Goodfriend & Associates: Success Stories

Challenge
Leader's verbal and written communication created conflict and barriers to working effectively with others. Leader had been recognized for technical accomplishments but was ineffective at collaborating with others across the organization to ensure that his successes would be accepted as the standard

Consulting Solution
Turnaround coaching program to help the leader transform:

9-month one-on-one leadership development program
Stakeholder interviews – an interactive 360 feedback process
Focus on building upon core, instinctive strengths and identifying a few key areas for improvement
Leader preparation of a self assessment and a Development Plan
Progress development sessions to help leader works towards sustaining improvements as everyday behaviors

Outcomes
Leader not only became more effective at communication, but became a successful facilitator of technical knowledge sharing. Stakeholders communicated that leader had become both more open-minded and more tolerant of other’s opinions to work towards the best technical solution. In addition, his technical successes were becoming accepted by more people in the organization as best practices.

Challenge
Project team was charged with constructing additional facilities during a production shut down period resulting in a revenue loss of $2 million per day of shutdown. Team needed to clarify roles and responsibilities between all the different engineering disciplines and craft specialists from different locations. Their goal was to create synergy of effort to minimize shutdown time.

Consulting Solution
Facilitate a meeting of 50 people including project engineers, construction supervisors, management, and production representatives to focus on the following:

Clarity of roles and responsibilities
Expectations of other disciplines and functions
Action planning on key issues and gaps
Common behavior norms and protocol

Outcomes
Stronger relationships between team members including those who had worked together but never met each other. Participants gained greater insight on the roles of others and identified key planning and action necessary to close gaps in roles. The facilitation kept the meeting on track both in the large group and breakout groups as well as in creating an environment conducive to the achievement of meeting objectives.

Following the meeting sponsor had this to say about the facilitation, "Mike did an excellent job in helping organize the meeting but he exceeded my expectations during the actual facilitation of the meeting. Considering the meeting maintained a rapid pace, Mike did a great job in managing the group participation while extracting the desired outcomes of the meeting."

Client: Multi-Unit Operation
Before Consulting	Consulting Solutions	After Consulting
$25 million company. Held planning retreats but no effective growth plan.	Strategic Planning Facilitated planning retreats and the preparation of strategic and tactical plans. Organizational Development Facilitated preparation of job descriptions, professional development plans, org chart.	Ongoing 3 year consulting relationship, with the company expecting to achieve a revenue run-rate of $100 million by year end. Unit sales growth outpacing industry average. Profitability from unit operations has increased from 16% to 22% of sales.
Client: On-Site Outsource Service Provider
Before Consulting	Consulting Solutions	After Consulting
Largest account in jeopardy. User (customer) complaints. Defective work.	Strategic Planning Performed annual customer satisfaction review.	Three-fold increase in scope of services at largest account over a two-year period. Process also generated a referral for client that became a large account.
Client: Engineering and Construction Team (Owner and Contractor)
Before Consulting	Consulting Solutions	After Consulting
$300 million plant in design phase had funding authorization rejected. Project objectives and business performance criteria not in alignment.	Organizational Development Facilitated owner and contractor team meetings.	Funding authorization approved. Plant under construction. Project objectives on track for successful completion. Plant on track for startup in 2001.
Client: Energy Company
Before Consulting	Consulting Solutions	After Consulting
	Executive Coaching Assessment of leader, coaching retreat and follow-up sessions.	Leader adopting a more facilitative, coaching style with others. People now seeking out his expertise.

"Your facilitation of our meeting helped the team begin focusing on planning and executing the upcoming Outage (maintenance and capital project) Since combining the maintenance turnaround and capital project under one Outage team was new to most of the team members, an understanding of their roles and responsibilities was critical. Your process to document Roles and Responsibilities helped focus the team members on the interfaces and del-verables required by the Outage. The Outage team's completed Roles and Responsibilities have been shared as examples for other combined turnaround and capital project Outage teams. The session was very well received by the participants and helped to start the change in thinking between a normal turnaround and an Outage."

David Simmons
BP Chemicals Project Manager