Case Studies & Testimonials
Making Business Integration Work
The Australian integration team, led by Karen, successfully completed this in just 18 months and achieved all of the identified milestones on time and on budget. Beyond these results Karen was a great sounding board for me and my leadership team throughout the whole experience.
When the global team reflected on the Australian team success and what stood us apart from others, it was clear that the critical element was the approach that the team took to unlocking high performance team collaboration.
It's great to see this codified approach is now sitting at the heart of Karen and Katherine’s business, so that other organisations can benefit from the power of exceptional team work.
Business Transformation
There were three critical factors that helped us transform. The first was getting clear on the new business strategy, the second was making some adjustments to our senior leadership team and the final piece focused on cultural evolution.
The critical enabler to these changes was the focus we brought to nurturing a culture of safety and applying a collaboration system for all of our teams.
I continue to be so proud of the results the ANZ team were able to achieve and I am excited to know that other businesses could now benefit from Karen and Katherine’s passion, experience and skills in helping teams to unlock their potential.
Best in class S&OP+
In 2015 we embarked on a journey to achieve a gold S&OP+ status which we knew would add more accuracy to the delivery of monthly targets and business forecasting. Naturally this would support our supply chain, customer engagement and P&L delivery.
Through detailed qual and quant research we found that although we did have some work to do on improving the “what” of the functional process most of the opportunity existed in the “how”. We found that improvements could be made with more efficient meetings, having decisions being made in the intended forums, ensuring actions were followed up, people were held accountable and importantly we practiced the behaviours that were the enablers for effective collaboration and team work.
The key focus of addressing the how was having our entire S&OP+ team trained together in Crucial Conversations. It was so powerful to have them experience the training together and they were then able to support each other in nurturing their learning. It was also beneficial to have Karen and Katherine deliver the training as they were able to tailor the examples to the realities of the business at the time. We also applied the Collaboration Program which helped teams be clear, disciplined and intentional about how they worked together.
The results of the changes saw us improve our S&OP+ to the highest rating of gold.
If your business needs help in improving the how of your key businesses processes, then Karen and Katherine can help.
Accelerating Customer Centricity
The tool we used to assess our performance is the Advantage Group Survey that ranks companies in the FMCG industry. The intent of the survey is to help suppliers understand what is important to them and how they can work together more effectively.
In 2017 the team launched an intentional full business focus on improving our customer centricity and after 18 months of focus we proudly achieved a top 2 rank in 2017.
I have no doubt that a critical enabler to this achievement was the focus the business had placed on building a culture of safety and developing collaboration capabilities across all teams.
Any business that is looking to connect more effectively with customers by unlocking the potential in their teams would benefit from talking to Katherine and Karen.
Thought Leadership
Corporate Collaboration Resources, LLC
Building Strong Leadership Teams
A Successful M & A
Mergers and acquisitions are notoriously difficult to get right. Statistically for most businesses - especially large businesses - the net outcome is that M&A activity loses shareholder value. Karen would often quote Peter Drucker in saying that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. We all know that cultural integration plays a key role in the success or failure of the integration or merger but so few of us know what a great strategy looks like or how to get there. Katherine and Karen were able to guide the business in not only setting the strategy for cultural integration but also drilling down to team-building at a functional and subfunctional level - starting with the leadership team and cascading through the organisation. By the time the strategy was operational and the integration underway the business was buzzing with excitement and a ‘can do’ attitude. Given that there were redundancies involved and the usual level of uncertainty that comes with this kind of activity, this was a truly outstanding outcome.
And the proof is in the final results - last year was the first full year of integration and a hugely successful year for the business. Business targets were met and employees rewarded with the bonuses they so richly deserved after a very full year. This is an exceptional result. In spite what could have been a very disruptive process - and what we had witnessed in similar activity within other companies in our industry - our business integration was smooth and employee engagement was maintained largely due to the partnership with Katherine and Karen. I highly recommend them and look forward to working with them again.