An Example Case Study for NewCo Telecom

“Enterprise LEADER Has Been a Catalyst For Change For Us... It’s Helped Us Change The Way Our Employees Think and Act... and It’s Helped Us Become Much More Customer Focused and Competitive.” For Ashoke the CEO of NewCo Telecom, the start of the year brought its fair share of commercial challenges. These included:

1. Tough competition: NewCo Telecom (NCT) is in one of the most competitive marketplaces, facing strong local and overseas competition.

2. Old monopoly mindset: NCT is a former state owned enterprise, previously the primary land­line provider. Being a former monopoly, it still has many employees whose mindset remains entrenched in a non­commercial way of employee thinking. This makes it harder to compete in tough hyper­competitive commercial environments where competitor companies have significant budgets for marketing and customer acquisition and in some cases superior offerings (i.e. LTE).

3. Low staff turnover: Given the countries economics and the historically well paid positions of NCT employees, staff turnover at the telco is low. This makes it hard to bring fresh ideas into the organisation and make the switch in thinking and culture from a state­owned to commercial enterprise.

What Next For NCT After an Expensive and Failed Change Program? Over the previous 18 months, NCT had tried — unsuccessfully — to introduce a program of change and address its core issues.

With the help of a large western consulting company, NCT spent a significant amount of time and money trying to change the mindset of employees and culture of the company to make itself more competitive.

Sadly, the results were not there and the CEO found himself at the start the year at an HRD conference, still looking for fresh ways to address his people challenges.

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Discovering Enterprise LEADER By pure chance, over lunch on the 3rd day of the conference, Ashoke found himself sitting next to Richard Parkes Cordock, a UK based entrepreneur and creator of an enterprise­wide coaching program called Enterprise LEADER. Enterprise LEADER is used by companies around the world to improve the performance of their teams.

Ashoke quickly discovered that NCT’s managers could use Enterprise LEADER to coach their own employees in essential themes such as customers, teams and personal leadership.

Ashoke learnt that Enterprise LEADER comprised of MP3 coaching materials, a printed workbook, and a rock solid implementation methodology which included group face­to­face coaching sessions (led and facilitated by NCT’s own managers, and comprising of teams of around 5 to 10 employees).

Amroze Technology = NCT Ashoke also learnt that the content of the MP3 sessions told the story of Amroze Technology and the troubles it faced. These are problems which NCT faced too, such as being relevant to its customers, attracting and retaining customers, improving communication between employees and teams, creating high performance teams, making employees accountable and developing self­confident ‘customer focused’ employees.

Enterprise LEADER and a Customized Version for NCT Over lunch, Richard explained to Ashoke how and why Enterprise LEADER works. Richard was also able to download a sample version of the mentoring program as an Android app on Ashoke’s phone.

Ashoke liked the idea of his managers becoming mentors and coaches — he too believes it is the responsibility of his managers to get the best from their own teams.

Ashoke also liked the idea of customising the Enterprise LEADER app, and creating a NCT specific branded app, containing the 20 session MP3 audio mentoring program, together with written transcripts of the program in English, Sinhala and Tamil.

Since NCT has a large proportion of younger employees, using tools and technology they are familiar with seemed to make perfect sense. They liked the fact that they could use their smartphones, YouTube, Instagram and Yammer (a corporate Facebook alternative). Enterprise LEADER and its methodology lends itself to using all of these tools.

Learning From Other Customers When Ashoke returned to his office, he took time to learn more about Enterprise LEADER and read in detail the case studies from the site www.enterpriseleaders.com.

One case study in particular resonated with him. This was the story of Haylor, Frayer and Coon, a US based insurance company, who had rolled Enterprise LEADER out to over 250 employees.

NCT had just over 2,500 employees, and it was clear that using the same scalable approach and methodology, NCT could achieve the same transformational results as Haylor.

It was also clear from all the case studies on the www.enterpriseleaders.com website that the content and methodology of Enterprise LEADER worked, and so the risk of using the program was low. It really was down to NCT themselves whether or not they achieved the results they wanted. Their destiny was in their own hands, not the hands of an expensive 3rd party consulting company.

Coaching 2,500 Employees! Ashoke invested in an Enterprise LEADER licence for initially for 2,500 employees, and also retained the services

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of Richard Parkes Cordock for a short while to help transfer knowledge and get the project started.

NCT already had a project team in place from the previous unsuccessful change project, so this team was able to plan out the implementation of Enterprise LEADER and build the NCT specific customer Android app which would be key to distributing the course content.

