Success Story: Major Medical Device Company Enhances Organizational Alignment

Challenge

Thanks to rapidly growing consumer demand for its health products, a major medical device company (“MMDC”) had grown rapidly (more than 500 percent) over the prior decade. The company’s new CEO sought to ensure the sustainability and repeatability of MMDC’s growth by improving the company’s top-to-bottom organizational alignment. Specifically, he sought to identify the company’s greatest attributes, instill a more performance-based workplace culture based on greater efficiencies, processes and individual measurement, and create a high-performance leadership team to drive business results. However, MMDC’s ingrained practices and culture threatened to impede his vision for its future. The company hired MDA Consulting to ensure a timely and successful organizational alignment.

Solution

MDA’s distinctive, client-centric approach meshed well with MMDC and allowed MDA consultants to more rapidly understand and execute MMDC’s alignment needs. MDA consultants began by immersing themselves in the MMDC culture and getting to know the company’s top 72 leaders – those who would ultimately serve as the company’s emissaries for organizational alignment. Ultimately, MDA sought to determine how these leaders planned to change their workplace approaches to achieve the company’s desired results. Based on this information, MDA could then work with the leaders to create an effective alignment strategy. To facilitate company-wide understanding of the planned process, MDA created a visual “road map” for alignment which included an overview of the company’s past performance and future opportunities.

MMDC formally rolled out MDA’s organizational alignment program – “Powered by Alignment” – by hosting a retreat for its top 72 leaders. The retreat, organized and facilitated by MDA, began with the company’s CEO, who spoke about the company’s need to institute a more performance-based culture, adopt specific leadership competencies and instill these values company-wide. In particular, he honed in on MMDC’s “silent killers” – workplace tendencies, like cumbersome decision-making processes – that threatened to imperil the company’s success. To address these “silent killers” and ensure that the alignment process would keep moving forward, MDA instituted and adopted a “Powered by Alignment” workplace team at MMDC – company leaders charged with leading dialogue, debate and decision-making on the subject.

Results

In less than a year of a multi-year process, MMDC began receiving an immediate return on its MDA-led workplace alignment initiative. From the accuracy and validity of MDA’s research discovery data, MMDC leaders were able to quickly understand and support the initiative, and began taking steps to implement it within their specific work areas. For example, company leaders adopted a more streamlined decision-making process, improving the company’s overall productivity and efficiency. MMDC plans to take several years for its changes to “sink into” the company’s culture and become a permanent part of its way of doing business.