Challenge
Northwestel delivers a broad range of telecommunications
solutions to a population of 110,000 northern Canadians in
96 communities scattered throughout the Yukon, the Northwest
Territories, Nunavut, and northern British Columbia. Northwestel's
operations include local telephone service; long distance
communications and advanced data communications, including
high-speed Internet and cable television. The company faces
an enormous challenge to build and maintain world-class infrastructure
and to deliver high quality customer services over such a
vast and rugged area.
Pending deregulation and rapid growth of the mining industry within
its territory has created an opportunity for competitors to cherry
pick Northwestel’s highly profitable high-speed data communication
services. Another factor was the CRTC, the national telecommunications
regulator, which began to require Northwestel to continuously achieve
increasing efficiency in operations. Added to this was a noticeable
divide between the executive leaders and the middle managers that
were charged to improve the organization. Given these circumstances
and realizing they were saddled with a culture common to regulated
utilities, Northwestel’s leaders decided to engage in an
effort to strengthen its leadership team and begin a planned change
of its culture.
Solution
Model the Situation, Including Current and Desired
Culture –For Northwestel’s leadership
to build an improvement plan that included culture, it needed
to clearly articulate the strengths and weaknesses of the current
culture and create a clear and tangible picture of the desired
culture. To this end, it engaged Tosan to complete a culture
assessment that incorporated assessing and improving the entire
senior leadership team. Having recently completed a climate
survey, a behavioral based culture survey was used to determine
how employees are expected to interact with each other and
approach work. In addition, individual interviews were completed
with each of the senior leaders. The assessment illustrated
a passive/defensive style where employees needed to find ways
to protect themselves through an overuse of avoidant, dependent
and conventional behaviors. This type of culture often results
from regulated, near monopoly status and leads customer service
and efficiency to suffer, as was the case.
The middle managers facing increasing pressure to improve performance
ran into the “old culture” barriers in their interaction
with executive leaders, as well as across the frontline employee
ranks. It contributed significantly to deteriorating senior leader
teamwork and effectiveness.
In addition to modeling the current culture, Tosan also used a
survey and the interviews to help the senior team clearly articulate
the desired culture and resulting gap.
Managing Your Culture Workshop –The extreme
nature of the geographical disbursement of the leadership team
called for the use of intensive developmental workshops where
the senior leaders could envision the future, build skills and
set in place action plans to improve teamwork and close the gap
between the current and desired culture. Tosan designed and delivered
a two-day Managing Your Culture Workshop for the entire senior
leadership team. It engaged the leadership team to quickly build
understanding and commitment to the desired culture and to the
individual leadership behaviors required to achieve the desired
culture. The workshop was designed to allow the group to create
common expectations, confront and change limiting beliefs and
behavioral patterns, build skills and commit to coaching each
other. The executive team spent an additional day reviewing and
building action plans around a 360-degree assessment demonstrating
the impact that they were having on each other and on their direct
reports.
Culture Change Strategy Development –A
subset of the senior leadership team was selected to develop
a long-term strategic culture change plan. This plan identified
a number of improvement areas including: HR systems and processes,
the need to engage the employees and senior leadership skills.
Tosan provided a disciplined process and template and facilitation
for this planning effort. The improvement areas were prioritized
and assigned to members of the senior leadership team. The action
plans were incorporated into the technical improvement plans
and project management.
The Constructive Leader: Coaching and Accountability
in the Workplace –An outcome of a passive/defensive
culture is notoriously low accountability. During the culture
change strategy development session it became apparent that
the senior leadership team could improve their capacity to
lead a change in culture with improved skills in establishing
accountability and coaching others to improve performance and
change behavior. Tosan custom tailored its Accountability and
Coaching course to meet this need. Once again, the entire leadership
team engaged in a two-day development workshop targeted to
gain commitment to common expectations, improve teamwork and
peer-to-peer coaching and to build skills in accountability
and employee coaching. This intervention used pre-workshop
interviews using Appreciative Inquiry and post course activities
to produce a change in the entire organization’s perception
of accountability. A post course follow-up session was conducted
via a webinar.
Benefits
While culture change takes many years of attention to see lasting
impact, Northwestel realized and sustained an immediate improvement
in teamwork across the senior leadership team and across departments.
A second cultural survey awaits, and yet the organization has
seen its climate survey scores improve across the organization.
Follow-up evaluation interviews with the senior leaders exploring
the impact of applying the Accountability and Coaching model
and skills yielded numerous examples of increased employee accountability,
morale and productivity. Several of the leaders reported a decrease
in workload as employees came forward to take on greater responsibilities,
releasing the “human capital” already present in
the workforce.
This effort continues to unfold and remains an integral part of
Northwestel’s overall organizational and leadership improvement
efforts. |
