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| The Client Perspective |
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Change Over Time: New Hampshire Electric Cooperative In 1999 the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative (NHEC) was facing negative equity, high electricity rates, and declining sales. The latest case study from Denison Consulting, Change Over Time: New Hampshire Electric Cooperative, profiles how this non-profit utility company pulled itself out of bankruptcy and transformed in to a highly successful electric co-op. Working with Caroline Fisher, Ph.D, of the Fisher Consulting Group, NHEC focused on shaping the culture of the co-op and striving to improve service to their customers. 
The NHEC case study also provides a good example of how an organization can maximize efforts by tailoring their leadership development program to build off of their culture initiative. NHEC began their work using the Denison Organizational Culture Survey and later introduced the Denison Leadership Development Survey to their employees. Executive level members, as well as high-potential employees, completed the Leadership Survey and participated in a leadership training program. Excerpts from interviews with Fisher and the Executive Vice President of NHEC, Ray Gosney, provide contextual detail on how NHEC was able to improve their equity, increase sales, and decrease the cost of providing power to their members. Another surprising outcome of all of their hard work: NHEC saw a drop in the number of employee reported accidents—an important metric that all organizations are looking to decrease.
You can access additional Denison Case Studies from our website. |
| If you have a best practice story to tell, we may be able to feature it in an upcoming Denison Newsletter. Contact Karen Luce for details. |
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| Denison Consulting Network |
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Odyssey Teams: Impacting the Emotional Bottom Line 
Engaging our employees is no small task. Organizations are hungry for ways to make sure their employees are invested in their work, committed to the organization and feel developed in a meaningful way. “To truly motivate employees, today’s team building programs need to impact the emotional bottom line,” says Bill John, President and Co-Founder of Chico, California based, Odyssey Teams. In 1991, Odyssey began their experiential team building programs with an emphasis on business applications. While innovative at the time, ropes courses, a tool used by Odyssey, quickly became mainstream, pushing Odyssey to rethink how they were doing teambuilding. They created programs aimed at not only the heads but the hands and hearts of their participants. Out of this, their humanitarian yet business focused programs such as Life Cycles and most recently Helping Hands programs were born.  After establishing a context for teamwork and collaboration in their Life Cycles program, participants are given a limited amount of time and tools to build a specific number of children’s bicycles (one for every five participants). Participants don’t know there are children in the next room who will receive these bikes. Participants grapple with issues like time management, quality, and competition vs. cooperation. “When the kids walk into the room, there’s an audible gasp,” says John, “people start frantically struggling to fix or finish their bikes.” They begin to make the connection to the customer and the gaps in their attention to quality, safety, teamwork and collaboration. Overall the program has provided over 15,000 bikes to children.  Bryan Adkins, President of Denison Consulting, personally witnessed the impact of this while working with a client struggling with issues like Customer Focus, Teamwork, and Coordination & Integration. "The impact was immediate and powerful. Looking into the eyes of the customer, who in this case is a child facing very difficult life challenges, makes everyone step back and think about the bigger picture and the impact that each of us can have, regardless of our role in an organization.”
Most recently, Odyssey has teamed with the Rotary Club to provide prosthetic hands to land mine victims in their Helping Hands program designed to get teams to access their potential. At the beginning of the program, participants are given a box containing the parts for the prosthetic hand. “We call it the dream box,” says John, “and we ask participants to try to imagine what could come from the potential of these pieces. The message is to get them to access the potential of each person, the team, and the organization.” Participants build the hands, decorate the box and write messages to the recipient. The Rotary Club takes care of doing a quality check and distributes them to places like Vietnam, Rwanda and Uganda. Watch the Helping Hands video overview – and don’t forget the tissues! |
Stew Friedman: Total Leadership  Peruse any book store these days and you are likely to be inundated with books on leadership. Many of these aim to improve skills in your professional life. Stew Friedman, however, believes in improving your total leadership skills. In his latest book, Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, Freidman vows to help you improve performance in all four domains of life: work, home, community, and self by creating mutual value among them. In Total Leadership, Friedman, a veteran Wharton school faculty member, brings us a proven method for producing sustainable change in all parts of our lives. Total Leadership will help you perform better, feel better, and have greater harmony among the domains because you will be able to better fit the parts of your life together. To learn more visit his website www.totalleadership.org or:
| Do you have a story you'd like to share? We may be able to feature it in an upcoming Denison Newsletter. Contact Karen Luce for details. |
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| Research & Publications |
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Culture Links to Customer Satisfaction and Diversity Management We constantly strive to bring good quality research to continue to support our services and products. Partnering with the organizations we work with on research questions is an important way for us continue to bring value to our clients and consultants. Here are just a couple of the things we’re currently working on.
Culture and Customer Satisfaction: Organizational culture causes customer satisfaction, and we have new research that proves it! In a study led by Anthony Boyce (AON Consulting), Michael Gillespie ( Denison Consulting), and Ann Marie Ryan (Michigan State University), we measured Denison Organizational Culture Survey scores and customer satisfaction using repeated measurements of both variables over a six-year period. The longitudinal structural equation analyses showed that culture predicts future customer satisfaction with a correlation of about .20, whereas customer satisfaction predicts future culture scores with a correlation of about .01. This is the strongest empirical evidence to date that culture indeed drives customer satisfaction. For more information, access a summary of our Culture Link to Customer Satisfaction research or contact Denison!
Culture and Diversity Management: Without a doubt, managing workplace diversity has become an increasingly important topic to organizations. But what are the factors that contribute to effective diversity management? Recent research has shown that organizational culture is related to perceptions of effective diversity management, and that the Involvement trait is most important. For more information, access a summary of our Culture and Diversity Management research or contact us!
To learn more about our other research projects or find out how you can get your organization involved, please contact your Denison Client Manager today! |
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| Denison News & Notes |
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New Team Members at Denison  Denison welcomes the addition of Nabil Sousou as our new Vice President of Global Sales. Nabil brings more than 20 years experience in technology sales and marketing to Denison Consulting. Nabil has a proven track record of achieving sales targets, extensive knowledge and comprehensive understanding of the various cultural and business issues required for successfully launching, selling and supporting global sales. We also welcome Katlyn Roggensack, Shannon Herline and Mario Vezzosi. Katlyn, a senior psychology student at Michigan State University, is assisting in our research department. Shannon Herline, a senior at the Univeristy of Michigan, is also a psychology student. She's assisting our client managers and IT professionals and gaining experience in office management. Mario Vezzosi attends Albion College with a double major in Anthropology and Sociology. Mario is working with our sales department. Each hopes to use their time at Denison to gain practical experience in the application of organizational culture in the workplace.
Visit the “Meet Our Staff” page of the Denison Web site to meet the rest of the Denison team. |
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As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions. If you have a
comment or question about this newsletter, or would like to suggest a story for a
future newsletter, please contact Karen Luce.
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Our July 15-16 Workshop in Ann Arbor, MI is filling up fast! We'd like for you to join us. To learn more and register, visit the 
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