Arming Production Leadership for Tindall’s Next Chapter
The Challenge
The then CEO/President at Tindall Corporation contacted us to explore Catalyzer as a means by which the company could address key people-focused challenges. Among them were (1) building a bench/succession planning, (2) spurring individual growth through leadership and supervisory training and employee development, and (3) responding to recruiting and retention challenges, ever present in the manufacturing industry.
The more general challenge presented here, and which is also the circumstance in every new relationship, is to discern in a very condensed decision-making window whether a given vendor has the capability to deliver against stated organizational objectives.
The Goal
Tindall’s goal was to accelerate these efforts immediately, all the while supporting their internal human resources team’s initiative development against these important challenges.
The Solution
Catalyzer cannot know whether and how to help if we don’t understand where the organization is and what they require. As a consequence, we routinely offer to visit the organization on a Discovery mission at our expense. That effort unfolded in two phases at Tindall.
After coordinating a visit to their headquarters in Spartanburg, South Carolina, we distributed an assessment to identified key leaders with the aim of gathering their individual insights regarding Tindall’s current status, direction and objectives. Our logical focus was toward optimally developing people. The feedback collected from 10 senior leaders revealed people-focused areas each felt critical to Tindall’s near-term growth. These were used to develop a workbook we used to facilitate the Discovery Visit that November.
Within the week, Tindall solicited three proposals from us, the largest of which was to roll out a six-module supervisory leadership development program in each of their six divisions. A second Discovery visit to the divisions was needed so that we might assess unique contexts and challenges in order to deliver tailored skills-focused modules. These modules were executed during the first quarter by specified Catalyzer facilitation/observer teams. Insights were aggregated and we began collaborative curriculum development with Tindall’s human resources team.
Within a few weeks, Catalyzer launched into all six divisions and with supervisory/production leadership cohorts that spanned from approximately six leads in South Carolina to 30 in Virginia. Virginia formed two cohorts, one fully Spanish-speaking and a second with more native English speakers. Modules encompassed Leadership Foundations, Emotional Intelligence, Communications, Interpersonal Accountability, Coaching/Performance Feedback and Team Building. In both Virginia and Texas, Catalyzer deployed a bi-lingual facilitation team to support those plant’s Spanish speakers and we additionally translated all curriculum to support those deliveries.
Visits were coordinated directly with each division’s General Manager/Vice President and executed throughout the year. Parallel program delivery occurred for Tindall’s senior leadership so that all could begin employing a more common vocabulary and specific models around the six specified leadership topics.
The Results
In a recent Customer Experience survey that included several senior leaders at Tindall, when asked about program outcomes, 75% responded with “very effective” and the remaining 25% “extremely effective.”
Specifically, the program resulted in two critical follow-ons:
- Georgia identified a new cohort in the following year to also complete the six-module supervisory leadership program.
- All six divisions engaged Catalyzer again to develop and deliver a four-module supervisory leadership sustainment program for the same training audiences that received the initial program.
Catalyzer remains engaged in all six divisions, as well as at the corporate headquarters. Beyond production of leader-focused programs, we developed and delivered anti-bias training for the executive leadership team and successfully built Tindall’s succession framework – an effort the CEO had been attempting to complete for several years before engaging Catalyzer in that work.
The Feedback
- 100% of survey respondents assessed Catalyzer’s facilitators as “Excellent – in the top 5% of all facilitation teams I’ve experienced.”
- Catalyzer “helped us prepare our new cadre of leaders, get our seasoned leaders re-engaged, and helped launch our succession plan.”
- Catalyzer presented “consistent, relevant training for leadership skills across our supervisory operations.”
What Came Next
After the initial year and our focused efforts around the production supervisor leadership initiative, Catalyzer launched a second-year and now third-year sustainment effort. This latter program involves no new curriculum, but requires site visits semi-annually to each division where we sustain relationships with production leaders and assess the integration of what we talked about in Tindall training rooms into moment-by-moment leader interaction and behaviors.
This site visit approach has been so successful that Tindall is preparing to engage Catalyzer for a fourth consecutive year in a hybrid approach – two new curricular modules plus site visits – at each production division.
What would Tindall share with other manufacturers about Catalyzer? “You would regret not using them, and they will exceed your expectations and deliver value every time.”