Breakthroughs

The law firm of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, LLP was recently selected as one of Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies to work for.  When selecting companies for their Top 100 list, Fortune performs an extensive audit of the organization’s culture, including factors such as Trust in Management, Pride in Work and the Company, and Camaraderie.  Fortune’s cultural audit also includes a thorough understanding of the company’s philosophy and business practices.  Their law practice has been one of the most respected in the San Francisco bay area since 1883 and has grown considerably over the years, extending beyond the San Francisco bay area with an office in Los Angeles and an affiliate office in Taipei, Taiwan.

As with many organizations that have experienced tremendous growth, one opportunity for improvement for McCutchen was in the area of Mission (Vision, Strategy, Goals & Objectives).  The administrative leadership team worked with Corporate Leverage to develop a strategy for interpreting and communicating the firm’s vision and strategy, and is currently moving forward with a plan to build on their exceptional cultural strengths while articulating a clearer direction for the future.  All of the pieces for a high-performance organization are there – people just need a clearer understanding of the firm’s direction and the strategy for how to get there.

@ Speed

The Denison 3Click ä  360 system

The 3Click is Denison’s new automated web-based system for administering the Denison Leadership 360 survey.  The 3Click system automates most of the 360-survey process and allows program participants, consultants, and program administrators to spend their time on the program and not on the survey process, saving valuable time, resources, and costs. 

What are the advantages of using the 3Click system?

•      Easy to administer.  By allowing each participant to define their own respondents and retrieve their own survey results, many of the typical complexities of administering a 360 survey are eliminated.  A program administrator can generate macro-reports of who is participating, how many have finished the process, etc.  
   

•      Automated.  The 3Click system automates many tasks involved in the 360 process, such as sending out e-mail letters, reminder letters, keeping track of survey counts and producing reports.
  
   

•      Speed.  As soon as there are enough completions, participants can generate an electronic report almost instantaneously.
   

•     Tracking over time.  Participant results are stored in a database.  If the participant does the survey again (a year later, for instance), a comparison report can be produced to show what progress has been made.
   

•      Confidential.  Security features are built into the system and respondent confidentiality is always maintained.  

The target date for availability of the 3Click process is August, 2001. 

Contact Us Online for more information or a demo

Co-ool Projects

Denison Team 360 Now Available

Denison Consulting has developed a new 360 application of the model specifically for project teams.  This new application was developed as a part of an executive program created at IMD for Dow Chemical called "Driving Innovation and Entrepreneurship."  The program is designed for internal product development teams at Dow and concentrates on topics like managing the relationship between sponsors and entrepreneurs, creating new business ideas, building business models, and mobilizing your team.

Dan Denison is the IMD Faculty Director for this program and used the

experience that we have gained with the culture and leadership surveys to design something that was better suited to the challenges of the Dow project teams.  Project teams complete the survey on their team and receive feedback on their team’s culture from different sets of stakeholders and respondents, including “upstream and downstream" stakeholders and sponsors and bosses who support the team.

For many teams, the team feedback session has been described as a

"breakthrough."  It has served as a strong reminder that the team is at the center of the innovation process, and that they must manage both the hierarchy and the value chain effectively in order to get their new products out the door.  It has also identified specific issues that need to be addressed with each of their stakeholders.

We greatly appreciate Dow's support of this new innovation and the valuable learning that they have provided for us. This product is now in the "beta" test stage.  We are able to make this survey available to our clients and are very interested in hearing from you if you have some possible applications.

We are currently developing all of the support materials necessary to back up this product, so that it can soon be offered through our distributors, and used by our network of consultants. 

Please click here to download a Sample Report from the new team survey.

We hope to hear from you if you have an interest in this new product.

Built to Last Roll Out Process - Lessons Learned from the Nations Number One Homebuilder:
Written by Kari Lawry, Director of Human Resources for Pulte Homes

In 2000, Pulte Homes surveyed 16 of our markets, over 1246 employees with an overall response rate of 87% - which is amazing considering we had never done this before.  When preparing for our 2001 roll out of another 17 markets and over 1373 employees, we had to take a look back at our process and evaluate our ‘lessons learned’.

