Background

Initially engaged to facilitate a management workshop on working with Millennials, planning sessions uncovered a high level of skepticism for the workshop, both from employees and managers alike, due to a pattern of annual meetings that rehash the same problems, followed by a lack of follow through.

Approach

The resulting workshop was used to explore this resistance help managers identify why, after years of hearing the same issues, nothing had yet been done to resolve them. It was quickly apparent that managers had indeed already crafted a number of workable strategies, several of which were in various stages of implementation. However, a “silo” organizational structure and an incentive structure that fostered internal competition left managers without the resources needed to fully execute these ideas.  The outcome of the workshop was therefore the establishment of a series of informal lunches: the one dozen managers were broken into three small groups, and each group met once every two or three weeks over a four month period. What couldn’t get done formally, we were going to do informally.

During these facilitated lunches, managers were encouraged to share what they were working on, as well as successes and challenges they were facing. The lunches also gave them a chance to bond, reducing the isolating impact of formal silos. The facilitator served the small teams in three ways: first, he kept lunches on point and productive; second, he provided a sounding board for ideas and offered suggestions and critical input based on relevant organizational behavior expertise; third, he helped transfer knowledge amongst the groups, and between the managers and the program’s executive sponsors.

Results

Two initiatives that had laid dormant since the previous year’s workshop were executed, including a promising mentorship program that had stalled after being launched in one manager’s group. By the end of the program, it had been adopted by 10 out of the other 11 managers. Also, effective intra-office competitions were re-instated. Furthermore, communications across managers’ groups peaked (as measured over a seven year period), improving morale, improving the flow of resources across teams, and reducing managers’ training workloads—because employees mimicked the managers’ cross-boundary communications and began to expand their own networks and resource bases.

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Case Study: Reducing Turnover >>