Capabilities Development for Aligning Organization with Strategy

Flavor & Fragrance House (“FFH”)

Challenges

One of our prestigious clients, a Flavor & Fragrance House (“FFH”), needed to assess leadership capabilities at their manufacturing facilities (the “Facilities” or each “Facility”) across the world in order to boost performance and build the foundations for successful change.

Their Operations Strategy identified the necessity to design a new operating model for the Facilities and identify future leaders to drive FFH’s efficiency and success. From this Strategy, a complete organization review started aligning people, culture and strategy.

A bespoke talent assessment program (the “Program”) was designed and deployed across the Facilities worldwide to identify employees’ leadership potential and overall capabilities.

The objective behind the partnership between FFH and AK+Partners was to secure a high performing leadership team at all management levels: Team Leaders, Supervisors, Managers and Plants Directors. While the focus of the Program was to determine employees’ readiness to advance to more senior positions in the organization, the Program also targeted uncovering any capabilities gap(s) as the prerequisite to building actionable development plans to raise the bar in overall talent across the Facilities.

36

Must-have Criteria Identified

528

Employees Assessed by year-end 2020

14

Facilities in Scope (USA, LatAm, Europe, Asia and Africa)

Solution

In collaboration with the FFH, AK+Partners designed the Program, which involved four phases. First, the benchmark for each of the four levels needed to be established. Each Facility’s stakeholders participated in the internal benchmark definition completing two profiling surveys: the Predictive Index® Job Assessment and CATIL® Leadership Profiling for each level. In total 32 survey results were collected. Results were compared against respondents by Facility, but also across Facilities and benchmarked again other available market data available to AK+Partners. With targeted and objective job profiles built, the global roll-out of the talent review could start.

Second, key internal stakeholders delivered a strategy workshop (articulating the new Operations Strategy) at each Facility to build commitment and the case for change. Third, validated diagnostic tools – the Predictive Index® (Cognitive and Behavioral Assessments) and CATIL® Talent Review survey – were used to assess each employee’s capabilities and readiness in current role. Identification of potential, as well as their strengths and weaknesses to drive continuous improvement were key elements to the evaluation.

Finally, the FFH stakeholders and human resources departments debriefed all assessed employees to initiate their personalized development program stemming from any identified capabilities gap(s). Global Facilities’ data were provided to the HQ training department to deploy targeted group development actions.

Results

Assessment of leaders at four level shared with the plant’s stakeholders supported a constructive succession planning discussion. “To be promoted” individuals were identified and overall plant development programs designed.

Stakeholders’ feedback is very positive as the identification of future leaders is critical to future success and the transformation. As one executive commented: «The CATIL Talent Review process really impressed me, putting the finger on the dot of something we intuitively knew, though translating in an amazingly precise description of employees. It is fascinating to see how such a simple tool can be that powerful.».

In addition to that, the Program helped:

Concluding Remark

Success of the Program was anchored on executive management’s and Company-wide acceptance of using objective diagnostic tools and a best in-class Talent Optimization process to hardwire strategy to people to corporate culture. It further confirmed the imperative to use behavioral science when leading transformations. Based on this win, FFH will employ the evaluation methodology and tools to support their global digitalization transformation.