Organizational Effectiveness Assessment

Fortune 500 Wholesale Grocery Distribution Company

The Request

To help the Senior Vice President assess the effectiveness of his area and make changes to improve their success in meeting project goals, budgets and dates.

The Context

This is a highly technical and complex area of the company that was on the brink of making significant technical decisions that would eventually improve their image, but would cause enormous disruption for the next few years. Their environment was getting more and more complex, margins shrinking and technical solutions more high risk. Most of the senior leadership of the area had come up through the ranks and had a high control style, which became bottlenecks for decisions and fresh input. Internal customers of the area would end-run the official structure to get their immediate requests taken care of interfering with their ability to accomplish more strategic goals.

The Challenge

The challenge in this project was to coach and encourage the senior VP to make potentially tough decisions based on the outcome of the organizational assessment. This meant that he had to operate outside of his comfort zone as a "nice guy". He also had to become more of an influential player in the executive ranks. It was also necessary to get the senior managers to understand and lead the proposed technical changes that were changing the organization around them.

The Approach

I undertook a qualitative organizational assessment through interviews with all senior and middle managers, internal customers, technical staff and company executives to "paint the picture" of the state of the organization. This data was compiled in a draft report which was presented first to the Senior VP. He presented the results to his senior managers.

This report became the basis for actions that the Senior VP took in reorganizing the department, bringing in some new senior managers and addressing priority issues from the assessment.

I encouraged my client to hold an offsite session with his senior managers to jointly address the issues and determine how they could best lead and work together in the changing environment. This never happened and caused difficulties later on. I continued to occasionally consult with the Senior VP on organizational and leadership issues for the next 2 years until he left the organization.

The Result

The organizational assessment helped pull together perspectives from the field of players which allowed for a more comprehensive picture of the complexity and interdependencies of presenting problems. This resulted in the causes of problems being addressed, not just the symptoms. Organizational changes were made that improved productivity and satisfaction. The assessment served as a communications and planning document for senior management and became the benchmark for reviewing progress against identified goals. The follow through on this project dissipated over time but was resurrected and recast by one of the senior managers one year later.

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