General Mills has taken a leaders-teaching-leaders approach for many years, starting with the company’s Leadership Institute.
by Site Staff
April 25, 2010
<p>General Mills has taken a leaders-teaching-leaders approach for many years, starting with the company’s Leadership Institute. These programs involve executives teaching and communicating through the ranks corporatewide initiatives on building culture and ethics. </p><p>Some years ago, General Mills identified two strategic goals that it wanted all its leaders to work toward: cross-functional collaboration and speed in decision making. </p> <p>To do this, the organization prepared its office of the chair — which consisted of the CEO and his two most senior direct reports — to deliver these messages to the company’s senior leaders. While ultimately successful, the initiative did not have a specific format or include instruction on how to most effectively deliver this content. Further, the absence of standardization made it more difficult for a consistent message to cascade through all levels of the organization. Essentially, executives were left to their own devices. </p> <p>General Mills decided it would benefit from implementing a framework for this leaders-teaching-leaders initiative and piloted it with the senior vice president of human resources. A four-hour interactive workshop was created from what was originally a 60-minute presentation on the link between management behaviors and employee morale and productivity. The challenge was not only to present this research but also to enable leaders to embrace and actually perform the behaviors that would yield positive results. </p> <p>To get the ball rolling, the General Mills learning team engaged in a mapping process that consisted of taking specific steps to achieve outcomes in the following three areas:</p> <p>1. <strong>Know:</strong></p> <ul><li>That great leaders do three things: invest, value and stretch their managers.</li><li>That being a great manager is more than just having skills; it involves differential utilization to drive energized commitment.</li><li>One’s own level of greatness.</li></ul> <p>2. <strong>Do:</strong></p> <ul><li>Coach managers on how to be great.</li><li>Execute on assessment feedback action plans.</li></ul> <p>3. <strong>Believe:</strong></p> <ul><li>That great managers drive and energize their employees.</li><li>That General Mills is committed to its managers getting better.</li><li>That it is the leader’s job to develop managers.</li></ul> <p>Once this process was completed, the team was able to build the content for the program. Several iterations of this process took place in PowerPoint-slide format. The team looked at the session outcomes and began to design ways to instructionally achieve them — that is, they aimed to match the message to the learning method most likely to achieve it. For example, for “know” outcomes, this meant information should be distributed through facts and figures. For the “do” outcomes, this involved creating learning exercises to assess and teach certain skills. For the “believe” outcomes, a combination of information, discussion and action-planning commitments were integrated. At the end of this process, General Mills had developed a series of activities that blended to form a cogent and relevant learning experience.</p> <p>The team then worked to create comprehensive leader notes. Each slide garnered its own set of notes, which was divided into two sections: one for what the leader could say and one for what the leader could do. Both were positioned simply as guidelines, as leaders were expected to use their own words in communicating the various messages and content. </p> <p>The learning activities included the presentation of relevant business data both from within and outside of General Mills; reviewing previously assessed 360 data; recollection, storytelling and listing of great manager attributes; identification of personal strengths and areas for improvement; opportunities to speak with fellow learners to improve their management behaviors; opportunities to observe direct reports to provide timely and fact-based feedback; action planning; and ending with a personal “legacy” story of great management. </p> <p>Throughout the session, the leader would be encouraged — via the leader notes — to ask for questions and seek understanding of all the learners through extensive continuous discussion on these activities. </p> <p>Unique to this approach was a two-page “great manager development map” that served as a workbook for recording the learner’s lessons and action plans, although the presentation slides were provided to the learner for reference.</p> <p>After the session, all of the participants were asked to take the experience to their direct reports and all of them felt they could do so. Based on their feedback, the pilot was a success.</p>