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Kendro Laboratory Products

Changing cultures- Changing minds

Change is often inherently difficult for people to deal with, even when it is small, if it appears that it might threaten what is important to us. When it’s on a larger scale it can be seen to have major impact on individuals, often leading to adverse effects on key organisational measures such as productivity, staff turnover, customer service and levels of absenteeism.

So how can we help organisations, teams and individuals live through major changes such as restructuring or mergers? In this case study we show how one organisation addresses the crucial elements of effective change through training and development.

When Kendro Laboratory Products was formed in 1998 by the merger of Heraeus and Sorvall they were faced with integrating two very different organisations into one. Interestingly the holding company retained the Managing Directors from both organisations and gave them joint responsibility for the new organisation. Naturally People tended to stay allied with their previous leader.

The business needed to demonstrate quickly, improved performance and reduced cost base. Recognising that they needed external assistance to bring the two groups together and move forward quickly in benefiting from the greater range of products available from the merge.

We were involved because the business had trouble with bringing the two groups of people together - both continued to talk about their own set of products when selling, they focused on their ‘own’ products in terms of maintenance and delivery while administrative staff favoured their old alliances. There were arguments about 'that’s not the way we used to do it' and 'its your fault its gone wrong.'

Our approach to this work was to recognise the need to provide a gateway through which everyone could celebrate what had gone before and bring with them elements of the success into the future. To do this we identified four key objectives for the development process:

• Development of a new direction that everyone could sign up to
• Opportunity to recognise the strengths and weaknesses of the two organisations and celebrate the synergy
• Utilise these strengths into establishing values and ways of working for the future of a holistic group
• Create time to get to know each other better and challenge the preconceived stereotypes

We did this through working with individual parts of the organisation starting with the central team - the operational team. We took them away for a day and got them to generate a vision and mission statement, gave them space to let go of the old ways and celebrate the coming together of two groups of great skills.

This was then followed up with action-learning sets that involved a variety of individuals; encouraging them to consider ways of reducing costs by streamlining and learning from each other’s ways of doing things. This was linked to further sessions for the whole group on a quarterly basis, which drew on the work done with the action learning sets and revisited the direction and values of the ‘new’ organisation.

We ran similar sessions with Sales, Engineering and the top management team. This brought to the surface issues about how people were being measured, rewarded and infrastructure issues about how the business could best meet the needs of the customer rather than just how the business integrated the old organisations.

A management development programme was also introduced for those in the middle levels of management to increase their capabilities with dealing with issues of culture, managing change, continuous improvement and dealing with conflict. It was also to show how this team could work together in the eyes of the rest of the organisation.

The reward of the programme was at the end of year celebration - there was little if no comment about the ‘old organisations’ only about Kendro, meeting the stretching targets from the holding company and a level of excitement about how they were going to improve even further in the coming year.

What’s great is that over the recent times Kendro Laboratory Products has built on this success and the company has recently been acquired by Thermo Electron Corporation.

Clive Laing, Joint MD. Kendro Laboratory Products commented 'This really made us think about how we approach to each other to get results'

Roger Bloomfield. National Service Manager. 'I believe this has made an invaluable and significant contribution to achieving our targets and goals.'