Aligning Leadership Culture With Global Strategy

Solution 

As a result of the initial diagnostic work, CCL provided Graymont with tools to move a leadership culture from largely independent to more collaborative. The team needed to apply new leadership practices to their own challenges before rolling them out to the organization.

Over several months, CCL’s experts attended Graymont leadership team meetings to observe how they addressed key business issues and then followed up by showing them how different tools could be leveraged to live out the new culture while executing the strategy.

Results

Quickly, the leadership team fell into sync and could lead the cascade process. During a 2-day conference, the Graymont strategic leadership team along with CCL’s guidance, shared their own learnings and taught the leadership tools to next level managers.

“The response was very positive,” said Rob Van Nus, VP of Human Resources & Corporate Services. “This was ‘train the trainer.’ As a strategic leadership team, we had to lead by example. It provided credibility and showed that these materials weren’t going away as we were teaching the tools and had invested in them ourselves.”

The new strategy meant new ways of working. Previously, different plants all worked more independently. Now, there is more consistency and centralization across all operations as a result of decisions being made for the benefit of the company and not just the specific plant. This led to significant efficiency gains and increases in operational productivity.

At the leadership team level, there were numerous breakthroughs. For example, for many years members of the leadership team had strong but differing views about how many and which strategic issues to prioritize. With CCL’s support, the team agreed on how to proceed once they understood they were dealing with a polarity. Many within the team were pleased as this lingering dilemma had once seemed insurmountable.