Case Study

 

Telegraph Media Group   – Commercial Division

Objective

To make the commercial division more competitive during what was a very difficult period for the newspaper industry. Also to give support to the new MD who had been promoted from within the senior management team.

Background

“What differentiates Ashtead is their reliance on hard substantive data. Their approach is very business driven and it gave me confidence. They are people I would work with again.”

Lynn Cunningham – HR Director, The Telegraph Media Group

Newspapers are very reliant on advertising revenues and at the time, the market was very depressed. The situation was squeezing the commercial team’s opportunities to generate the revenues they needed. There was a lot of pressure on them to perform.

At the same time a new MD was appointed to the division. He had been part of a long established team and so it was a potentially difficult situation. He had colleagues who had considered him their equal and now he was their manager. Lynn wanted to make sure he was supported through this difficult period so he could establish himself as the group’s leader.

The senior team

The senior team situation was complex. Most of them had worked together for about 17 years. It was clear that these weren’t just business relationships; there were personal relationships there too. There was a lot of rivalry but also camaraderie.

The new MD suddenly had to assert himself. He also wanted to do things differently. Change is never easy when things have been done the same way for so long.

The sales team

The Telegraph sales team had been a very comfortable place but in a depressed market, they needed to do things differently and be more competitive. On top of this, deadlines and time discipline were inconsistent.

APG’s intervention

First of all we worked with the new MD to present the ideas to the team and let them know what to expect at the end of the project.

It was important to understand how people perceived the issues in the sales department. The next stage was to send online questionnaires to a large sample of staff. Once we had collated the data from the sales team it was obvious there was a very clear gap.

At the same time we ran an offsite workshop with the MD and his senior team.
Because of the differences of opinion, and the tension between individuals, it was important to get them to reach a collective view. We encouraged open discussion. At the end of the workshop they had agreed what they wanted to achieve in relation to the survey around leadership, strategy and communication.

Following the survey and the senior team workshop, with our support, the MD held communication briefing sessions to everyone in the sales team. Every single person was told the survey results, and about the problems and issues that were emerging.

“It was a very good communications session,” says Lynn. “People had never before been invited to give their views and an opportunity to critique a whole range of things. It was a real breakthrough.

“It was also the first time any one of the senior management team had admitted that some of the issues were down leadership style."

Result

The intervention was originally designed to improve performance. However, five months into the project the company was put up for sale. This meant that we didn’t get the opportunity to measure if our intended outcome had been achieved.

However, our work helped to bring stability to a very unstable situation. It achieved cohesiveness in the senior management team and asserted the new MD as leader.

Importantly, he was able to give confidence to people in a very difficult period of change when the future of the business was unknown.

Says Lynn:

“APG’s work helped the MD keep a steady hand on the tiller and keep his teams motivated.

“This was a really important group of people on whom the profitability of the business is entirely dependent. APG’s work helped to hold them together.

“What came out of the work was that the organisation needed to do things differently. Everyone shared this view and therefore it had a significant effect. They recognised they needed to operate to much shorter or even undefined deadlines. That meant moving at a much faster pace.

“We needed them to have real sense of future, and a much bigger picture of who our competitors were. We needed excitement and imagination from them.

“It was good preparation for change and for what was to come. But, most telling of all, they are things that have remained embedded in team."

Working with APG

“I had worked with APG before and I thought they would be a good fit for this project" says Lynn. "I trusted them and had confidence in their ability to deliver. However, principally it was because this was a sales environment.

“APG used a tool called OTI which gave them the advantage. It was perfect for this context because it’s very data-driven. It asks a range of questions but it’s quantified because it’s compared against different groups of people and industries. It has credibility and it’s objective. They also have a fully integrated offering including one-to-ones and workshops.

“Whatever we did had to have resonance with the sales team. They are constantly assessed on their performance, so they were entirely used to measurement. The concept of targets and data to assess whether they were doing well was something they were very familiar and comfortable with.

“APG believe everything they do should have real business focus. They’ve got to be able to define it and measure it. Only once they have data to inform them will they propose a strategy.

“Some consultants take an intuitive approach to gain an appreciation of what’s going on. They can do some very useful work but it’s not as grounded. It doesn’t have the same understanding of the issues as APG’s approach and that’s why I like working with them.”