The MD wanted managers in this global organisation to have an immediate and continuous impact on performance.
Thirty years old in 2008, Diesel was the first retailer to launch distressed denim, now much imitated. It has circa 3,500 employees across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Annual sales were approximately €1.2 billion in 2005 and largely consist of denim sales, but also extremely successful and influential ranges of accessories and children's wear. The international nature of operations means that senior people are often transferred overseas and this has an inevitable impact on local team effectiveness and on performance management. High performance is expected immediately, and there often isn’t long to assess skills within a team and diagnose good & poor performance.
In the UK, a new highly capable leadership team under a new Managing Director had been brought on board during 2007 and 2008.
Performance management (of which appraisal is a small albeit a significant part) in this sector has traditionally been limited. The MD and HR Director were determined that Diesel should take the lead in driving excellence in performance management and asked Reconsulting to advise on how best to accelerate the effective operation of the leadership team.
Performance management (PM) is a long game. But because of commercial pressures, it’s very tempting for an organization to run some appraisal training just before appraisal time and then forget about it for the next 12 months. And that’s exactly what many organizations do.
Diesel had foresight to understand that the interim months is where performance can be improved most. So our emphasis with Diesel was to lay foundations at appraisal time and then to build on these with managers in the interim, in three ways:
- by demonstrating how weekly and even daily PM interactions with their people can get results
- personal coaching for ‘difficult’ situations
- by using refreshers on key principles in the interim period
Starting with senior leaders, learning was cascaded through the line.
We took time to understand the skills of each leader and manager. Our approach is always to build self-awareness and motivation in our clients to foster change. Skills are important of course, but only when there’s a will to change.
It’s the only way to effect a genuine and sustained change in people.
One of the most immediate benefits was to give managers increased confidence to have ‘difficult’ conversations. Whether about past performance, future objectives or pay. Diesel sensibly opted to schedule separate conversations with each of their people to address each of these three areas.
In addition to establishing personal motivations to become better performance managers, participants learned new tools and techniques:
- Situational coaching
- Accountability
- Situational and person-based influence models
- Communications skills
- Day-to-day PM
- Inspirational leadership and empowerment
- Objective prioritisation
The work was designed to dovetail with other initiatives that Diesel had planned. Reconsulting was asked to continue with the next phases of the cascade.