+91 99309 41534
The client is a leading global supplier of machines and complete plants for the ceramics, plastics, food & beverage, and packaging industries with its base in Italy.
Internationally, the organisation has a strong presence with production facilities, subsidiaries, and offices spread across various continents. The company is renowned for its innovative technologies and high-quality products, which cater to a wide range of industrial sectors. We worked with their office based out of India.
HR had approached us with a clear problem statement – that there were gaps in expectations of the Indian CEO from the heads of departments especially when it came to communicating professionally. It appeared as if the requirement was about learning simple business etiquettes i.e. the do’s and don’ts of communication.
Since we were to work with HODs, we decided to spend some face to face with every HOD to understand why there were gaps in communication. A good amount of time was spent with each of them with a directed set of questions. Then the results were compared across inputs given by different leaders to identify the patterns.
The core problem was identified not about learning the do’s and don’ts of communication but rather about spending more time collaborating with each other and communicating on a more frequent basis so that they could build deeper relations and be able to freely talk to each other.
Another big issue that was uncovered was that these leaders were all seasoned individuals who had not undergone any training or coaching before so there would be a lot of resistance to both taking in inputs from an external agency and then being ready to implement the changes.
While HR and our trainer team made a list of objectives that would need to get addressed during the training, we agreed to start out with a few well defined objectives so that it would be easier to collaborate with the HODs and bring about the changes rather than try to approach all the bottlenecks at one go.
A full day training session was organized, customized more along the approach of brainstorming rather than educating the HODs, given their years of experience and the mindset to resist change.
We decided to start the day with team bonding activities before getting to the more serious issues that need work so that the team would be more settled into the format of a full day of spending time with and collaborating with each other.
Each specific objective was taken up through different scenarios, activities and case studies, helping the HODs to understand the importance of the techniques that we discussed and how exactly they could implement them into their routines and their team culture.
As expected, the leaders felt this format to be new so they were either hesitant or not fully forthcoming at the beginning of the day. The icebreaker and team bonding activities helped to loosen them up, especially when they saw the others being as uncomfortable as they were in trying this format of learning, and still trying them out. The trainer had an encouraging tone rather than the tone of a specialist since she could sense this hesitance in the audience.
As we warmed up and went forward, the participants began to enjoy the day. The role plays were a delight for them – they could see how our team had picked up the specific pain points each of them had been facing and now they had a chance to talk it out with each other at length. One of them gave this open feedback during the session that our team had really understood their issues very well.
Some activities on perspective thinking helped them to see each other’s point of view and this helped them to suddenly get a new way of approaching problems they might be facing with the other departments during various situations. This included both verbal and nonverbal communication, highlighting the importance of body language.
We ended the day with each HOD sharing how they were going to implement the changes that we had together brainstormed within their routine and their departments to ensure smooth functioning of the organisation.
As always, the follow up was scheduled a month after the training session. We had changed the format of our regular follow up sessions from training to 1:1 sessions due to the nature of the audience. This was a great decision – the follow up helped get each HOD to agree to a timeline and pathway in which they were either already implementing/planning to implement the concepts that we had discussed on the day of the training.
More than that, it helped the trainer to identify why there was a big gap in communication – it was majorly due to a single individual in the team, different from whom the CEO and HR had identified during the pre assessment.
We lined up coaching for both the CEO to be able to set up his expectations from the team in the right way and for the individual in question to be more apt in their communication and in coaching their team to communicate with other departments with respect and clarity.
