Post-Merger Leadership Integration
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Realizing the full value of a newly merged or acquired business has proven to be a complex and uncertain undertaking. What has become clear, however, is that the speed and effectiveness of any integration begins and ends with the newly formed leadership team.

SCG recognizes how fundamental the work of integrating leadership teams is in determining the success of any merger or acquisition.

Getting leaders aligned and working together, as a resilient and effective team, is our goal. The challenges are numerous, including:

Leaders' beliefs about what is possible and what is important are often different.

• We discern enabling from disabling beliefs, and create the conditions for making powerful shifts.

Power and positioning is the dominant behavior.

• We confront the dysfunctions, clarify the consequences, and develop clear accountabilities.

Strategies and goals are unclear.

• We facilitate clarity and alignment, and catalyze emotional reasons for collaboration and shared commitment.

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Firm-Wide Strategy Alignment Rollouts
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Getting people to move deliberately and effectively in the right direction is a significant challenge; getting them to do so swiftly can seem impossible. As goals and strategies are defined and communicated, the human factor gets triggered. People immediately ask questions:

• "What does this mean?"
• "How does this affect me?"

Unfortunately, most of these questions are not asked publicly and individual interpretation wins the day. Here lies the greatest obstacle to mobilization and organizational alignment.

SCG has designed and perfected a powerful organizational alignment process that quickly and effectively engages people - encouraging them to personally own and actively promote the necessary changes involved. This process uncovers the most complex implications, and moves people to change their day-to-day actions to better reflect the new direction of the business.

This alignment process has worked for teams as small as 30 and corporations of more than 60,000 people. It is a highly interactive process that, from the eyes of participants, is led by their senior managers and facilitated by SCG. This is an important distinction. SCG serves as a catalyst for the change; senior leaders serve as the owners.

Getting teams off-site continues to serve as a great opportunity to inform, galvanize, and plan for future business challenges. Unfortunately, that opportunity is often lost due to poor planning, ineffective facilitation, and sloppy follow-through.

SCG has developed a highly productive approach to designing, facilitating, and supporting offsite events to ensure business goals are accomplished, team dynamics are improved, and participants' time is well spent.

We pride ourselves on the quality and experience of our facilitator cadre. Our expertise in group process, conflict management, decision-making processes, and issue-driven team building allows us to produce a powerful and productive experience. Probably the most mentioned "value-add" and integral part of our methodology is the production and documentation of real-time outcomes - the immediate turnaround of meeting issues, distinctions, agreements, decisions, action plans and individual accountabilities. Participants walk away from events with a polished communications plan and "presentation-quality" materials as a resource they can immediately put to productive use back on the job.

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Customer-Centric Organization Re-Design
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"The performance of today's high-tech attack aircraft is determined by the talent and competence of its pilot … right? Wrong! Modern aircraft will only perform to the limits determined by its design. The pilot's job is to reach that limit!"
-- Mat Juechter, former Chairman of the Board, ASTD

Many organizations today are realizing the value of placing renewed focus on the customer. Unfortunately, most are not designed to fulfill what their slogans and brand promises communicate.

At SCG, we understand the importance and impact a customer-centric strategy has to a company's bottom-line. Deciding to place the customer at the center, ultimately choosing that strategy as your "way to win" in a highly competitive environment, is a major decision with significant implications.

Our goal is getting the right people, knowledge, and expertise aligned to effectively deliver maximum value and service to customers. The challenges, however, are complex:

Scale can be huge, customer needs are unique, and employees are most likely organized around products or internal functions, not customers.

• We access best-in-class research, assess the current design, engage every key leader in exploring potential solutions, and help clearly map-out the path forward.

Managers are siloed and act accordingly. Getting them to change their behavior to put customers first (before their own agenda) now becomes paramount.

• We facilitate the development of a new organizational structure, clarify new roles and responsibilities, and confront the implications of behavioral change…starting with the most senior management.

Employees (specifically those where the customer relationship exists) are not empowered, let alone equipped to serve the customer.

• We align the entire organization to the new strategy, engage people regarding its implications, and confront historical beliefs and attitudes that prevent real empowerment.
• We help design the necessary systemic changes required to support the new behaviors (performance management, rewards and recognition, etc.).

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Culture Change Interventions (Really!)
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Although the notion of "organizational culture" has been present in business and academia since the early 1980s, it has long been considered intangible, esoteric, and difficult to manage, let alone change!

Today, leaders have recognized the importance of culture and its direct impact on bottom-line performance. The challenge, however, is that most leaders don't believe they can deliberately change culture.

At SCG, we think differently. We've developed a comprehensive intervention methodology that tangibly changes how work gets done in corporations, hence the operating culture. We discovered that you cannot change what you cannot measure. Utilizing state-of-the-art assessment tools, we now have the ability to quantify and measure business culture; view culture from a behavioral perspective; and hard-wire this seemingly "soft-stuff" to specific bottom-line results such as profitability, market share, sales growth, quality, etc.

We deploy an integrated change management approach, linking the behavioral change work required of leaders to the fundamental systemic issues that must change in parallel. We know how to baseline the current culture and now know when we have achieved the desired state.