Focusing attention on the management cadre
Our role in supporting and facilitating change at Rentokil Pest Control included a strong emphasis on developing the company’s existing management population. And although the strategy was evolutionary, the pace of the programme was revolutionary. All managers (as well as some senior technical and sales staff) had to apply for newly redesigned positions, and while this resulted in a few departures the process proved extremely effective in identifying the right people for the right roles as well as understanding the development requirements. As a result it succeeded in delivering a number of core managers who have already emerged as key shapers and enablers of the new culture – people with the skills and competencies to take the business forward confidently.
The project’s initial phase involved extensive fact-finding: meeting people, building relationships, and getting to understand the prevailing culture and the problems associated with it. This was emphatically not just an objective data collection exercise but an essential preliminary to future collaboration, providing the basis for a genuine partnership approach. The underlying premise was that progress would only be achieved by working together, rather than by Wingivers importing ready-made solutions. Winning the trust and respect of the existing workforce was therefore crucial: the focus was not on evaluating how things were being done, but on identifying and acknowledging existing problems, and discovering how things could be made to improve.
One practical outcome of this initial phase involved communicating the proposed change programme to management: how and why the structure would have to change, and why jobs would have to change with it. Rather than concentrating on HR minutiae, the message was firmly centred on the business rationale for change: without it, the company simply could not be turned round. It was big-picture stuff: ‘we’re changing the way we run the business, and we’re going to start by developing you’ (i.e. through assessment centres). The communication programme was also realistic in acknowledging the inadequacy of the previous internal communications climate. It stressed that the new, more open climate would require managers to communicate more effectively with their staff, encouraging their questions and thus creating a genuine dialogue. In addition, a help-line was set up, enabling staff to speak directly to senior management on aspects of the change programme and how it could affect them individually. Instead of being made to feel that they were being subjected to a process when working with Wingivers, managers were actively helping to shape and develop the activity themselves.
All the information from the fact-finding and discussion sessions was fed into the design of the assessment centres. Their aim was to help refocus the business along more customer-centric lines, looking at everything from corporate values to individual job design in the process, and seeing how managers could begin to implement the new approach in their day-to-day operations. Once people had been reappointed as managers, they started to implement the new thinking -making evidence- and data-based decisions, rather than being exclusively action-oriented; working collaboratively with team-members, rather than merely instructing them; and understanding the impact of the new processes as they replaced the previous increasingly ineffective modus operandi.
Although it was something of a roller-coaster for the individuals involved, the whole assessment process with its three-way feedback was seen as highly effective. Immediately after receiving their own feedback, managers went straight to being trained as assessors in order to assess their own people and train them in readiness for the new-style organisation.
At the same time, key work was being done on the customer interface. Stressing the need for alternative ways of working, this involved working alongside and talking to people at all levels within the organisation to identify existing pockets of good practice and circulate them more widely.
A series of workshop days helped to embed the new strategy in the way managers approached their jobs. These covered a whole range of topics, from the change curve to problem analysis to communications. But instead of simply disseminating new policy and practice, they focused on getting managers to talk about their experiences, using real-life examples of business problems.
By developing ideas that came out of the assessment centres and linking them back to business aims, managers were able to gain ownership of and responsibility for the new approach, enabling them to take effective action. One key outcome was to make them realise that expectations of how they were expected to perform had changed radically (in effect, many of them had not really been ‘managing’ at all before).
There was real optimism that things were indeed changing for the better – and belief that there was now genuine support for overcoming the difficulties facing the business. In addition, Wingivers continued to work with managers on the follow-up conference activity and workshops, equipping them to develop and run these high-impact events themselves.