How do you eat an elephant?

Managing BIG change for competitive success…

Just nine months ago, I embraced a new, exciting though unexpected challenge.

Wrested from a global role at Tui, following a charm offensive by my now boss, I found myself heading up the company I had only just left a few years earlier… ASEL. Upon arrival it was obvious that I had landed in the hot seat of a sleeping giant. So much potential is very, very exciting. But until you learn how to cook a souffle, you’re just faced with a bowl of broken eggs!

It was also clear to me that in order to please my charming new paymaster – Frank Argenbright and his Board in the USA – change would have to be made swiftly and effectively. That’s one of the few cons to the many pros of having a boss who started with $500 and created a $2.5Bn business, employing 100,000 people, in a little over a decade – patience is not high up there on his list of personal qualities!

However, the challenges immediately apparent were significant. How then to eat an elephant? Well, it turns out that the correct approach is… one bite at a time! So, I put on my best elephant eating trousers and contrived a plan; so cunning that you could “pin a tail on it and call it a fox” (love a bit of Black Adder).

The starting point, as with all great plans is to set your objective.

If ASEL was to be reinvigorated, it had to be reimagined. To do that we needed to make cultural changes throughout the organisation. And that, dear reader, is where the Harvard Business Review and I became firm friends…

This venerable repository of business excellence, a valued companion to innumerable managers seeking to bring change to their organisations over the decades, acts for many as a definitive guide to what is hot, and what is not, in management circles.

And I found myself drawn inextricably at an early stage to its brilliant insights into the importance of developing a corporate culture as the starting point for any seismic change in a large organisation…

The phrase ‘Corporate Culture’ originated in the 60s. It did not really become mainstream until some 30yrs later. Today it is firmly part of the modern business lexicon. And yet, if pressed, would you be able to give a definition of the phrase many threw around with carefree abandon?

According to Investopedia, Corporate Culture refers to the values, beliefs, and behaviours that are common or understood at a company. These are important because they determine how a company’s employees and management interact, perform and handle business transactions.

A company’s culture will be reflected in elements such as its hiring decisions, treatment of employees and clients, and the levels of client satisfaction it attains.

Often, corporate culture is implied, not expressly defined, and develops organically over time from the cumulative traits of the people that the company hires.

The Importance of Corporate Culture A carefully considered, even innovative, corporate culture can elevate companies above their competitors, support long-term growth, and underpin a company’s longevity.

Benefits of a positive corporate culture that contribute to business success include:

• Building a positive workplace environment
• Creating an engaged, enthusiastic and motivated workforce
• Attracting high-value employees
• Improving employee morale
• Improving performance quality and productivity
• Building favourable business results

SOLD! To the man in the elephant eating trousers…

The Harvard Business Review has identified six important characteristics of successful corporate cultures. The first two of these are Vision and Values…

Vision

Whether communicated via a simple mission statement or a corporate manifesto, a company’s vision can be a powerful tool. It sets the tone of its private workings, letting employees know what the long-term goals and mission of the company are. Vision also shapes marketing and brand building, which define a company’s public image in the eyes of consumers.

Values

Values, while a broad concept, can embody the thinking and perspectives necessary to achieve a company’s vision. They can serve as a beacon for behaviour necessary to progress toward all manner of success. Examples of values include fairness, trustworthiness, integrity, performance excellence, teamwork, and a high-quality customer experience.

My starting point was simple. To ask every single one of my 5,000 colleagues how they wanted the company to be shaped. And what was the culture that they wanted to be part of. All replies were anonymous. We then sifted the results to look for patterns and emerging themes. We overlaid that with our US parent’s mission and values and created a set of values that form our vision and our values today; the guiding principles that help us every day.

You may think that the response would be self-serving, about money and profits. However, that was a million miles from the facts.

Emerging themes were putting people first by first empowering them and then demanding accountability for how they wielded their power.

The word ‘passion’ was a recurrent theme. Our colleagues wanted to be ‘authentic’ and to put people and purpose first in every action that they took.

And ‘fearless’ – as an organisation we should embrace challenges and empower people to make changes to respond through innovation and adopting disruptive technology. And all of this without fear of failure and the consequences.

But that was not all.

t is one thing to look introspectively at what we wanted. What our people felt was important. However, the most important person in all of this is the customer…

To make sure that our customers were on board. To that end we created a road show and took our new values and vision to our customers, making sure that we aligned with their values and vision – or at least that they were complementary to what they were seeking to achieve themselves.

Overall, the experience has been transformative. Our people feel they belong to an organisation that gets what they are about, and our customers feel the same way too.

There have been many, many changes at ASEL. Not everything has been all beer and skittles. Yet over the nine months we have been transforming the business, only one customer has left us… and who knows, maybe they will come back once they see what we have managed to do in under a year.

What comes next? According the Harvard Business Review that is my favourite subject: People.

So, tune in next week for another exciting elephant eating episode…

Dan Hardy
Group MD