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Black & Decker: Building a Model for Change
June 02, 2008
Imagine seasoned businessmen and women clutching and stroking plush penguins during a training session. It may sound odd, but that was the scene during a Leading Bold Change (LBC) training session for Black & Decker Hardware and Home Improvement Group executives. "Ninety percent of people hate change," says Bret Skousen, director of employee and organizational development, Black & Decker Hardware and Home Improvement Group. "So people at the session were grabbing the stuffed penguins because they wanted comfort cuddle buddies. They felt better able to deal with the change issue when holding and stroking the stuffed penguins," which represent the characters in the book, "Our Iceberg Is Melting," on which the training is based.
Skousen has been a strong proponent of change at Black & Decker. It all started when he signed up for Ken Blanchard's Master's of Leadership program at the University of San Diego (he's known Blanchard for years and admires him as a mentor). "Two weekends of the program were devoted specifically to change," Skousen explains. "We had to research all the change experts out there and then go forward with one. It was an aha moment for me: Without a good change program, you don't have a good leadership development program."
So Skousen started analyzing what was going on at Black & Decker. He found that the company does lean manufacturing and Six Sigma, but had no concrete, consistent process for change. "We had made some acquisitions a few years before, and there were things we could have done better if we had a change management initiative," Skousen says. "Plus, we found we were tapping the same people all the time to solve problems, but they were getting overwhelmed. And they might have been critical thinkers, but they might not have the right skills to solve that particular problem." Skousen ultimately chose Dr. John Kotter's Leading Bold Change approach because "I felt he was the best, plus I've been involved with ISB Worldwide [the course developer] for a long time."
The group's global operations leader was very much behind the change initiative, Skousen says. Once a year in January, he brings together 150 leaders to discuss strategy, so in January 2007, the decision was made to start the change management training with those executives. "We trained all of them on LBC and trained them to take it back to their teams," Skousen says. "Once in-house, we try to transform the environment into an iceberg—we have blow-up penguins and squid hunts. We try to create a discovery process instead of a training program."
Here's how the global operations leader used the 8 Steps to get the Black & Decker group into the change mind-set:
Step 1: He hit key points of the training, including having iceberg posters everywhere with the penguin symbol under each nametag to create urgency.
Step 2: He pulled together the team, then made it cross-functional and branched out from his team to others.
Step 3: The team laid out what it was going to do and NOT going to do.
Step 4: The team started to communicate with others in the company who would be affected—obtaining buy-in.
Step 5: The leader got the right executive team leadership members to support the effort and made them understand the consequences of not doing this.
Step 6: They celebrated short-term wins.
Step 7: The leader is a soft-spoken guy, but he forcefully said, "We can't let up now. We can't celebrate to the point where we think it's done. We have to put a plan in place to continue to have meetings and checkpoints and accountability."
Step 8: This year, at the global operations meeting in January, the leaders were filmed on where they were at in their change initiatives, so people didn't think it was just a one-hit wonder from last year. This included executives who said they were planning something and didn't get it done but now promised to do something this year.
Skousen says Black & Decker doesn't formally measure employee engagement in change initiatives, but "we pulse it through meetings and informal chats. And while we don't allow people to identify with NoNo, one team does feel strongly about having 'NoNo sessions' in which they allow people to be devil's advocates to bring up potential problems." Skousen admits to identifying most with the character of Alice "because in the role I'm in, I have to push people along. So I'm behind the scenes doing the dirty work, influencing people. That said, my favorite characters are the heroes—the people on the plant floor and in the bowels of the organization who get the majority of the work done without the credit."
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