Use Case
There is no substitute for the client’s own voice.
Below you’ll find four case studies with detailed client assessments, a series of shorter quotes, and a client list.
Success Stories
Case Study 1 – Keeping The Edge Sharp
The need: Pfizer, one of the world’s leading providers of life-saving drugs, wanted to maintain top performance in one of its largest manufacturing plants – located in Dalian, China – after its current Managing Director retired. The pressures to keep the edge sharp and the plant at peak productivity were enormous.
The Solution: After careful planning with the client, Team Results designed a customized 2½-day program based on identifying, reality-testing, reformulating and retesting the top-level leadership strategies that would lead this critical plant into the future. Characterized by fun, laughter, the right cultural fit, and a basis in the four Team Results principles – Originality, Credibility, Results, and Measurement – the leadership team emerged with practical, proven refinements to the world-class dynamics that they had already had in place under the previous leadership.
The Results: After the program and the post-retirement change in Managing Director, the Pfizer Dalian plant went on to new strengths, handling the leadership transition smoothly and maintaining – in fact, slightly increasing – all productivity measures. Though the credit for productivity improvement should always go to the client, top Pfizer management identified the Team Results program as critical in sustaining and improving performance over the transition and into the future.
Productivity measurement results can be seen in the “Measurement” section.
Case Study 2 - Fixing a Crisis
(Note: Since this case study describes a major challenge at a client, the client’s identity has been protected.)
The need: When 1500 staff walked out at a large manufacturing client, costing the controlling company a total of $2.5M a day in lost production, the company came to Team Results for solutions. Based on a long-standing relationship with the controlling company and on high-speed consultations with top managers, and in the absence of any identifiable cause, Team Results concluded that the likely cause was a subtle but rapidly destabilizing feature in team dynamics which needed practical investigation and correction.
The Solution: Team Results invited a specially-selected group of key opinion leaders to attend a 2½-day customized productivity-improvement program which was focused on finding, diagnosing and correcting the destabilizing features in the team dynamics. About two-thirds of the way through the program, and through using proprietary, fun but well-provenanced techniques for investigating these dynamics, the “survival terrain” of work teams at the plant had been well-mapped and the cause – a complicated cultural instability triggered by a simple event – was identified and tackled. Back-channel strategies designed to defuse such instabilities in the future were created during the program and then implemented at work.
The Results. Workers at the plant returned to the job, and more significantly, there has not been any similar incident in about six years since. Confidence across the workforce remains high that the former instabilities have been successfully tackled with practical strategies developed on the program and then sustainably continued in the workplace.
An academic paper was written on this work by Team Results and delivered at Johns Hopkins University, leading to a collaborative project in cutting-edge team dynamics research with UCLA. This paper, and further information on current Team Results’ thought- and practice-leading research activities, can be found in the News Room.
Case Study 3 – Hitting a Performance Target
The Need: When giant telecommunications provider Telstra sold its Yellow Pages business, it was essential that the Yellow Pages I.T. Department – the most critical team to the sale – do its best work ever in the three months leading to the transition. The catch: there were no jobs waiting for them at the end. The challenge: the business data must be in top saleable condition, and I.T. had no reason to care.
The Solution: Team Results met with senior Telstra leadership to identify the areas of performance that were most critical. Then turning its attention to the Yellow Pages I.T. Department, Team Results designed a customized 2½-day program tailored to identifying, developing practical strategies for, and implementing the answer to a simple question – if there is no job waiting at the end, what unifies a work team to turn in the best performance of their lives?
Working with Team Results, I.T. department staff identified a key area of choice and control – they could take charge of ensuring their own high-value marketability across the I.T. community, the business community and the business media after a very successful sale and handover of the Yellow Pages business. The team then focused on using the program to develop tested and proven strategies for the short-term unification of a group of professionals to achieve world-acclaimed performance.
The Results: Strategies developed by the I.T Department during the program were instantly transferable and highly successful at work, leading to the successful and uncontentious sale of the Telstra Yellow Pages business at the full asking price. Wide acclaim of this success in the business community and the financial press led to all members of the former Yellow Pages I.T. team finding excellent jobs within three months, in many cases at higher seniority and salaries. By comparison, other outplacement efforts for equally-qualified staff in other parts of the business which did not engage Team Results look longer, cost the business more and were much less successful.
The Solution: After careful planning with the client, Team Results designed a customized 2½-day program based on identifying, reality-testing, reformulating and retesting the top-level leadership strategies that would lead this critical plant into the future. Characterized by fun, laughter, the right cultural fit and a basis in the four Team Results principles – Originality, Credibility, Results, Measurement – the leadership team emerged with practical, proven refinements to the world-class dynamics that they had already had in place under the previous leadership.
The Results: After the program and the post-retirement change in Managing Director, the Pfizer Dalian plant went on to new strengths, handling the leadership transition smoothly and maintaining – in fact, slightly increasing – all productivity measures. Though the credit for productivity improvement should always go to the client, top Pfizer management identified the Team Results program as critical in sustaining and improving performance over the transition and into the future.
Productivity measurement results can be seen in the “Measurement” section.
Case Study 4 – Getting on the Same Page
(Note: Since this case study describes a major challenge at a client, the client’s identity has been protected.)
The Need: A globally-known car maker needed its dealerships to freeze sales during a long weekend so that the system could be overhauled to meet new tax regulations. The dealerships met the request with a hostile and angry refusal. The company was facing an impasse on a national scale, complications on every side, and a non-negotiable deadline for tax compliance.
The Solution: Recognizing that only the senior management saw an urgent need for resolution of the impasse, Team Results asked the company to send key managers and opinion leaders from the three most-affected departments – dealerships, finance and I.T. – to a 2½-day customized program at a neutral location. Focusing on the need to emerge with practical team strategies for an apparently impossible project, the group managed a simulated project together which accurately reproduced the challenges of getting a unified result across major cultural differences and legitimately different business priorities. The goal was to develop a set of practical, tested and shared strategies to get a complicated job done on time – even when compromise and sacrifice were required by all.
The Results: Using negotiation strategies developed in the program, the managers and key opinion leaders returned to work and won support in their work areas for the impasse-solving strategies also developed in the program. The tax switchover happened on time and without excessive compliance costs, and the dealerships implemented agreed stop-gap measures, which allowed trading to continue. Though all sides retained their legitimately different business pressures, their now-unified strategies and practical discoveries about trust and teamwork enabled this massive tax change to be completed on time and with no loss of goodwill.
Clients with clickable links have detailed, downloadable Case Studies in Adobe PDF format
