A classic situation that Bodhih Training handled was when a huge technology-based organization was consolidating one of its key businesses, which had a revenue of $25 billion, and that employed over 150000+ employees who operated over 70+ countries. In India, the company decided to reduce the offices to half in number and reduce headcount by 6% (around 10000+ employees) as part of the restructuring, resulting in high uncertainty for the team across the hierarchy. Many employees started to move out of the organization searching for newer opportunities, and remaining members too were seeing an uncertain future. This resulted in overall diminishing performance across the level.
We were consulted to offer necessary solutions to help, especially the senior management – S1 and S2 level with an average of 8 to 14 years of leadership experience to manage the transition smoothly.
Over the next 3 months through various efforts, including identifying the pain points to designing a framework for the program that included Change Leadership, dealing with members across the level, identifying the right talent to retain, resetting the internal communication, and motivating the team that is going to continue the employment, etc.
Impact Created:
The senior management team certainly had enough sincerity of purpose in wanting to learn new tools, techniques, and approaches to dealing with change. Moving from change management to change leadership was quite an eye-opener for many of them. So was the whole concept of understanding and using people’s behavior to be able to deal with different people differently in times of uncertainty.
The mood of uncertainty was prevalent among almost all participants. This showed itself up during role-plays, activities, and exercises as a lack of conviction in answering questions from subordinates, perhaps because they themselves were not too convinced about the answers that they heard from higher up. They also realized that doing things differently and applying what they learned in real work situations is critical in translating learning to actual competence.
The transition took almost a year, but the team was able to move strongly into a new organizational structure and roles.