Participative Design Builds a Structure for Team Success
Recruitment
is a fast-paced, time-sensitive, and highly competitive industry.
Recruiters are charged with finding the best and brightest job candidates,
those who bring energy and inventive new ideas to the company, those
will later join the managerial ranks. Even the best companies must
grapple to qualified candidates. Recruiters spend months traveling
to universities, wining and dining and enticing undergraduate and
graduate students to choose their company over the rest. Then, just
after offers have been accepted and the new employees settle in,
the recruiters must begin pounding the pavement all over again.
A new Senior Director had to hit the ground running when she was hired to lead the Associate Analyst Program at a major energy corporation. Hired on the last day of the year, she was immediately confronted with the pressures of navigating a new workplace, bringing a staff together, and juggling multiple tasks with high accountability. An absence of infrastructure in the recruiting department had left other areas already in desperate need of new staff. "It's a challenge to attract the best people to energy, and to this city, when they could work for McKinsey or Goldman Sachs," she says. "The energy industry didn't have a 'fun' reputation." And in late December, many of the best candidates were already being wooed by competitors. But the most urgent needs were in the recruiting group itself.
The
Senior Director found herself the new leader of a new group. Her
department was made up of new and experienced employees, and employees
from several areas at the company. Some weren't getting along. Others
didn't know who was responsible for doing what. Yet together, this
group managed staffing for all entering positions, and fed the corporation's
managerial pipeline. Like company ambassadors, the department staff
visited college campuses and arranged special events, attracting
top recruits to their corporation and away from other companies
and industries. The Senior Director brought a wealth of ideas to
improve the recruitment effort, but needed her group to act on them.
To avoid losing any time - and any of the best candidates - the
Senior Director wanted her group working together and functioning
as an effective recruitment team immediately.
"I wanted my people to understand that they were seeing things through their own lens, and then help them see as a group," she says. To pull her group together, she needed to understand how different tasks had been assigned and performed before her tenure, what goals and missions had been set, and how she could most effectively lead the department. She hoped to set ground rules for a successful operation and develop a common mission for her department. Yet even as she was learning her own position, the corporation was pushing for results. She needed a fast and effective tool to help her group perform well in the short-term while building a plan for long-term success.
In the crowded world of business consultants, the Senior Director was most impressed with Caridas Consulting International (CCI). Mutual business contacts (former CCI clients) lauded the unique design tools and extensive business experience that CCI brought to the table. The Senior Director was particularly eager to try CCI's participative methods to learn about her department and develop a common mission. "It was new to me, but this approach seemed perfect for what I needed to accomplish," she says. "No one else offered anything like it."
The Senior Director brought in CCI consultants Evangeline Caridas and Frank Heckman into a situation pressured by a communications-challenged staff and the company's urgent needs. She saw immediately that CCI understood how big businesses and entrepreneurial environments worked, and how to operate effectively within them. "They had the right experience, and a complete understanding of our business: our business and financial challenges, our recruitment and customer service issues, our need for measurements," she remembers.
The
work redesign began with the participative meetings the Senior Director
had eagerly anticipated. Though some members of her group were initially
wary, she was pleased with how the process created an open dialogue
that demanded her people think and participate. "Everyone was
challenged, and had to think and speak productively; it wasn't something
where we were just sitting around and talking aimlessly." CCI
helped the group define the work process for each person. By leading
a discussion of individual responsibilities and skills, as well
as the group's needs, CCI helped the department change its underlying
tone. "They got people to get out from under their own perspective
and think as a group, for the department benefit," the Senior
Director says. "It changed from an 'I' focus to a 'we' focus."
CCI gave the Senior Director's group a framework to build the team she'd wanted. The participative redesign rooted out her people's talents and needs, streamlined their processes and systems, and gave them a structure for continued improvements. CCI helped the Senior Director get all three of her subgroups - managers, recruitment team, and administrative staff - up and running quickly. The administrative staff used participative methods to give input and take initiative; they became practically self-managing, which meant greater job satisfaction for them and excellent support for the department. This large energy corporation developed one of the best recruitment programs in the business. Its Fortune Magazine ranking leapt more than 100 notches in 18 months. Thanks to innovations in job-matching, assessment, professional development, and company branding, the department was able to meet the company's global staffing needs and resolve retention issues. Other companies send visitors to see how the industry's benchmark recruitment program operates. Everyone, from recruits to the company's top brass, gets the best service in the industry.
Participative design proved a crucial tool in the success of the recruitment department and the company, and CCI brought the right people in. "Evangeline Caridas and Frank Heckman led people through their resistance and got everyone in the group involved. She knew how to get between perceptions and realities, how to be objective, and provide the checks and balances that our group needed." The Senior Director valued the opportunity to participate as a member of the group. She knows she would not have had the same positive results, nor learned as much about her group, had she chosen to lead the sessions herself instead of participating in the dialogue.
In
addition, Caridas helped the Senior Director with her own professional
development. "Caridas is an excellent business coach,"
the Senior Director says, and offers an analogy for her coaching
experience: "If I was driving at 80 mph, she helped me by juggling
the road map, identifying my highest priorities, figuring out what
shortcuts I could take and where I needed to go the long way, as
well as what passengers I'd need to pick up along the way. She's
a good navigator when time is tight; she has your interests at heart
but will always keep your keep feet to the fire."
For further information, please contact Evangeline Caridas at 713-629-5692, or visit Caridas Consulting International on the web at www.flowmanagement.net