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Creating a ‘one company’ culture for greater success

Creating a ‘one company’ culture for greater success [2]

One company, one team, one culture, aligned around the same vision, living by the same values, making decisions for the greater good, getting the best synergy and collaboration across all divisions, business units, product and customer segments. Does this describe your orga-nization? Or does this describe a state of being that you would like for your orga-nization but you continue to be frustrated that it falls short of this ideal?

Based on Senn Delaney’s work for 40 years with companies globally around these issues, we know that most CEOs are seeking to overcome challenges in how people work together to improve bottom- and top-line performance.

At a time when organizations have to perform at their best, they are often stuck at average, trying to manage through turbulent change, or create greater cohe-siveness across a complex or matrixed structure, with a geographically dispersed workforce, complicated reporting reltion-ships, a lack of overall company clarity and alignment, competition for resources, turf wars and often poor communication.

It is rare to find organizations with prod-uct and geographic diversification that is fully integrated, aligned and executing synergistically. Most companies operate somewhere in between. They have busi-ness units, product or customer segments as well as geographic units. Somehow, all these elements need to work together.

How do you best utilize the functions or centers of excellence? How do you maxi-mize shared services? How do you serve customers more seamlessly? How do you get everyone working towards a common vision, thinking for the greater good? Answering these questions can add bil-lions of dollars of value to Fortune 500

companies and tens if not hundreds of millions to smaller ones. The real solution is not just about changing the structure or changing the leadership team, but rather, refocusing the culture around a one-company approach. The lever to drive the change is the functioning of the senior team (the CEO and direct reports).

Some benefits of creating a one-company culture

Faster execution of strategies, better decision making

Improved business results

Better team dynamics with more alignment, collaboration, trust and mutual support

Greater agility to move faster with change

An enhanced total customer experience

Greater levels of accountability at all leadership and management levels

Stronger cross-organizational collaboration to create greater value across the enterprise

The following behaviors are among the overriding imperatives:

1. A commitment to the greater good versus a self-interest mindset.

2. An increased emphasis on open com-munication, trust, common language, flexibility and focus on breaking down silos between units, functions, depart-ments and operating business units.

3. Developing a supportive team togeth-er, team apart culture among top leaders.

Here are three examples of organizations that have worked to create this culture.

Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare: Creating a ‘Power of One' culture to maximize system performance

Memphis-based eight-hospital health care system Methodist Le Bonheur worked to drive a “Power of One” culture through-out the organization.

“It was a number of years ago that we really decided that the vision for the orga-nization needed to be one that created a health care system that was one of the best in the country,” said Gary Shorb, who led the culture transformation while serving as CEO. “We knew that the miss-ing ingredient was our culture; that we really had to address that. You can have all the best talent, the best plans and you can have the best strategy, objectives and goals. But without the culture piece being absolutely right, we were not going to achieve the kind of results we needed to achieve. It is the magic that makes every-thing else work.”

Goals of the Power of One cultureThe goals of the culture transformation included creating a system mindset so that decisions are made for the greater good, building and broadening account-ability, and having more open and candid dialogue to handle tough issues.

Other goals included:

Create a consistent, patient-centered brand experience across all hospitals and systems

Improve teamwork and interaction among the senior leaders as well as other leaders within hospitals within the corporate structure

Improve financial performance

Increase patient satisfaction

Improve employee engagement scores

Maximize teamwork, achieve greater synergy by instilling an enterprise mindset and values

Creating a ‘one company’ culture for greater success [3]

The Power of One culture reinforced the one culture approach based on MLH’s organizational values: Service, Quality, Integrity, Teamwork and Innovation; and connected to their goal of putting patients and their families at the heart of everything they do.

Results of the culture transformation

As a result of this focus, the executive team saw improvements in strategic alignment, annual planning and budget-ing, broader system thinking, a climate of trust and engagement and sharing of best practices.

There was improvement on every goal. The system is in the top five percent in the nation on associate satisfaction. In clinical quality, scores are in the top quartile. The system went from a BBB bond rating with Standard & Poors and Moody’s to an A+ rating. Patient satisfac-tion scores achieved top quartile.

It was ranked one of the 2016 Best Workplaces in Health Care, by Great Place to Work and Fortune magazine. For the second year in a row, it was named to Becker's Hospital Review 2016 list of its 150 Great Places to Work in Healthcare in the United States. Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital became among only seven percent of hospitals in the country to have earned the distinction of Magnet status in 2016 by the American Nurses Credentialing Center.

The Power of One serves as the touch-stone for Methodist LeBonheur’s culture. At the heart of Power of One are the MLH values: Along with the guiding behaviors, the values help people under-stand how to work together to serve patients, their families and the community by living them each day.

Operating as one team and one organi-zation has given Methodist a strategic advantage in an increasingly competitive

and volatile market. It has also enabled the healthcare system to create a consis-tent brand experience from hospital to hospital and across its corporate functions by building on an already strong foun-dation to take performance to an even higher level.

Iglo Group: Creating a competitive, collaborative culture to enable growth

Iglo Group grew to become the market-leading frozen foods business in Europe, operating in 11 countries across Europe. It acquired the Italian Findus business, mak-ing Iglo a truly European business.

