Success Stories
Translating passion to career success.
Stakeholder Coaching
A highly talented business leader who rapidly ascended the ranks encountered an unexpected challenge. The leader’s enthusiastic approach to work, while successful at lower levels, resulted in mixed reactions with executive team members. Some executives admired the leader’s zeal, while others were annoyed, creating barriers to getting proposals approved and work accomplished.
A structured coaching program was implemented featuring feedback collection from key stakeholders, including the executive team. This feedback, carefully themed and communicated, offered valuable insights into the coachee’s strengths and highlighted areas for development, including ways to build stakeholder buy-in and refine proposals. The coachee embraced feedback and guidance, built a purposeful action plan, systematically adapted personal behaviors while sharing insights with stakeholders, and delivered results on high-profile projects.
Eighteen months later, the leader’s span of control increased two-fold, and they continued to deliver high-quality work. The behavior changes from the coaching experience removed barriers and built skills to deliver consistent results and helped put this leader’s career back on track.
Building a flexible, scalable workforce model.
Organization Development
Faced with the challenge to increase operational capacity while reducing fixed internal costs, a talent development group collaborated with Asmus Consulting to redesign their organizational structure for enhanced cost effectiveness, scalability, and flexibility. The project kicked off with an environmental scan to understand team dynamics, processes, and roles. As a result, we proposed a solution involving outsourcing and centralizing operations. This enabled a smaller internal staff to focus on more value-added activities including internal consulting and program management, while engaging an external partner to bring operational excellence with highly skilled staff and core process standardization expertise.
A Request for Proposal (RFP) process followed, resulting in the selection of an industry- proven Managed Learning Service (MLS) partner. We played a collaborative role in driving the transition with coaching, SLA development, and process mapping.
Key outcomes include transitioning internal instructor and administrative resources resulting in a 30 percent internal headcount reduction. The new MLS partner’s cadre of proven instructors and administrators now provided a flexible workforce model to scale up and down services based on demand and economic cycles with minimal fixed cost constraints.
Assessing effectiveness of growth initiatives.
Organizational Development / Group Facilitation
When a company set a goal to accelerate sales growth outside the US, we partnered with business unit executives to identify barriers and accelerators to goal attainment 6 months into the initiative by interviewing 60 sales leaders across Europe. Through focused 30-minute phone conversations, sales leaders shared success stories, identified missed opportunities, and offered strategic advice to make important adjustment to refine the initial priority plan to accelerate progress for the next 6 months.
The insights gathered were themed and used as groundwork for an offsite planning session, enabling sales and product managers to collaboratively draft action plans and make necessary adjustments for the year ahead.
Actions from this effort included adjusting an overly broad product portfolio to focus more on the most relevant products by individual regions, and a revised sales approach with greater emphasis on understanding customer needs. The process repeated the next year and considerable progress was made in reaching sales targets.
Global alignment of factory operators' performance assessment.
Performance Management
In response to a transition to one standardized global HR system, we used this opportunity to standardize and simplify manufacturing operators’ performance management across the factory environment. We partnered with manufacturing leaders across the US, Europe, and Asia factories to understand the current state which consisted of factories using site-specific approaches, many with complex paperwork tying up valuable management time.
We collected details for each existing system, interviewed stakeholders at each factory, and benchmarked best practices. We then proposed a simplified, globally consistent solution. Manufacturing leaders embraced the simplified approach with important refinements for regional differences.
It was estimated the effort reduced paperwork by 10-15 hours for each phase of goal setting, mid-year, and year end reviews for manufacturing managers. These managers could then re-purpose their time to provide real-time coaching and feedback with operators on the factory floor. It also provided a more consistent way to evaluate, promote, and compensate operators across the company.
It’s all about the discussion.
Performance Management
We collaborated with HR leaders to increase the frequency and improve quality of performance discussions through a multifaceted campaign featuring targeted communications, practical tools, and specialized training. The campaign featured a creative company-wide communications plan to boost engagement.
Additionally, “tip sheets” supported effective goal setting sessions, mid-year reviews, and year-end discussions. We delivered just-in-time interactive workshops to address the complexities of performance dialogues. To increase accountability, pulse surveys assessed effectiveness in customizable formats.
Results from pulse surveys featured concrete improvement with an average of 10-20 percent increase in the quality and frequency of performance discussions based on employee feedback from the businesses and functions who participated in the surveys.
Using Data For Continuous Improvement
Training Evaluation Standardization
Asmus Consulting played a leadership role in helping a company drive continuous improvement of its learning programs through design and implementation of a data driven approach to operational management.
We began by inventorying active surveys across a myriad of development programs, then synthesized core questions to define a standardized set. Next, we researched survey tools for optimal data collection, reporting, and LMS integration, as well as tools for enhanced data visualization.
We then built a suite of standard reports for quarterly and year-end reviews to compare trends, identify high and low performing classes, and pinpoint instructional, content, or support gaps, leading to concrete actions for improvement.
The team estimated this effort saved forty hours of manual work for each review cycle. More importantly, it provided real time data to enable instructors, administrations, and program managers to make ongoing tactical changes, along with longer term strategic learning program portfolio decisions.