The overall change was revolutionary in nature but some of the components of this change could only be achieved via evolution like employee behavior change, which could only be achieved slowly by proving the new rolled out strategies. Human behavior can never be changed as a part of big bang approach, which was one of the key ingredients to achieve the objective. Sears organization change was not only about change in marketing strategy but also change in the logic and culture of the business. Sears identified TPIs (Total Performance Indicators) and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
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Organizations have to visit and monitor these performance indicators and change the direction accordingly, which is an evolution of processes based on certain factors i. e. you react and adapt. Tracking of success from management behavior through employee attitude to customer satisfaction is an evolutionary process. Change in employee attitude cannot be driven through a mechanical formula, it is changed slowly making sure that the big picture is alive and continue to build up the confidence by proving the strategy at every point.
On the other hand making the entire organizations objective dependent on management behavior and employee behavior change (employee-customer-profit) is a revolutionary approach. Within 100 days of joining as the CEO, Martinez initiated a turnaround plan; he initiated a evolutionary process of targeting the softer side of sears and introduced new private-label line of apparels and cosmetics.
It takes a proper planning and sufficient market research to introduce a new band and make sure it succeeds. Due revolutionary nature of change, many employees did not have any idea about the change and where they were heading as the things were moving very fast. Sears conducted multiple training and educational sessions to evolve employees to align themselves with the key objectives of employee-customer-profit model / strategy.
In the nutshell, Martinez’s plan to turnaround the loss making organization into a profit making business in few years and his decision making approach was revolutionary in nature but it’s implementation of plan was dependent on evolution of employees attitude, believe in the organization and empowering employees to achieve customer satisfaction. Tichy’s Framework Sears used the Tichy’s model the most to achieve the objective and turnaround. Some of the key factors that Sears opted were 1. Had a very clear vision, mission and strategy in place 2. Work on employee behavior change i. . the cultural change 3. Have TPI and KPI in place to track the progress and make necessary adjustments to the strategy to achieve the employee-customer profit model Tichy’s model depicts all the 3 points. One of the most important parts of Tichy’s framework is that it takes Mission and strategy as one of the very first input.
Without a concrete and clear strategy in place it is very touch to achieve the organizational level change. Tichy’s entire framework revolves around people i. e. culture. As mentioned before, Sears could not achieve the organizational level change i. . employee-customer-profit model, without changing how the employees think, behave and work. Organizational culture is very important compared to external factors. Tichy’s framework also includes the continuous improvement aspect of the strategy i. e. the output of employee performance is the input to the mission and strategy i. e. output of framework is input to the framework. Vision and mission should not change but the strategy should and could change depending on the TPI and KPIs. Example: due to the kind and magnitude of change Sears employees had no idea about the change.
The Task force was created to track the progress of change. When the management realized that they have to work towards keeping the employees on the same page and increase their confidence, they scheduled training and educational sessions and added couple of more tasks to the task force to track the employee behaviors. Sears reacted to the output and changed the strategy to achieve the goal. Sears practices (4 Key Practices) a. Deployment of 5 task forces (customer, employees, financial performance, innovation and values): Task force was created to monitor the change and make sure that everything is aligned.
Lot of people complained that their workload increased due to extra work towards the task forces. But they were communicated that they have to put in the extra time to do both i. e. task force items and daily jobs. This lead to the urgency of the situation which helped provides the great recommendation to realign the strategy. This practice did increase the workload but also helped provide the right recommendation for the proper change to the organizational level. b. Making human resources a part of goals and objectives: Sears trained and educated employees to increase their confidence toward the organizational level change.
They conducted quarterly company wide meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page for where the organization is heading and what it had achieved till date. Depending on TPI and KPI incentives were formulated which kept employees motivated. Sears aligned the organizational goals and objective with their employees as one of the key components for the change was cultural shift. c. Performance Tracking using TPIs and KPIs: First law of micro and macro economics is “Marginal people react to incentives”. TPIs and KPIs not only help identify the incentive structure but also helped realign the strategy depending on the
TPI and KPI benchmarks. d. Upper management involvement: No huge change can be successfully achieved without full support of upper management and also a strong management in place. Sears had a full involvement of upper management to strategize the change. Upper management strength was increased to double in a year to support the change.
