***This article is part of a series on employee engagement called Capitalizing on Culture. The series follows Richmond Hill, Ont.-based Trimark Sportswear Group and its quest to improve company culture.
Week four: Identifying priorities and communicating them to staff
Will Andrew hadn’t really hired consultants at Managerial Design to help him rethink the culture at Richmond Hill, Ont.-based Trimark Sportswear Group when he took over as president on June 1.
He’d done work with facilitators in the past for help with longer-range planning. But Mr. Andrew wanted the management team to know his expectations were even higher than his predecessor’s. “I didn’t want to get by with things being fine,” he explains. “I wanted to go to the next level.”
He wanted to solicit employees for their ideas but he recognized that demanding the bar be raised could feel threatening to some. “I didn’t want people to be scared they wouldn’t be able to achieve it,” Mr. Andrew says. “It was more ‘we as a group are going to set higher standards, work together.’”
To start the process, Managerial Design performed a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. That not only involves looking at how the individuals in a management team function and how the group functions as a team but also at how competitors are doing in relation to Trimark.
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One of the interesting tools the consultants used to determine the dynamics among senior management at Trimark was a visual diagram of the conversation flow in a meeting. When a person would speak, the consultant would put a dot in front of him or her. By the end of the meeting, it was more clear, by the number of dots each person had, whether one or two people were dominating the conversation — and perhaps not listening as much — whether someone was weaker and needed more training, and so on.
Similarly, the consultants socialized with the group and observed meetings — occasionally selecting someone to sit out of a session to determine how their absence changed the conversation. “We did pull someone out of the room,” says Mr. Andrew, “and the dynamics completely changed. We learned a lot as a group.”
In addition, the entire company compiled a list of goals, thresholds, awards they’d like to win, and more, and then started to prioritize.
“They’ll say, ‘Is inventory management tied to the number of styles in the line?’ Of course. ‘Which one is more important?’ Then you start to push one above the other,” Mr. Andrew explains. “I had ‘Being open and honest; dealing with the elephant in the room.’ That led to much more dialogue around culture and how we go about things as opposed to what we do.”
The next step was to narrow the initiatives into categories — in Trimark’s case, customer-experience, financial metrics, inventory control, sales, culture, and continuous improvement.
