Success Story: Photo Company Partners with MDA to Drive Company-Wide Change
Challenge
For more than 70 years, a national photography company (NPC) has been part of American culture, capturing millions of individual portraits. But competition from low-cost digital photographers threatened to slow the company’s historically double-digit market share growth. To maintain its position, NPC needed to change its legacy systems and processes. Specifically, the company sought to consolidate its sales territories for growth, determine a more effective way to assess the company’s field and sales operations personnel, delineate a strategy for effectively executing consolidation changes, and forge ongoing support for its placement and development decisions. NPC turned to long-time partner MDA Leadership Consulting to devise and manage a talent management and organizational change strategy through the company’s consolidation process.
Solution
MDA began its work with NPC by creating a change management process tailored specifically to the company’s needs. Drawing on the results of a change readiness survey of NPC employees, as well as from MDA’s familiarity with the company, the process detailed a measured, deliberate approach for successfully executing and sustaining change at NPC. Specifically, MDA identified the greatest potential contributors and barriers to the success of the NPC change initiative, focusing on the critical role the company’s leadership plays in supporting and sustaining the change initiative. Deliberately labeling change as a “process” as opposed to an “event,” MDA outlined a four-stage change process for NPC: Plan, Engage, Act, Sustain. Integral to this effort was an MDA led workshop, Leading Sustainable Change™, which included an online business simulation to help leaders understand and prepare for their role in successfully promoting change.
Because leadership support is the single greatest factor in the success of an organizational change initiative, MDA’s Leading Sustainable Change™ program emphasized three roles for NPC’s leaders: 1) Participate actively and visibly throughout the change process; 2) Build a coalition of sponsorship and proactively manage resistance; and 3) Make the case for change and communicate directly with employees throughout the process.
Simultaneously, MDA began identifying and profiling characteristics of the company’s highest-performing territory managers, sales managers, and operations managers. Posted in sales territories throughout the United States, these leadership roles comprised the operational backbone of NPC, responsible for the oversight and profitability of the company’s thousands of portrait photographers. With information gleaned from this profiling analysis, in the coming years MDA will be better able to assist NPC in gauging the potential and preparedness of future leaders as well as assessing candidates for NPC field leadership roles.
Results
As a result of MDA’s research, analysis, and ongoing coaching and support, NPC is better positioned to successfully implement its desired organizational changes and pursue its growth goals. The NPC change process has proven particularly effective in building capacity for change within NPC and equipping leaders with the knowledge, tools, and vocabulary they need to effect change. This is especially important since NPC’s change initiative will take several years to develop and maintain. In the years to come, MDA will work with NPC to successfully roll out planned changes in the field and ensure they are adopted and sustained.