NCT also already had a web based learning platform in place called Saba, to which they uploaded a multimedia version of Enterprise LEADER for those who wanted to access the coaching program on their PC rather than phone.

Getting Started To get the project started, Ashoke let the entire NCT workforce know that they were going to embark on a company­wide coaching program, and that every employee was going to experience coaching over the next 9 months.

He also made an arrangement with local University to ensure that everybody who completed the program, either as an employee or manager/coach, received a certificate of achievement, helping them add an extra qualification to their CV.

Creating Hundreds of Small Mentor Groups NCT had literally hundreds of little mentor groups running over the next 6­9 months, with managers leading their teams through the 20 mentoring sessions.

Initially, there were raised eyebrows by some employees, but very quickly, everybody started to embrace the mentoring sessions and even look forward to them, as it gave them a chance to share their ideas, opinions and experiences. They felt like they were being heard, especially by senior management.

CEO for a Day Exercise and Yammer One of the core takeaways from Enterprise LEADER is a particular exercise where employees suggest what changes they would make if they were CEO for a day. This exercise alone generates thousands of business growth and cost saving ideas. To capture and organise all the ideas, NCT implemented an internal social media platform called Yammer (a Facebook styled collaboration tool for corporates).

In real time, employees could see the ideas and suggestions other employees made, and Ashoke and the other senior management team had access to a ready­made body of business growth/cost saving/product improvement suggestions. These were ideas which came directly from employees (who are closer to the customer than the senior management are).

Final Presentations and YouTube As the 20 mentor sessions came to an end, each group of employees was asked to create a short presentation, outlining what they had learnt during the coaching sessions.

They had a free licence to express themselves in any way they wanted. Some created songs, some created short mini­dramas, some showed their learning by creating a quiz show. Others prepared more formal and traditional presentations.

All had fun, and the presentations (which were often given to senior management) were highlights of the program. Each presentation was recorded on a camera phone and uploaded to a private company YouTube page for every other employee to watch. This created a real buzz in the company.

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Enterprise LEADER ­ A Catalyst for Change Enterprise LEADER was a catalyst for change for NCT. It gave NCT a common language, a shared direction, a renewed focus on their customers — and more importantly it gave them the tools to compete in a hyper competitive environment.

As Ashoke said, “Enterprise LEADER gave us what we were looking for. It worked for us for three main reasons:

1. We owned the process: It was our managers who coached their own teams. This level of ownership was important. Change has to come from within, and this approach allowed us to make that happen.

2. The content of Enterprise LEADER was rock solid: Using the backdrop and case­study of Amroze Technology was perfect for us. Amroze allowed us to reflect on our own company, by first looking at another company. I know when our people listened to the MP3 session, they often forget they were hearing about Amroze, and thought they were listening to stories about NCT.

This story­based way of transferring knowledge is very powerful. It is quite similar to learning a new language (which indeed our employees were; they were learning the language of business). Language learning programs are always based around a story, as this approach is more memorable and engaging.

3. The methodology of Enterprise LEADER just works: I know when Richard first created Enterprise LEADER he thought it would be a personal development program used by individual employees, but he soon discovered it gave more transformational results when used by teams as a coaching program.

It is the methodology behind Enterprise LEADER which really unlocks the potential of teams. This methodology includes how to use the workbook, how to run a coaching session, how to generate ideas, how to get the most from the final presentations — and not to forget the importance of branding the program and having a NCT branded android app.

All of these elements together just work and made it easy and enjoyable for everybody involved."

As Ashoke continued... “at the end of 9 months, we have seen NCT transform from a company with a monopoly mindset entrenched at its core, to a new dynamic workforce: one which sees the future, respects the competition we are faced with, and knows how hard we have to work to attract and retain customers.

We have an innovative workforce, who are always looking for new ways to add value to our products and services, and looking for new ways to grow revenue and shrink costs.

Along the way, a few people have left us, but that is never a bad thing. Not everybody was right for the new NCT. Over the past 9 months we have identified some real stars in NCT, some real untapped talent who have been given the opportunity to shine. These are real gems.

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Interestingly enough, as a hidden benefit of Enterprise LEADER, we’ve even seen some people’s spoken English improve, as they’ve been able to listen and learn English along the way!

For a company like NCT, we might be expected to draw on the expertise of large international consulting and business transformation companies like McKinsey and PWC, but in the end, we took a different, lower cost approach to change. We harnessed technology (smartphones, Youtube, Instagram, Yammer) and we harnessed the power of our biggest asset, our people. I think we made the right choice as demonstrated by our improved financial results, customer acquisition and retention levels and employee engagement levels.”

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