Business Leadership Transformation

We helped one of the world’s best-known brands transform its culture by ensuring employees at all levels understood and could apply new expectations of leadership standards and employee behaviors.

The Need

Our client is a well-established consumer goods company—over 100 years old—with a beloved brand and comfortable culture steeped in its long history. The relatively new CEO, who was recruited from an outside organization, wanted to establish a new vision and mission focused on delivering growth through innovative products, acquisition, and market expansion. She wanted employees to align to this new vision and mission without losing touch with the values that were the bedrock of the company’s success.

Further compounding the challenge of achieving aggressive growth targets and ambitious goals were changing market conditions. Most notably, consumer tastes were changing, and the company needed to be strategically focused, innovative, and agile.

The company had communicated and reinforced the core behaviors and leadership standards the year before. As a result, people knew about the new vision, mission, and behaviors, but they often struggled to connect these concepts to their daily work. It’s one thing to clearly communicate a vision—but quite another effort to ensure individuals are connected to the vision and can bring it to life.

Blueline was called in to reinforce the CEO’s desire to facilitate a change in the culture. Our goal was to put the company’s vision, mission, values, and behaviors in the context of each individual’s job role. The client also needed us to help leaders explore how to champion this transformation by demonstrating the new leadership standards.

The Blueline Solution

We started our engagement with an on-site, day-long project kick-off meeting with key leadership to define the objectives and core content. We later went back for another day of interviews with key business leaders to discuss how changing culture and encouraging the adoption of new values can benefit from a team-based learning solution.

Subsequently, we created two workshops that leveraged a combination of our Blueprint^™ learning visuals and our ExperienceBUILDER^™scenario simulations. The first workshop was for all employees. It focused on exploring the company’s vision, values, and behaviors using a learning visual that invited employees to go on a metaphorical journey.

The second workshop was designed specifically for leaders, who needed to be able to lead by the key principles and reinforce desired behaviors. The workshop consisted of two parts: a learning visual that invited leaders to explore the new leadership standards, followed by an ExperienceBUILDER simulation in which participants explored ways to apply what they had just learned to the specific challenges they would likely face in the transforming organization.

The Result

The company valued Blueline’s ability to help facilitate alignment across the various stakeholders; our flexibility and responsiveness; and the engagement the sessions generated.

Leaders assess themselves on their proficiency with the new knowledge and skills before and after the training.

Their scores jumped from 51% pre-training to 99% post-training with 91% of leaders stating that they would recommend the program to their peers.

The workshops and simulations were translated into Chinese, French, Portuguese, and Spanish for global teams.

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