With a relatively new executive team and an ambitious plan to create a centralized product and marketing function, Iglo Group had a clear need to create a com-mon culture based on speed, high perfor-mance and collaboration.

personal change

People need to unfreeze existing habits and make personal behavior change.

purposeful leadership

The CEO and senior leadership must own and lead the culture- shaping process.

broad engagement

Momentum, energy and critical mass are needed to engage all employees in the desired culture.

focused sustainability

Systematic reinforcement is needed at individual, team and organization levels to embed the culture.

Key principles to successful change

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3 4

Then CEO Martin Glenn created a high-performance culture throughout the company to support the ambitions of aggressive top-line growth and improved synergies and productivity. “We built a platform for growth and we wanted to accelerate,” said Glenn. “We realized that our biggest barrier was us, not the marketplace, not our competitors, but how we were operating, how we were behaving with each other. We needed to take a good fresh look at trying to make a modern, progressive culture work for us across the European business.”

Goals of the culture transformation

There was a matrix organization that needed a common language and values to enable idea sharing, leveraging best practices and making decisions across the enterprise. An expanded leadership team, with new members, needed to be aligned around the common culture. Multiple

Creating a ‘one company’ culture for greater success [4]

legacy cultures, especially at the top, had to be integrated. Other goals included fostering a culture positive energy and outward competitiveness with inward col-laboration to enable achievement of busi-ness goals and effective operation in the matrix, connecting people with the com-pelling purpose of the business and cre-ate an environment of teamwork, focus and decisiveness, not just at times of crisis but during usual business operations.

Glenn and the executive leadership team created a fresh set of values called PACE (Performance, Ambition, Collaboration and Energy), aligning the whole organiza-tion around these values and focusing the business on key areas that would make the most difference in achieving Iglo’s ambition. Glenn credited the creation of a clear, unifying purpose, and the work to define and bring its core PACE values to life throughout the organization. This created a culture that has been a key enabler for success. Within a year, the company grew at a rapid pace to become a European sector leader. Among other results:

Better decision making and sharing of ideas, enabling the Findus acquisition to be quickly integrated

Record financial performance in 2011

Increased employee engagement

Market share growth in almost every market

Recognized as Food Manufacturing Company of the Year in 2012 by the Food Manufacturing Excellence Awards in recognition for all-around excellence.

Glenn said the PACE culture was a key tool to enable and accelerate its growth strategy: “2011 was our best year yet. We achieved our fifth consecutive year of core category sales and EBITDA growth and delivered on all of our financial tar-gets. I am proud of the management team’s ability to integrate a large-scale business.”

Children's Hospital of Wisconsin health system: creating an integrated, patient-centered enterprise

When Peggy Troy became CEO of Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin health system, it was in the midst of major trans-formational change that would involve and affect the entire organization and the way it delivers care to children.

Structured as a functional business model enterprise with 13 different divisions, it was transitioning to an integrated delivery model, and implementing an electronic health record system that would serve as a catalyst to support this integrated approach to care. “One of the things that I found when I came here is we were not very well integrated, particularly as you look at the child and the family as a center of what we do. We find that our biggest opportunity and also our biggest challenge is really to integrate around them so that we can create pathways for our children to be successful over the time,” Troy said.

She understood that this major shift, as well as the sweeping changes impacting hospitals and healthcare systems through health care reform, would also require culture change in order to implement its strategy and fulfill its vision that kids be the healthiest in the nation.

The key goal was to foster an ‘At Our Best’ culture that shifted people beyond the episodic care approach to a more all-encompassing Population Health strategy of serving children ‘from cradle to col-lege.’ “That was the North Star of our strategic plan and we realized if we could integrate all the different pieces and parts of our organization, we would be able to achieve a very audacious goal,” said Troy.

An important part of the culture work involved building partnerships and increased collaboration and alignment with physicians. “Collaboration is one of

those things that we hadn’t done well in the past because we just didn’t pay attention. And again, with all the pieces and parts of our organization, we had to bring it all together.”

Troy said the culture-shaping work has truly made a difference. An important key to success was creation of a clear purpose and a set of values and guiding behaviors to bring the culture to life across all ser-vices and departments.

“It makes us so much better in how we are able to first and foremost show up as an individual and live out our values as we are working with our families. We are looking at ourselves very differently as a system of care, as opposed to a bunch of discrete little units,” said Troy.

Troy was intentional about including doc-tors in the culture change early on. “We realized that the only way we were going to be at our best was to have a very healthy working relationship between the provider community, the administra-tion and all employees. That was just key. And it set us up for success in ways that I would never have imagined. I saw a change in the physician involvement, the physician commitment to the success of what we were trying to accomplish. They owned it in a way in which I would never have expected. Their effectiveness in working with us is so much better than it was before.”

***These are justa few examples where orga-nizations that made a long-term commit-ment to creating and instilling a one com-pany culture reaped major benefits.

Larry Senn (lsenn@senndelaney.com) is the founder and chairman of culture-shaping firm Senn Delaney, a Heidrick & Struggles company.

Creating a ‘one company’ culture for greater success [5]

About Senn DelaneySenn Delaney is the culture-shaping firm of Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc., the premier provider of Executive Search, Culture Shaping and Leadership Consulting services worldwide. Founded in 1978, Senn Delaney was the first firm in the world to focus exclusively on transforming cultures. A singular focus of creating healthy, high-performance cultures has made us the leading international authority and successful practitioner of culture shaping that enhances the spirit and performance of organizations.

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