance, Ambition, Collaboration and Energy), aligning the whole organization around these values and focusing the business on key areas that would make the most difference in achieving Iglo s ambition. Glenn credited the creation of a clear, unifying purpose, and the work to define and bring its core PACE values to life throughout the organization. This created a culture that has been a key enabler for success. Within a year, the company grew at a rapid pace to become a European sector leader. Among other results: Better decision making and sharing of ideas, enabling the Findus acquisition to be quickly integrated Record financial performance in 2011 Increased employee engagement Market share growth in almost every market Recognized as Food Manufacturing Company of the Year in 2012 by the Food Manufacturing Excellence Awards in recognition for all-around excellence. Glenn said the PACE culture was a key tool to enable and accelerate its growth strategy: 2011 was our best year yet. We achieved our fifth consecutive year of core category sales and EBITDA growth and delivered on all of our financial targets. I am proud of the management team s ability to integrate a large-scale business. Children's Hospital of Wisconsin health system: creating an integrated, patient-centered enterprise When Peggy Troy became CEO of Children s Hospital of Wisconsin health system, it was in the midst of major transformational change that would involve and affect the entire organization and the way it delivers care to children. Structured as a functional business model enterprise with 13 different divisions, it was transitioning to an integrated delivery model, and implementing an electronic health record system that would serve as a catalyst to support this integrated approach to care. One of the things that I found when I came here is we were not very well integrated, particularly as you look at the child and the family as a center of what we do. We find that our biggest opportunity and also our biggest challenge is really to integrate around them so that we can create pathways for our children to be successful over the time, Troy said. She understood that this major shift, as well as the sweeping changes impacting hospitals and healthcare systems through health care reform, would also require culture change in order to implement its strategy and fulfill its vision that kids be the healthiest in the nation. The key goal was to foster an At Our Best culture that shifted people beyond the episodic care approach to a more allencompassing Population Health strategy of serving children from cradle to college. That was the North Star of our strategic plan and we realized if we could integrate all the different pieces and parts of our organization, we would be able to achieve a very audacious goal, said Troy. An important part of the culture work involved building partnerships and increased collaboration and alignment with physicians. Collaboration is one of those things that we hadn t done well in the past because we just didn t pay attention. And again, with all the pieces and parts of our organization, we had to bring it all together. Troy said the culture-shaping work has truly made a difference. An important key to success was creation of a clear purpose and a set of values and guiding behaviors to bring the culture to life across all services and departments. It makes us so much better in how we are able to first and foremost show up as an individual and live out our values as we are working with our families. We are looking at ourselves very differently as a system of care, as opposed to a bunch of discrete little units, said Troy. Troy was intentional about including doctors in the culture change early on. We realized that the only way we were going to be at our best was to have a very healthy working relationship between the provider community, the administration and all employees. That was just key. And it set us up for success in ways that I would never have imagined. I saw a change in the physician involvement, the physician commitment to the success of what we were trying to accomplish. They owned it in a way in which I would never have expected. Their effectiveness in working with us is so much better than it was before. *** These are justa few examples where organizations that made a long-term commitment to creating and instilling a one company culture reaped major benefits. Larry Senn (lsenn@senndelaney.com) is the founder and chairman of cultureshaping firm Senn Delaney, a Heidrick & Struggles company. Creating a one company culture for greater success [4]

About Senn Delaney Senn Delaney is the culture-shaping firm of Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc., the premier provider of Executive Search, Culture Shaping and Leadership Consulting services worldwide. Founded in 1978, Senn Delaney was the first firm in the world to focus exclusively on transforming cultures. A singular focus of creating healthy, high-performance cultures has made us the leading international authority and successful practitioner of culture shaping that enhances the spirit and performance of organizations. Corporate offices Los Angeles 7755 Center Avenue Suite 900 Huntington Beach, California, 92647 t (562) 426 5400 London 40 Argyll Street London W1F 7EB United Kingdom main office line: +44 20 70754260 (from the U.S.: 011 44 207 075 4260) Web site: www.senndelaney.com Video channel: sdtv.senndelaney.com 2017 Senn-Delaney Leadership Consulting Group, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced in any form without written permission of Senn-Delaney Leadership Consulting Group, LLC Creating a one company culture for greater success [5]