The client challenge
Senior leaders of our client, a European mining organisation, asked blackswan to:
- Facilitate a clear understanding of the requirements of leadership
- Develop world-class cross-cultural working relationships
- Enable effective action planning at all organisational levels
- Deliver a clear model of accountability and responsibility
- Address current issues and barriers to success
- Communicate the leadership model across all business functions
- Align all business teams to strategy
- Ensure and build team awareness through the use of team assessment tools
The blackswan solution
blackswan delivered a 3-year programme to the client, beginning with the formulation of a Leadership Model, followed by its communication throughout the business. Critical to the success of the programme was to ensure the HR strategy and the leadership model was couched in terms grounded in the day to day reality of the business.
blackswan surfaced the typical barriers to change from the participants’ perspectives. Within team sessions, this helped to generate a desire to change, an emergent capability to change and recognition of the barriers and enablers individuals would encounter during the modernisation journey.
blackswan also ensured that a significant and critical part of the learning process was the preparation and evaluation. Workshops were delivered across the ExCo team, HR, Marketing and finance incorporating significant personal and team evaluation to ensure that the learning environment was as structured and effective as possible.
The programme cascaded the process throughout the organisation and progressively build a complete culture of high performance, where everyone in the organisation consistently works together to improve performance. It transformed the usual resistance to change, which requires great effort to ‘push-in’ changes, to a highly motivated situation that will ‘pull-in’ changes for subsequent improvements.
The client outcome
We worked with the client to utilise strategic ‘Systems-Thinking’ which enable teams to work together more effectively.
The result was teams creating ‘joined up solutions’ and eliminating ‘black holes’ which went onto impact people’s behaviour by changing the perception of their own job. A significant reduction in ‘silo’ thinking was achieved, along with an aligned business model and members of all teams facing their business challenges head on.
blackswan also supported the teams to measure performance in a way that focused the whole organisation on maximising value and allowed Senior Directors to successfully deal with ‘problem people’ head on.
