Coaching Leaders During Restructuring

A Managing Director had decided to restructure her business, and wanted as little disruption as possible on her business operations. She had reached the conclusion that the processes within her business could be more agile to create more efficiency, better sales and marketing and improved customer service. She needed a new approach in order to do things differently. She felt confident identifying the need for change and just needed a little support to think it all through using tried and tested techniques so she wasn’t reinventing the wheel.

We started out by looking at the facts and the current structure and what seemed to be working well and what didn’t work quite so well using feedback from customers, employees and suppliers. The first few sessions involved further exploration until she felt all aspects had been covered.

She had many common issues such as hard working although inexperienced people in managerial roles, some of them really didn’t want to be managers but had drifted into the role. Most of these people didn’t have the skills required to lead people and manage the operation. She had employees working in total isolation, which unmanaged was leading to a lack of teamwork and cooperation.

More positively, she a had a clear strategic vision of how she wanted the new structure to be, and asked for coaching and support her to get through the changes.

We created a robust plan by breaking down each area down into bitesize chunks (remembering not to break what was working well). We worked through each one in turn, and it highlighted where there were additional training needs, further coaching for team members who were capable of achieving more, where relationships could be improved through increased communications leading to better teamwork. We also created a clear communications plan and identified the people in the business who would help her manage the change.

Over the course of a few months we had regular afternoon coaching sessions, and the outcome of the coaching is that now the new structure is in place with people working in their new roles, morale has improved, employees have more clear defined goals and I’m told are engaged and having fun! I am now working with her new leaders to undertake similar coaching. By asking for help, she had created a more open culture where it is viewed positively being able to explore difficulties, ask for help and continuously make improvement.