What’s Working…Leadership Development at Tennant Company…An Interview with Patricia Edman

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Patricia Edman manages leadership development efforts for Tennant Company, a leader in designing, manufacturing and marketing floor maintenance and outdoor cleaning equipment, floor coatings, and related products that are used to clean industrial and commercial facilities. Earlier this year, Tennant’s senior management kicked off an innovative leadership development initiative. To help support the initiative, Patricia, along with help from MDA, has implemented a unique action-learning program that combines peer group learning and individual coaching. In an interview with Patricia, she shared some of the unique aspects of the program and how it’s been working for Tennant. 

Q. Through its Senior Leadership Team, Tennant has established a fairly comprehensive development program. Can you tell us a little about Tennant’s overall program?

A. Certainly.  Tennant’s overall development initiatives come in different forms, from basic training in typical developmental areas, such as performance management, performance appraisals, performance problems, etc., to an individually designed approach for high potentials—those individuals who have been identified through the organization’s succession planning process.

Q. And it’s with these high potential candidates that a new program has been initiated, right?

A. Yes.  We’re fortunate at Tennant to have a senior leadership team that looks for developmental opportunities in the context of business issues—they call it a “stretch program.”  As part of the strategic planning process, six key initiatives were identified that the organization needed to focus on for 2002. We then chose six high-potential employees to serve as “champions” for these business initiatives.

Q. Was this in addition to their regular job responsibilities?

A. No.  These initiatives are critical for our organization, and our high-potential employees already have heavy responsibilities.  We evaluated each initiative and how much time and energy would need to be devoted to it for the year. In some cases, the champion is devoted full-time to the issue, in others it’s 50 or 75 percent.  We then transitioned their normal responsibilities to other staff for the interim.

Q. Tell me about the program you’ve put in place to see that these champions succeed.

A. This is the exciting part.  The program combined individual and group learning, while the champion is engaged in leading a real-world initiative.  Each champion participated in an assessment process so that developmental issues could be identified specific to the person.  The group—our Breakthrough Team—meets quarterly in a session facilitated by MDA to address issues that have broader relevance to the full group.  Each champion also has a mentor inside the organization who helps with issues involving the real-world issue, and they each have a coach to help with leadership and developmental issues. I’m one of these coaches, as well as the coaches at MDA.

Q. What’s the most exciting aspects of this program for you personally?

A. I’ve always had an interest in “action learning” as a development model.  I knew it could be a powerful development tool. To allow individuals to experience learning in real-world situations—especially for senior leadership—is a win-win situation.  The organization gets the business issues solved while investing in the individual developmentally.  I had planned for an action learning program for two years, but we didn’t have the right issue so I just kept alert for opportunities.  When the leadership team identified these six initiatives and the champion concept, I knew that we needed a pretty intensive support system in place to make it work.

Q. Was there skepticism?

A. Not by our senior leadership, but by the champions initially.  Not about being a champion and addressing the business issue, but about the developmental part.  Once we had our initial group meeting and talked about what’s in it for them personally, they became receptive to it.  We had to make a conscious decision to address the developmental learning, not just the business initiative, and structure parts of the program to take advantage of the personal learning that will result.

Q. You’re only five months into the project, but what have you learned that you could pass on to anyone considering this type of program?

A. You must have senior management support.  They need to see and support the value of combining challenge with learning. There are a lot of good arguments out there to help you get visible buy-in, but it’s critical.  I talked about action learning for two years before we had the right opportunity to use it. 

Business issues need to drive it. It can’t be an “HR training thing.”  The business issue must come first—and that goes hand-in-hand with getting management’s support.

As for the program design itself, I believe it’s critical that participants have a baseline assessment, a coach and the opportunity to get together as a group to learn from one another.  In our case, it worked best to have each person responsible for their own initiative, rather than the group working on one initiative.  And, the last thing is something we already touched on, which is, you can’t expect your high-potential employees to take on more without any relief.  They need help in finding ways to balance work and, in most cases, that will mean shifting at least 50 percent of their job to other people.  We spread out the work we parceled out, so not one individual felt the burden of the project.

Q. The initiative began in January.  Are you pleased so far?  Do you expect this type of program to continue?

A. At this point it is difficult to project what the final results will be.  We will be measuring the success of the individual projects, as well as progress towards individual development.  If we find that we have positive results on both sides of the program, and we have the right business issue to address, it will be worthwhile to use an action learning approach again.

Tennant is a leader in designing, manufacturing and marketing floor maintenance equipment, outdoor cleaning equipment, floor coatings and related products that are used to clean industrial and commercial facilities. Headquartered in Minneapolis, with manufacturing operations in Holland, Michigan and Uden, The Netherlands, the $400 million company has 2000 employees worldwide. The human resources department has a staff of 15, with nine of those responsible for education and development initiatives. For information about this action learning based leadership development program, contact Joe Volker at 612-332-8182.