Customer Scenarios.

The business climate is volatile and continual change is becoming our new normal. We’re not telling you anything you don’t already know. You also know that changing leaders and shifting strategy to fit your challenges is often the way to survive. Whether you’re a new leader, you are bringing in a new leader, or changing strategy, you want your organization to improve, not wallow in a productivity dip after you make that change.

Uncertainty among leaders and managers is the greatest enemy of effective change. And that trickles down – any managers who are uncertain of the path or unable to directly address employee concerns will under-cut any action from leadership. Well that’s our sweet spot – we know how to engineer successful transitions like this. The key is making your big change feel familiar, controlled and successful to employees, from the start.

Can we help you with your leadership change? Yes. Can we help you with your strategy change? Yes. Can we help you with your culture change? No. Well, we will help, but we’ll try to change your mind about that one. Culture is like the immune system of an organization – it tries to kill anything that doesn’t fit. Culture is strong and nearly immutable. So we will advise you to use it, not lose it. Leveraging the dominant culture in your organization gives you power for any change. We can lead you through culture assessment and work with you to embed cultural cues throughout your initiative, to help employees embrace and engage.

Technology is a big investment and doing it well means focusing on the ones with their fingers on the keyboards. Would you go live before your system was tested and ready? No, you would not. Well your people are a part of your system. They need a readiness approach just as rigorous and strategic.

The Emerson team has decades of experience with the people side of big technology and process change. We work with you to identify the user behaviors critical to your business results, then we make sure your systems and processes work hand-in-hand with those behaviors. We also help you enlist employees as a part of your solution – pulling for your new technology, not against it. We can help you create momentum and prevent resistance, productivity dips and workarounds – all to deliver your outcomes.

A merger, acquisition or any other major structural change shocks the organization like nothing else. Leadership has to answer some questions, and quickly.

How will decision-making change? How will governance and reporting change? How will we merge or replace data, systems, and processes? What are the people impacts? What roles do we want to keep? What are the redundancies? How will we communicate at the right times, with the right messages? How will we cut through the chaos and focus each employee on what’s critical to make this work?

We specialize in changes that rock your world – those that affect at least 350 employees, have >$1 million impact and must create significant progress within 180 days. Our methodology takes you from triage and diagnostics to a steady state, fast. We don’t drop decks on you and leave you to execute; we start with tightly facilitated working groups, including all your key decision-makers. We get you on track and on-message from the start, and we don’t leave you until your team has what it needs to maintain the transformation.

If you’re looking to expand your market or introduce a new product, you have a need for speed. You have to make it work or fail, fast. The biggest misstep? Thinking you can do this using your current team, as they run the rest of the business. Because you’ll not only risk failing slowly and painfully, you will build the old – old thinking, behaviors, processes – into something that must be brand-new. A burdened, multi-tasking team will only sow the seeds of failure into your new venture.

So what’s an ambitious company to do? Here are the first few things we’d tell you: Build a team that focuses ONLY on this new territory. You need people who can shake off the limitations of your current business and “live” in the future. They should be thoughtful, fast and scientific – testing and honing your solution in quick iterations. Once they land on a solution, and they make it feel familiar, controlled and successful to the rest of the organization, they can help fold it into ongoing operations. That’s how you position your launch for greatness.

You don’t want training. You want to improve human performance. And you want performance that meets YOUR goals.

Do you have new products or services employees must support? New process or systems your people must use to get to that ROI? Do you have new compliance requirements? Trying to reduce turnover or get every bit of brainpower from your work force? Could leadership use a tune-up to get your company to the next level? We can help.

We work with you to build custom solutions that get your people to change behaviors, so their performance is laser-focused on your business goals. And we don’t just build learning programs in a vault somewhere, then toss it to your team. We roll up our sleeves and work with your learning and business function experts – not only to make sure the learning fits you like a glove, but to transfer as much knowledge as we can before the project is over.

If you think technology alone can keep your organization safe, you are playing into their hands. Hackers know that your people are their easiest way in. Phishing is increasingly their go-to method. Worried yet? Don’t be – your people can be your first, strongest line of defense. We know how to create the employee behaviors that work with IT to protect you.