Aligning Leadership Culture With Global Strategy

CLIENT:	Graymont, a global leader in lime and limestone solutions
LOCATION:	Serves markets throughout North America and Asia-Pacific
SIZE:	~1,600 employees

Client Profile & Challenge

Graymont was executing an ambitious strategy. The executive team recognized that they had to be intentional about shaping the culture and creating an organizational leadership capability. They needed a trusted partner to support them.

Over the years, CCL had been delivering a custom individual leadership development program for Graymont. Given the relationship and the success of the previous work, CCL was the natural choice to work on this major initiative to support the transformation of Graymont.

CCL started our work with the discovery phase by guiding the Graymont strategic leadership team through a series of learning conversations. The goal was to help them to align on this new strategy and then to discover and define the elements required for successful execution from a culture and strategic capabilities perspective (among other areas).

From this process, the team came away with a key realization: They wanted to pursue the new strategy but didn’t have a strong enough organizational leadership culture in place to do so successfully.

Solution

As a result of the initial diagnostic work, CCL provided Graymont with tools to move a leadership culture from largely independent to more collaborative. The team needed to apply new leadership practices to their own challenges before rolling them out to the organization.

Over several months, CCL’s experts attended Graymont leadership team meetings to observe how they addressed key business issues and then followed up by showing them how different tools could be leveraged to live out the new culture while executing the strategy.

Results

Quickly, the leadership team fell into sync and could lead the cascade process. During a 2-day conference, the Graymont strategic leadership team along with CCL’s guidance, shared their own learnings and taught the leadership tools to next level managers.

“The response was very positive,” said Rob Van Nus, VP of Human Resources & Corporate Services. “This was ‘train the trainer.’ As a strategic leadership team, we had to lead by example. It provided credibility and showed that these materials weren’t going away as we were teaching the tools and had invested in them ourselves.”

The new strategy meant new ways of working. Previously, different plants all worked more independently. Now, there is more consistency and centralization across all operations as a result of decisions being made for the benefit of the company and not just the specific plant. This led to significant efficiency gains and increases in operational productivity.

At the leadership team level, there were numerous breakthroughs. For example, for many years members of the leadership team had strong but differing views about how many and which strategic issues to prioritize. With CCL’s support, the team agreed on how to proceed once they understood they were dealing with a polarity. Many within the team were pleased as this lingering dilemma had once seemed insurmountable.

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KEY BENEFITS OF THE PROGRAM

Good progress implementing the strategy and increasing the value of the business,
The capability to successfully execute complex transactions (divestitures as well as domestic and international acquisitions), and
Improvement in the company’s environmental and safety performance

Participants Say

“The whole experience has given us leadership muscle to do things we didn’t think were possible. CCL has been a part of this success by helping us build leadership capabilities to take advantage of opportunities and create value for the shareholders.”

Rob Van Nus

VP of Human Resources & Corporate Services
Graymont