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A short case study showing how Herrmann HBDI can be used to illustrate a corporation wide problem
Business Issues:
5 years ago a leading international service organisation faced familiar problems in managing service engineers in the field. These included:
- The profitability of servicing original installations being squeezed by global competition, the service business had to do more than break even. Viability of the total business depended on the service division being a major profit earner.
- Customer satisfaction and retention levels were low and had to improve if business growth targets had any hope of being achieved.
- Effective management of a globally dispersed operation was proving progressively more difficult to achieve.
Failed Approaches:
Conventional 'Customer Care' and 'Culture Change' programmes by US consultants failed to address the stubborn core problems. Break through was only achieved when the client :
- Was able to recognise the difficulty of the culture change required using HBDI
- Fully recognised the pivotal role of the field supervisor
- Stopped trying to manage the business 'top down' and set out to manage 'bottom up'
- Found the means to develop the business, operational and leadership skills of field supervision
- Replaced conventional training programmes with a high-reality business simulation that allowed participants to develop their skills in the 'real' context of their workplace.
The break through in understanding came as a result of using HDDI with a group of senior managers. Their profiles emerged as shown in the following figure:
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This demonstrated very quickly the left brain dominance in the thinking of the organisation. Customer care (C quadrant), although crucial for the future of the organisation was not in the primary thinking style of senior management - not surprising in an engineering dominated culture. Without some recognition that customer care was nothing the organisation would do willingly - any initiative in this area would fail; as indeed had already happened in the USA. Conventional programmes asserting the need for customer care would not work. Wider use of Herrmann allowed change programmes to be built that started with the premise that in their busy working lives, managers would not readily put customers at the top of their agenda. In fact taking the quadrants in order of dominance it was the last thing they would do.
Ultimately, simulations were developed especially for the organisation reflecting the work of a supervisor looking after a typical territory with typical customers and typical customer problems. Field supervisors had to lead and manage this territory in a whole brain way; it had 12 engineers and about 100 customers with 400 or 500 installations. They were required to train and develop their people to have the right competences and attitudes to do the job well so that they can delight their customers and maximise the revenues and profits from their territory. In effect they were required to run their own business using the people and tools issued to them by the organisation. Programme designs 'hung off' the Herrmann model and the complexity of the role was made clear using exercises building required management activity on the four Herrmann quadrants.
Over time programmes were translated in all the major European languages allowing Herrmann data about the word-wide organisation to be gathered. In the figure below can be seen the strong left brain dominance that was preventing a culture swing to customer focus.
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Outcomes:
These programmes have enjoyed spectacular success winning two in-house gold medals for exceptional performance in the process. Sixty in house trainers have been enabled to run the program in various countries (most of them coming from the field). In excess of 400 programmes have now been run world-wide.
This would not have been possible had not the Herrmann instrument and the clarity of its feedback been brought to bear early in the problem identification stage.
Author - Gorden Webster - gordon.webster@hbdi.co.uk
By the same author Project Management and the H.B.D.I. click here
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Creative Thinking for University Students
China / Hong Kong
Author – Caroline Yeoman
Caroline was first introduced to HBDI in Hong Kong and she managed the translation of the HBDI questionnaire into Chinese for use in both Hong Kong and mainland China.
In China HBDI was used in a larger scale corporate responsibility project by a major telecommunication company to take a 3 day creative thinking workshop to universities around China. Caroline designed and facilitated the pilot programme, refined and further developed the workshop and coached local Chinese facilitators to deliver the programme within the universities.
HBDI was a great success in providing a creative thinking model to students who had never before being exposed to a creative technique and process. Being a thinking tool, the model was totally translatable and understood by the students.
To date the workshop has been conducted in 25 universities throughout China with participation from some 2000 students.
Author - Caroline Yeoman
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Stress and the HBDI
Author Caroline Yeoman
As part of her MBA Caroline developed a HBDI based questionnaire, which identifies and importantly anticipates, stress triggers based on an individuals thinking preference. This is unique as it is a predictive stress model and is a preventative measure rather than an after the cause fix.
Evidence to date shows a clear correlation between thinking avoidance and potential stress triggers. In strong preference and avoidance profiles avoidance thinking actually is the same as the stress triggers.
In more balanced profiles, stress triggers are more difficult to predict from the HBDI profile and the stress survey results show that experience and capabilities play a much greater role in determining stress triggers and in a spiky profile. Therefore it cannot be assumed that a balanced profiled individual will be stressed or not by each quadrant equally. The new stress survey therefore plays an important role in determining stress triggers particularly for the more balanced profiles.
Bottom line implications for this new tool are clear. If teams can be developed to build on the individual preferences and limit stress then the result will be more effective, motivated and innovative individuals and overall increased team performance.
In addition, costs related to stress related absenteeism, reallocation of workload and in the worst case loss of employees and new recruitment will be dramatically deceased.
Author - Caroline Yeoman
For a copy of the survey contact caroline.yeoman@hbdi.co.uk
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