The Shyft Group is a leading and growing provider of commercial vehicle products and services with a national footprint and several dynamic brands making up their portfolio. With this increased growth, there have been significant changes in organizational structure, and the company’s leaders are committed to developing and maturing into a profitable organization that is an attractive employer. As a result, leadership changes and new talent were required to implement this new vision and guide the company to meet its business objectives.
During a Leadership Summit, the CEO and the senior leadership team introduced and explained the concept of “One Shyft” and their vision for the future of the organization, with an emphasis on four points of focus for success: creating high-performing teams, driving operational excellence, customer-centric focus, and financial growth. The intent was to provide a common foundation for the twelve legacy brands and offer opportunities for operational efficiencies and a superior customer experience.
Senior leaders understood that to support the One Shyft organization, consistent, strong leadership is required. They wanted to focus on the role of the VP/GM leaders who have both Profit and Loss responsibilities and people leadership. By creating a common set of leadership competencies and behaviors for this role and assessing them, the company developed a baseline of expectations. Current leaders were allowed to leverage their strengths and bridge their gaps while planning for future succession. They partnered with CTD to support the planning and execution of this initiative to create a scalable organizational model.
Project objectives:
Based on initial discussions with the corporate leaders, CTD developed a three-phased plan to achieve the organizational objectives. First, we facilitated a working session for the key corporate leaders to align on objectives, roles, and communication, and then a second working session to collect data for the VP/GM Success Profile.
The second phase was a facilitated working session with the current VP/GM leaders to understand and surface current state data and align around desired competencies and behaviors. We then took the results from all working sessions to complete the final VP/GM Success Profile.
The third phase was preparing the leaders and their managers for assessing themselves against the Success Profile, holding those feedback discussions, and then creating individual development plans. The leaders now had a common set of expected behaviors and competencies needed to support the dynamic organization and its growth goals. There were clear guidelines for future leaders and a template created for other key roles in the company.
The three-phased project provided the strategy and implementation structure that enabled a key role in the company to form, grow, and evolve purposefully so that leaders can leverage their strengths and experiences while modeling behaviors of self-awareness, assessment, and development.
The process of understanding the current state and defining a desired state for the VP/GM role allowed all stakeholders to work through their different perspectives and create a common, yet customized set of expected competencies and behaviors that will support The Shyft Group’s vision for a One Shyft, customer-centric culture. The success profile will provide a foundation for future leadership succession planning and internal career pathing to support the company’s commitment to building and sustaining high-performing teams that get business results.
© Copyright 2022 Connect The Dots
