Driving Cultural Change to Drive Business Results

Situation: A global retailer was facing increased competition and was fighting to maintain and grow its market share. The senior team realized they needed to fundamentally restructure the relationship between the corporate leadership and the store personnel. Their goal was to empower the people who were closest to the customers, so that their change initiatives were clearly linked to customers’ needs and wants.

Plan: To achieve their objective, the company needed to:

• Change their culture of top-down authority

• Reward different behaviors at every level of the organization

• Create new processes to facilitate communication from the front lines back to headquarters

We realized that the crucial focus for the change process was at the store general manager level. We helped the company select and develop a team of internal change agents who worked at with the store leaders and their staffs. We co-created tools and training to enable these change agents to teach and support the new behaviors. We provided coaching and support to both the change agents and the store managers to identify and respond to resistance.

Outcome: We saw dramatic changes in how the retailer did business. Their decision-making became much more customer-focused, and they made significant gains in market segments where they had previously been unsuccessful.