Guy Tremblay, VP Human Resources
Management Team Everyone at the table is talented and can make outstanding contributions. But we all talk by each other and argue about what doesn’t matter. So there’s no alignment. I’m not saying this as a judgement; but we’re missing opportunities. Tons. HR Department We were 12 and now we are three. Cutbacks. Like everyone else we were expected to contribute to cost- containment efforts. But no one has cut back on what they expect from HR. People still want us to do Learning and Development, Employee Engagement, Succession Planning, and so on. What we can do is the transactional stuff of HR. That’s it. Your Role I’m the chief negotiator so I’m prepping for the next round of labor talks in a few months. Brian Johnson is a reasonable guy on an individual basis and so is Rob Brown. But put them together in the same room and the sparks fly. It might take a while but eventually we’ll get a deal done. Obstacles to Change There’s not one person who’s a problem. Everybody has strong ideas, biases, opinions. That’s a good thing. But there’s no glue holding us together, no mission, no vision, and so everyone is just protecting their own turf. We’re just people being people. The Solution We should integrate the teams with something like a matrix structure. That would allow us to focus on individual products as well as on functional structures. I think we could do it. We have bright people here.
The Challenge Ahead We’ve all been under some stress lately.Who isn’t though? It just means that people might not like what they see coming for us. I’mwith Brian on this; we need some fresh, unbiased perspectives around here. Good luck. Thoughts on Teams Cross-functional teams have got to be the way we work in the future; so we get more collaboration. Teams need to help us with the complexity we face and get buy-in on the decisions we make. The Problem Problems not problem. Take your pick: Marketing, Manufacturing, R&D, Johnson, Smith. Everybody’s got their own opinions. And the blame-placing is counterproductive. If we put that much energy into the customer, we’d own the market.
4
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs