Browning was also being forced to deal with White Cap’s marketing team which was not spending time listening to the customers about their needs nor were they addressing what was going on in the competitive marketplace. Browning saw the entire department and its management team to be a huge weakness for White Cap along with weaknesses he uncovered in other departments. This lead to Browning’s issues with members of the management team that reported to him such as Jim Stark, Director of Marketing and Tom Green, Manager of Human Resources.
Peter Browning had a much greater need for accomplishment at White Cap as opposed to his successes at Bondware. At Bondware, Browning was assigned to fix a business that was dying in the eyes of management. Any failures that could have occurred at Bondware would have been attributed to the natural downfall of the business and not associated with Browning, alleviating much of the pressure to perform at a flawless level. On the other hand White Cap had not only been successful for 50 years but it was Continental’s number one division. The White Cap assignment was also seen as a testing period of Browning by management.
Another issue that faced Peter Browning was his strong attachment to his own belief system that he tried to instill on others. An industrial psychologist suggested that although the majority of individuals shared his ideals, there were those who held different beliefs and values and they found it difficult to relate and understand him, leaving them to be left behind the others.
The issues facing White Cap as a whole were much different. White Cap’s technology was falling behind that of its competitors. Competitors began cutting prices to gain market share making it difficult for White Cap to compete profitably. The FDA had recently approved the use of plastic containers requiring plastic closures and many customers were beginning to adopt the use of this plastic. White Cap was reluctant to focus their R&D on the development of such products because of past failures but if things continued as they were White Cap would continue to lose customers.
Continental’s management did not believe that White Cap was aware of the speed at which the competition was beginning to steal White Cap’s business, and that White Cap’s management was blind to it by an arrogance of being number one for such a long period of time. White Caps’s management team was accustomed to a management style consisting of little if any friction between managers and a formal structure of superior dominance.
Although changes were necessary at White Cap, Continental itself was making serious reforms. Since the acquisition by Peter Kiewit and sons in 1984 they had sold off $1.6 billion worth of businesses and cut corporate staffing tenfold. Change was happening throughout the company and management would expect nothing less from Peter Browning. Peter Browning’s first step in beginning to implement change was to create a vision that White Cap’s employees would understand and buy into. A vision that combined the traditions of White Cap while focusing on regaining a competitive edge in the marketplace was needed. It required a vision of both conceptual framework with an emotional element. Such s vision would guide the behavior of both employees and management to see a future state for the White Cap division.
Along with the vision, a modern mission statement was required, one that clearly set out specific and measurable end goals while keeping them realistic and attainable within a specific time frame. White Cap’s employees had seemed to lose a sense of direction and were complacent with their products and with themselves. Browning’s vision and mission needed to spark change through top down enforcement of the stated goals. Browning would need to micro-manage members of his staff such as Stark and Green in order to get them on board. Failure or resistance from them, along with general employee buy in, gave him the justification and rationalization for their reassignment or dismissal.
Through good-faith and genuine desire for the betterment of White Cap, Peter Browning would create psychological contracts with his employees and peers. Peter would change the contract so that the people felt the existing contract had simply been enhanced despite a new mind set replacing the old one. He would be unfreezing the old mindset and replacing it with a new one. Browning needs to make it widely known that the current state of White Cap was vulnerable to its competitors, changing the employees assumption that White Cap would be number one forever.
Creating credible signs for change is the first step in preparing the employees for change. He has to make available the market information challenging there underlying assumptions of their sovereignty. He must also offset the loss of certainty and control his employee’s will feel by involving them in many of the change initiatives. He has to convince them that only if they worked together would they regain the dominance they once had under the White family. Through effective communication and by validating his reasons he could accomplish this. Some steps in adopting these transition structures can be the creation of mini-authority positions. By this I mean slightly promoting top performing employees slightly above their peers in a kind of “senior” position but keeping them under the authority of their current manager. This will create a “new hire” atmosphere and can enable management to get these seniors to buy in to the new change contracts creating information channels through a trickle down effect to their new subordinates. Management will know have outlets close to the employees that they can use to convey the new expectations and commitments.
The creation of a job content enhancement program can help create the new environment as well. Giving current employees more of an ownership role over their current functions and getting them involved in change management of their functions will allow them to buy in to the change while being a stakeholder and a change agent in the process.
A transitional change is necessary to make White Cap’s evolution a success. With the competition already utilizing advanced technologies, a developmental change would simply be too slow and too ineffective. On the other hand, a transformational or radical change would set employee moral, loyalty, and the understanding of management’s agenda into a tailspin.
The company needs a corporate cultural change through the use of management lead programs. Training courses and brainstorming session with mixed levels, with top management conducting the training, will not only help communicate the changes but will bring about a sense of unity. Browning needs to also consider the creation of a pay for performance program for those employees that can go above and beyond by changing something, fixing something or doing something as change incentives. The goal being that other employees will recognize the recognition these employees are receiving and strive to perform at their level.
Although I foresee White Cap’s employees initially meeting such programs with bitterness, over time a task alignment will take place. Through the recurring change programs the employees will be part of; their altitudes will begin to follow the actions management has set in motion. By changing the cognitive component of the employee’s functions, the affective component will soon change from one of contentment, to one of excitement, with an encouragement to become proactive with change leading to a change in behavior and eventually a change in attitude.
Browning and White Cap as a whole must also keep in mind the possibility that they have already fallen too far behind their competition and their customers may enter into contracts with others before White Cap can meet there needs. An option could be the acquisition of a firm already utilizing the plastic technology. If an acquisition is financially unattainable a merger could feasible. White Cap has a strong brand name and a long standing tradition of success. Smaller, lesser known yet more technologically advanced firms would find these qualities attractive. As a contingency Continental must consider its last resort options of merger or even a sell-off of White Cap. This type of transformational change should be considered a last resort for Continental because of the disastrous effect this would have on its employees.
References
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