Deploying Global Initiatives

When your organization expands globally through the acquisition of independent companies, one of the issues that keep your senior leaders awake at night is the need to maximize your operating capabilities, regardless of location, culture and past standards. That issue can become even more exacerbated when your new divisions are situated in developing countries, where rules of operation rapidly unfold and change.

When you depend on your business units across the globe to adopt standard practices, people must adapt and change their behavior. Through our work with global companies, CLG has identified a number of issues that affect your employees, regardless of their location:

• Loss of decision making ability. When uniform standards are implemented on a global scale, decisions are made based on what is best for the company as a whole, rather than focusing on results in one particular area
• Because restructuring goes hand in hand with global initiatives, employees fear job loss or diminished responsibilities in the new structure
• Learning how to use new processes can be frustrating for employees, leading to poor morale and a lack of confidence

As a senior leader, you should recognize the compelling need to standardize critical work processes, including IT systems, data and supply chain management. It is not unusual for senior leaders to become frustrated when employees around the globe are not compelled to act with the same urgency.

Don’t be fooled in thinking that your success will be determined by the speed with which you deploy change into the organization. Your ultimate success will be determined by how quickly your organization adopts important changes.

Behavior Change is the Key

Wouldn’t it be great if your employees across the world said “Yes!” to your strategic initiative? CLG has helped a number of companies create this reaction to global initiatives. The key is to identify where behavior change is critical to success and then help people make those behavior changes in positive ways.

Our approach is founded in Applied Behavioral Science (ABS), a powerful individual behavior change methodology. ABS couples traditional change management tools, such as communication and stakeholder planning, with proprietary behavior change tools that align and adjust High-Impact Behaviors^SM across your entire organization.

Our approach includes:

• Active Alignment - In any global initiative, it is important for senior leaders to actively demonstrate their alignment about the business case for change. CLG helps you engage senior leaders in tough conversations to ensure each of them actively supports the decisions and actions required to implement change.
• Design for YES!^SM - Often, global changes to process, structure or systems are good for the organization as a whole, but might be perceived negatively by individuals, groups or countries. CLG works alongside the vendor you have retained to design your new process, structure or system to address the behavioral changes required by the new design. The ultimate goal is to get employees on board and actively involved in adopting the changes. Design for YES! involves designing reinforcers into work that engage employees so they more readily adopt the change.
• Balance of Standardization and Customization - The challenge is to design the overall process and then let the countries modify 20-30 percent of the process to meet local needs, while achieving desired results. CLG works with your leaders around the globe to understand how the initiative impacts them differently and how best to bring about behavior change in their culture.
• Local Implementation - Using the principles of ABS, CLG provides coaching to your senior leaders, who need to be the first role models for the prospective changes. We also help them track results and develop regional champions or advocates who can help implement the initiative.

CLG has worked with clients around the world, and has watched them thrive when behaviors changed among all units in their organization. When you make change on this scale a positive and reinforcing experience, your teams are much more likely to adopt it.