Dyson are a world-leading innovation, engineering and technology company, founded by James Dyson in 1993, with annual sales of £5.4bn, operating in 72 markets, with 16,000 employees.
Dyson designs and manufactures iconic household appliances: cordless vacuum cleaners, air purifiers, hand dryers, blameless fans, heaters, hair dryers, hair straighteners and lights. The Dyson University is where ‘the next generation of engineering enthusiasts learn to think with ‘vital freedom, as the future is going to be completely different.’
Dyson is a unique, cutting edge technology enterprise, built on a desire to ‘solve the problems others ignore’. Yet Dyson faced a challenge: world-class engineering, leading innovation, soaring global demand, poor infrastructure to deliver, potential unfulfilled.
What showed up?
“We had significant issues that were restricting the business opportunity, we had to change.”
Dyson Chief Financial Officer, March 2020
Dyson is about invention and improvement. So when faced with a global pandemic, there was a global commercial imperative to drive efficiency hard and fast to off set reduced revenue. Finance and Procurement merged in March 2020 to transform business services and processes. A new global multi-functional team was born and the systemic team coaching journey began. The team were running the business and transforming it simultaneously across a multitude of teams each with systemic challenges.
What we did?
We took a systemic approach to enable an already successful team to deliver even greater value and impact. The team used a future-back, outside-in lens to lead business transformation in partnership with their key stakeholders by reframing how they relate to them. The 12 month programmatic approach was divided into 3 phases: Inquiry, Accelerate and Navigate.
Phase One: Inquiry (Month 1-2)
To get to the heart of what the stakeholders need of the team in the future, we ran a ‘Team Connect 360’ online diagnostic alongside other baseline measures including Customer Satisfaction, Service Level Agreements, KPIs and Employee Engagement surveys. We undertook diagnostic interviews with a cross-section of stakeholders and team members. The mirror was held up to the team to give insight on how they were showing up inside and outside the business.
From the inquiry, the focus in our five disciplines was:
Clarity
– Our collective purpose and priorities with our key stakeholders
– How we deliver our service – our behaviours
– Ownership and accountability
Commission
– Partnership not transaction
– Process quality to match Dyson product quality
– Efficiency and accuracy
– Co-creation
– No blame/no shame
– Feeling of belonging
– One team – pronouns ‘we/us’
Connection
– Contracting with and constant care for our stakeholders
– One compelling story
– Customer experience
Core Learning
– Listen to what the system is saying
– Learning is in the moment
– Integrate learning as we go to accelerate progress
Phase Two: Accelerate (Month 3-10)
Workshops focussed on priorities from the Inquiry phase. This was the real work of the team to drive the collective purpose of continuous efficiency. We began with the clarifying discipline and realised that to transform quickly and virtually, we had to work on all 5 disciplines simultaneously.
We enhanced trust, collaboration, constructive conflict and productive levels of support and challenge. Between sessions the team worked to integrate insights, outcomes and new behaviours day to day. Meetings observation and individual leadership coaching provided additional insight. Team members united in collective leadership.
We developed deep understanding of who their important stakeholders really were and how to pay attention to each stakeholder to achieve shared business outcomes.
New learning happened where neither the team nor the coach knew the answer but together we discovered how challenges become opportunities. The coach’s role is to work with the team to focus on how they learned as well as what they learned to generate fresh awareness and choices.
They cascaded the process to their own teams simultaneously to efficiently engage their HIPO talent in systemic thinking. Making early meaning of ‘inside out’ data with the wider team was important to understand and disrupt unhelpful dynamics and improve the way they handled conflict, communication, learning and leadership.
Phase Three: Navigate (Month 11-12)
Building on reflections, insights and learning, the team captured their ongoing development plan and planned to grow or hire required talent. Transferring team coaching skills to the team and team leader meant they could take performance to an even higher peak independently. By baselining from the beginning of the 12 month journey, the team evidenced they had achieved their business goals. This gave them breathing space to invest in their global business for long term sustainability, ‘raise the bar’ and set up the next iteration of business evolution for 2022.
“ Systemic Team Coaching changed our thinking forever. Thinking and operating at a systemic level makes things simpler and quicker – I recommend it to any leadership team”
Director, Dyson Business Services, May 2021
What was the impact?
Dyson Global Business Services was born in rapid time by leapfrogging an operating model from a discrete outsourced shared services model and going straight to a global business services model ready to further mature to an intelligent business services model in the future.
Qualitative Benefits:
– Built a stakeholder-centric mindset through clarity and collaboration
– Transformed the way of working with stakeholders
– Agreed shared purpose and priorities
– Removed complexity to bring scalability
– Driven new insights to achieve growth ambition and targets
– End to end service delivery: quicker, smarter, simpler, happier
– Fit for future technology to further enable people, process and stakeholders/customers
– Positive leadership impact: sustainable process, enhanced confidence, maintained momentum
– Better working life for individuals, team, inter-teams, stakeholders, board and the business
Quantitative benefits:
– Shifted from a predicted efficiency range of 10-12% to 30-35% in 12 months
– Relative business outcomes up to 2X
– Accelerated global business maturity and enterprise value
– Uplift in customer satisfaction, SLAs, KPIs, employee satisfaction and equality diversity & inclusion measures
– Next iteration to Intelligent Business Services has predicted efficiency range of 35-45% (4X)
– DBS is run as a global business with clear people and performance accountabilities
“Systemic Team Coaching gets the team on the same page, on message and travelling in the same direction at speed. It is the systemic part that is the game shifter – it turns negatives to positives, blame to request and looks to solving problems in the system. As the system does not take things personally, nobody gets upset and we are all in it to lead together”
Director, Dyson Business Services, February 2021
How can you benefit?
A systemic team coaching journey will give you competitive advantage.
There are many moving parts, dynamics and disruptions in our systems that influence team attitudes and behaviours. Qualified and experienced Systemic Team Coaches are a rare breed who work flexibly and powerfully with complexity. Clients trust me to partner with their boards and senior teams to achieve ground breaking improvements. Systemic team coaching interventions are felt more widely and deeply resulting in a a much greater return on investment.
We work with dynamic innovative growing businesses with global reach. Their leaders and teams need to accelerate maturity, impact and performance for greater purpose. They have complex change to deliver in tight timescales or have tried things before and need a fresh approach to re-set team and stakeholder relationships. The team may realise that the speed and scale of what they have to deliver would benefit from external support to bring fresh thinking and move forward.
What next?
Team coaching is on the increase as organisations realise its power, value and lasting impact.
Arrange a conversation with victoria@coxenconsultandcoach.com or call 07812 037728 to explore how systemic team coaching will benefit you, your team and business.
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