The York Consulting Team, Inc.

Leadership Benchstrength

A very successful, large high-tech business, concerned about the company's benchstrength for future leaders, asked The York Consulting Team to interview 100 of their top leaders to determine the level of confidence in the existing leadership, perception of the actual benchstrength, recommendations for how to develop future leaders, and the skills and abilities they thought would be most important to lead the company in the future. The results and recommendations were shared with the Executive leadership and ultimately led to a new leadership platform and development process to build talent.

The York Consulting Team assisted the Vice President of Marketing and Sales of a national wireless telecommunications business in building capabilities in the senior leadership team.  Along with providing in-depth individual coaching for team members, we conducted a team peer-peer feedback process.  Interviews were conducted with each team member to gather feedback about strengths and opportunity areas for the Vice President and each of the functional Directors.  After individual coaching to create development plans based on their confidential summary reports, a team meeting was held to discuss the results. Each member had an opportunity to receive positive affirmations about their strengths and specific suggestions for understanding and overcoming opportunity areas.  The complete and candid feedback from their peer group accelerated individual leadership development.

The Executive Vice President of a large high-tech company asked The York Consulting Team to assist in resolving conflicts and building cross-functional collaboration between the Engineering/Development department and the Product Marketing Department.  Tensions had been growing on both sides, the company was facing major changes, and there was a growing concern about the ability to retain key talent. Customer satisfaction was the ultimate objective.

In depth interviews were conducted with all parties from both organizations.  Questions were asked about what works and doesn't work today, the purpose and roles in each department and beliefs about the other group, strengths and opportunity areas, and what each department would likely say about the strengths and opportunity areas of the other department, etc. Themes were developed and shared with the Executive Vice President.

A joint offsite retreat brought both departments together to explore the themes and develop a joint action plan for improvement.  New working agreements were developed and all parties made a commitment to follow through with metrics to assess their progress.

The York Consulting Team worked with a Resource Management team to build and implement a transition plan to merge six separate work units in Human Resources into one new organizational entity.  Working with the managers, we provided a blueprint for change and regular coaching to help navigate the transition as they hired talented people into new cross-functional teams. The teams were chartered to provide analytic, consultative, and administrative support to seven functional Directors (some of whom were new to their roles as well).

Team members applied for the new jobs and came into the new roles with in-depth specialist knowledge and experience; they would need to build Human Resource generalist skills by adding one new specialty area to their portfolio.  In some areas they assumed lead roles, mentoring others with less experience, and in alternate situations they were mentored. Their Resource Manager supervisors helped them work as a team and build individual capabilities.

Functional Directors built networks composed of people assigned to support them.  Since they were now working without their own Direct Reports, they needed a formal mechanism to share big picture and upcoming information, coordinate project planning and provide feedback to guide work efforts.  They also needed feedback and status from people working on projects in their areas. During the monthly network meetings, they worked together to plan, problem-solve and share information.

It took approximately six months to fully transition into the new model.  Budget cuts and staffing shortages made it very difficult for the new teams to fully support each of the functional areas. For the most part, cross-functional team members appreciate their new teams and the new learning experiences.  Although it is a very new way of working, Directors depend on the functional networks to get their work done.

The York Consulting Team initiated the first Executive 360 Degree Feedback for a large, international high-tech company. Building on the company's existing survey, we collected feedback via our web-based technology for leaders and their leadership teams in the United States, Europe and Asia (200+ people).  We met individually with each of the participants, helping them to understand their feedback, strengths and opportunity areas, and helped them to create developmental action plans. In many cases we did multiple feedback rounds on an 18-month cycle to measure development over time.  Leaders were able to see the collective strengths and opportunity areas in their leadership teams, enabling them to provide development for the whole team in selected areas.

Partnering with an internal team at an international high-tech company, we developed and implemented a team training model to enable virtual workteams (team members were located in multiple countries) to collaborate effectively on product development, marketing strategies and engineering challenges.  The teams came together for a kick-off training session where they learned the new technology and built working agreements and relationships with colleagues they would likely rarely, if ever, see face to face.  Teams learned how to collaborate on documents, build a shared workspace for storage and retrieval and how to converse with each other in asynchronous time. 

Since this early introduction to shared virtual workspace, technology has advanced rapidly and virtual workteams are now commonplace.  Most co-located teams now utilize shared drives, collaborative project management tools, and remote meeting technologies.  Virtual workteams have now become a way of life in this company, cycle time has greatly improved, mobile employees now move collaborative work products forward from any location and any timezone.

Responding to marketplace changes and the need to streamline work, a large telecommunications client undertook a company-wide effort to identify and eliminate non-productive work.  Functional workteams got together to identify opportunities to modify or eliminate work tasks that were no longer adding value, stop unnecessary meetings, move signature levels to accelerate productivity, and stop the production of reports that mostly ended up in file cabinets.  Members from functional teams came together for two-three day Make A Difference workshops sponsored by business unit leaders.  They worked hard to develop recommendations to eliminate or modify any unnecessary work.  At the conclusion of the workshops, teams presented their recommendations to a panel of leaders who were prepared to make decisions on the spot: yes, eliminate it; modify your recommendations; or needs more study.  Many, many non-essential work tasks were eliminated, significantly reducing costs and effort.

Succession Planning
With the announcement of the upcoming retirement of a long-time, highly credible Executive Director of Health and Welfare for a large, state-wide employer, the Associate Vice President of Human Resources asked The York Consulting Team to develop and implement a transition plan for succession.  Working in partnership with the Executive Director, the plan included individual interviews with key stakeholders from multiple constituent groups to determine what worked and didn't work for them today, what they would hope for in a successor, feedback for current direct reports and an analysis of their potential to take on bigger assignments, and suggestions to ensure a smooth transition. 

Themes regarding what to look for in a successor were developed and shared with the Associate Vice President early on so search and recruitment could begin immediately. A series of transition 'fireside chats' were implemented with the Executive Director's Direct Report team so they could build a broader understanding of the bigger picture context and interactions with key players in the industry.  Together we built a replica of the Executive Director's very effective 'dashboard' for tracking a large variety of issues across many dimensions.  We prepared a summary document outlining the rationale for some of the major historic milestone decisions that would be shared with the new Executive Director, along with a listing and location of important historical documents.

Each of her Direct Reports was able to take on stretch assignments for their own development and to cover some of the retiring Executive Director's role, recognizing that there would likely be a gap between her departure and the start of her replacement. They also began to attend the many meetings where she was included as the expert on health and welfare benefits.  Over time they took on lead roles and she minimized her participation so they could build their own credibility with clients.

A year later, a new Executive Director was hired and was able to easily transition into the Executive Director role.  The department functioned well during the interim period and follow-up conversations with many of the original stakeholders indicated that this was one of the smoothest transitions they had experienced.