First of all, and most importantly, we made sure this time around that our key contacts (our people in the field who would actually be distributing the surveys, ensuring that the surveys get returned on time and act as the liaison between their market and myself) in the field received all of the communication and time line information that the Market Presidents did.  Last year we left the communicating up to the Market Presidents and found that the general communication was “Call Kari, she’ll explain everything”.  I also made sure that the Key Contacts in the field all received a lot of T.L.C. from me.  Yes, I mean ‘tender loving care’ but I also mean T-elephone calls, L- etters, C-ommunication.  I send out regular communication directly to the key contacts telling them about their response rates, impending deadlines, the importance of 100% response, etc.  I also sent out e-cards (via Blue Mountain cards) to the Key Contacts just thanking them for their time and effort and copied their Market President on the ‘thanks’ as well – recognition goes a long way.

Last year we had an expanded time line for receiving and delivering the feedback results.  Surveys were taken in late June and the results were communicated to the teams in late September-early October.  The problem with that timeline is, the teams all were crunched at that time of the year with closings, next years budgeting, etc. and most did nothing with the feedback until December or even early January.  This year we were smarter.  We started the process in January with communication, communication, and more communication.  We sent out the surveys in early March with an early April due date.  We will have a quick turn around for crunching data and then start rolling out the feedback in May.  This way the groups have the rest of the year to promote, improve and drive a positive culture.

A definite key to success in our opinion is ‘follow up focus groups’.  Last year we gave every team the option of conducting focus groups with their employees to get the story behind the numbers.  Not surprisingly, our lower performing markets took us up on this offer and we flew out to conduct focus groups with their entire employee population.  The follow up feedback was open, honest and productive.  From that feedback we provided the markets with “themes” of areas for improvement and actual ideas from the field on how to improve.  This was incredibly valuable feedback.  More surprising than that was the fact that several of our highest performing markets also took us up on our offer to conduct focus groups.  Our first response to them was “why, you obviously already have a highly functioning organization?”  But their response to us was “We believe in continuous improvement, we can always get better.”  I guess that attitude is why they got so good in the first place

One last tip, as we went back to each market to deliver the feedback we decided to ask our highest performing markets all the same question: “ you are under the same business and resource constraints and issues as all of our other markets, and yet the culture in your market is remarkably stronger…how did you get so good?”  We listened and took notes and soon some very solid ‘themes’ began to surface.  We collected all of the data to support those themes and published them in an open article to all of our markets.  The themes and data show that there are definite things that leadership and employees in the highly performing groups do that the lower performing groups don’t and we wanted to provide a ‘blueprint’ to the lower performing groups to help them drive positive improvement within their culture.  This “How They Got So Good…Lessons From The Field” blueprint is now the most highly requested document that I have.

Footnotes¹

Stephanie Morlan recently started a Research Internship with Denison Consulting to work on analyzing and updating our norm base for both the DOCS and DLDS.  Stephanie will also analyze the consistency and statistical validity of relationships within organizational demographics for our surveys and work on a variety of research projects.  She is currently working on finishing her PHD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology.

Making Waves...

Bill Neale, co-owner of Denison Consulting and co-author of the Denison Surveys, presented a workshop on “Leadership and the Bottom Line” at the Food Marketing Institute’s (FMI) annual “Managing the Total Store Leadership Course” conference on June 10-14th.  

Linkage, Inc.  Change 2001 Conference & Expo

Caroline Fisher Ph.D. presented an overview of the Denison Model and research at Linkage, Inc’s 4th annual Change 2001 Conference & Expo on Monday, April 30th in San Francisco, CA.  Caroline conducted a pre conference workshop on  “Assessing Your Culture and Determining Its Bottom Line Impact.” 

Denison Culture and Leadership Seminar

Denison Consulting conducted a  “Denison Culture and Leadership Seminar” in Vail Colorado in June.  The seminar focused on how people can leverage business culture to increase business performance and accelerate results in all types of organizations.

Attendees were from a number of countries and included both consultants who had used the Denison surveys before as well as those unfamiliar with the Denison Model and surveys.  Here is what one attendee had to say at the conclusion of the session: 

 "Having already been using the Denison Model for determining the impact of culture upon bottom-line performance, I was absolutely delighted with the quality of content and calibre of the recent Denison Training in Vail Colorado. In addition to the actual programme content, the ability to pragmatically explore the boundaries of application with such a powerful group of like minded attendees was invaluable. This was by far the best workshop that I have ever had the privilege of attending, in terms of quality and content. Despite the cost and time involved in traveling from the UK, this was money very well invested ! I look forward to us hosting the equivalent in Bournemouth, UK later in the year".  Nigel Watson of Q4 Solutions.

For more information about upcoming trainings and seminars please Contact Us Online

Thank you for your interest in Denison Consulting. To learn more about the Denison Organizational Culture Survey or The Denison Leadership Development Survey, visit our website at www.denisonculture.com