Business Team Turnaround In Russia

The Situation
A business team, responsible for marketing in Russia for an international food giant, had not met its targets for years. Although all the other business teams were doing well, results for this team had declined year after year. Far from taking responsibility for the situation, they saw themselves as the victims of external forces and had stopped believing in their ability to turn things around. They reacted, as necessary, but took no action to improve their situation – not surprising in a Russian culture in which most people had lived with few choices about anything.

To make matters worse, the team members did not believe in one of their top products “margarine” and failed to eat anything but butter! Not surprisingly this team had become dysfunctional, working in silos and not coming together to generate a strategy to improve performance – it was hopeless.

Our Work
From the beginning the lack of ownership and confidence surfaced. Although the aims of the team did not change when they created their strategy in the planning process we went through, their collective responsibility for the results shifted to everyone on the team. The members of the team were now aligned and the monthly monitoring resulted in a higher individual performance on team priorities as the months went by.

A team that was once shunned by others in the business as well as by one another developed a new level of mutual respect and understanding. The habits of avoidance and gossip were replaced by the habits of winning and appreciation. The team began honestly assessing and learning from failures, using the experience of one another as well as their facilitators.

At the heart of their success was their passion for making their personal development plans —- the first time they had thought about what they wanted. These personal transformations fueled a new drive to turn things around for the team.

The Results
We invited this Team Leader to give a presentation to a Global Conference. She reported that shared ownership and responsibility for the business was the key to the turnaround. This resulted in a renewed belief in the ability to achieve targets and the generation of a performance culture in which the habit of winning prevailed and there was an end to blaming others for failure.

The team met all of their key annual targets for the first time in years. Each team member became proud to be on the team that had dissolved a culture which avoided change and responsibility to one in which performance was thriving!