Bussines cases

Consolidating high-performance teams at regional level

One of the biggest challenges multinational companies face up to is getting their regional teams to work under the same criteria and organizational culture.

Research shows the advantages diverse talent brings to decision making, as well as how those multinationals with diversity and inclusion policies in place improve their business indicators. This is why these organizations are determined to maximize multiculturality and generate a positive impact in the company.

It has been proved that when decisions are made by teams consisting of people from different generations, assertiveness is increased by 80%; when the regional diversity variable is added and team members come from different geographic locations, it increases up to 87%. When gender diversity is incorporated, assertiveness goes up to 73%.

A CPG multinational company detected their organization didn’t have a brand identity in their corporate culture and that their teams weren’t cohesive. This situation led them to request our advisory services, aiming to generate one culture and align the entire organization with it.

Objective

Transform the Andean Region team into one that contributes to the development of the whole organization, maximizing diversity and creating a culture across all markets. Likewise, the necessary behaviors to achieve business objectives were established.

Project

Work with the leadership and management team in the organization to generate and promote the same culture in their regional markets, while standardizing the strategic foundations and core behaviours that should be developed in each country.

Results

The challenge was to integrate diversity in some of its different aspects such as gender, age and culture.

Before implementing the strategy designed by Talengo, the teams wouldn’t recognize themselves as a region or even as part of the same company – each of them worked in their own sylo. This changed with the consolidation of the regional team as a business unit: after analyzing the strategic foundation and leadership behaviours, the cultural aspects that were common across the regional markets were aligned with the business strategy and objectives, which at the same time, made visible those behaviours they had in common.

A common culture to the whole Andean Region was created, with their President involved in the project, which was critical to the positive results being achieved. The team overcame situations such as not communicating regularly, not resolving their differences and avoiding being straightforward when communicating with each other, which led to their roles and functions being aligned, as were the business objectives.

Industry

CPG

Location

Andean Region

Approach

Strengthen the professionals’ skills and align the group with the business strategy for them to become a high-performing team. It’s important to understand that, in order to achieve this, the values, beliefs and cultural symbols in each of the countries needed to be identified and openly shared with the aim to promote an inclusive organizational culture.

The journey to a one-company culture

Talengo established work sessions to create the foundation of a high-performing team, where they learnt that trust is the essential component and backbone of it all.

The country leaders took tests to assess their thinking and leadership styles in order for the organization to maximize their diversity’s potential. This would prevent those differences between countries from becoming a source of conflict, and instead all their perspectives would turn out to impact positively on innovation, creativity and results.

When critical behaviours were established for both collaborators and leaders to adopt them at any time in any of their countries, we worked with the management team to drive this change in each of their areas and countries – this later trickled down to collaborators as a result.

Once the teams got to know each other, generated trust and adopted an assertive, direct and transparent communication style between them, they learnt to work in an aligned manner and realized their diversity complements each other, which is vital to become high performers and achieve objectives.

Today, this multinational company has integrated an assertive communication style, improved their ability to manage conflict, clearly defined roles and functions and has become results oriented – all of these aspects representing essential commitments that help understand the importance of leadership.

It is worth mentioning that research conducted at Harvard University shows that leaders have a 70% impact on their team’s work atmosphere, hence getting executives involved in a cultural transformation process is crucial. It all starts with them before trickling down to the rest of the organization, and the success of this project was partly due to their involvement.