The CEO’s question to us
We see new players, new technologies, regulatory changes impacting our business of providing fleet management to companies. We have been growing rapidly over the last 10 years, yet, we seem to have lost our ‘typical company feeling’. How to retain and nurture that company feeling - key for us, in how we work with our clients, our partners and with each other - while keeping a decentralised and locally empowered operating model?
Our Executive Board has also noticed that our operating entities with higher levels of customer satisfaction are more successfully growing their top line and profit (and often also have better employee retention).
We believe that embedding this in our organisation and in our ways of working is key in growing and transforming our business in a fast changing landscape. How can we mobilise our leaders and all employees to engage in this transformation?
Background
Founded over 50 years ago, this company was one of the first to provide automotive leasing services; allowing people to use an asset without having to purchase it outright. Doing this successfully required strong finance capabilities focused on optimising the management of the asset during its use, to be able to sell it with a reasonable return in the future. The focus and mindset of the leadership has been primarily on the management of the asset itself and not the experience of when the asset is used.
Over time, they have grown internationally to become a market leader in fleet management services while maintaining a decentralised operating model. This has resulted in operating under the same company name and brand in multiple geographies yet acting as different companies. With the opening of markets and further globalisation, international customers are increasingly expecting the same service level irrespective of the geographical operating entity serving them.
Continuing to win in the future will require leveraging the power of being one global company while changing the business model towards providing mobility services in the broadest sense and to new types of customers, with the behaviours and ways of working that is requires.
The challenge as we saw it
- How to open the minds of 180+ senior leaders who typically spent their entire career inside this company, have a ‘hands-on, operational’ approach, and are busy running a successfully growing business today?
- How to mobilise the leadership of the company around the benefits of a more unified and streamlined way of operating while retaining the autonomy of local entities?
- How to create a common storyline and way of engaging each person in the company to take up their role in the transformation?
What we did
- We worked with the executive team to develop a new (strategic and leadership) identity across the group. We co-designed with the Business Development and HR teams a process across all 30 countries (through workshops, interviews, dialogues, surveys) to re-define the company’s brand, positioning and core values and corresponding behaviours. This new identity created a story of the company’s reason for existence and how it delivers its promise to customers.
- We empowered 500+ local leaders and ambassadors with a skillset, toolset and mindset to engage their local operating entity and their suppliers to bring the strategic identity to life. Through this approach, all teams and individuals became aware of the strategic identity, understood it, believed in the need to live up to that identity and developed a team and individual action plan to make that identity a lived reality for customers. Local suppliers (responsible for delivery more than 50% of the services towards clients) were introduced to the identity and inspired to engage in their role in delivering the brand promise. The local management teams and ambassadors took ownership (using the globally developed methodologies) of engaging all employees in their entity to live up this identity. We took this approach in three waves to 33 countries, in a combined client-ELP Network delivery team.
What the client got out of it
- Significant increase in customer loyalty enabling continued growth during the last financial crisis.
- Significant increase in employee engagement and brand recognition by prospective customers.
- New growth ideas created and tested.
- Everyone in the company unified behind a common identity.
- Clear commitment and ownership for concrete roadmaps for growth in operating entities.