Making Good Managers GreatSteven Brantner, Manager, Learning & Communications

February 24, 2011

General Mills

• One of the world’s largest food companies

• $16 billion USD inFY10 net sales*

• 33,000 employees

• Marketed in morethan 100 countries

* Includes proportionate share of JV net sales

The Company of Champions

Global Brands: A Broad Portfolio

Popular Around the World

In Good Company: External Recognition

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Do you remember a great manager?

• In Pairs, 1 minute each:

• Describe your great manager experience:• What do remember that made them great?

• What impact did they have on you?

• What would you tell them today?

• We got started the same way

• That led us to do some research and ask some

questions and we’ve been working it ever since.

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What’s your Great Manager Story?

Mike

Kevin

Cheryl

Ricardo

Beth

Whose Story Is This?

•I’m just the story teller, lots of folks created it

Good Managers…

Relationship Are respectful and inclusive

Empowerment Delegate effectively/

provide exposure

Performance

Management

Complete performance

appraisal /check-ins

Coaching &

Development

Complete IDP and support

my career progression

Integrity Are honest and truthful

Focus Group Data: Good is Pretty Good!

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Good Managers… Great Managers…

Relationship Are respectful and inclusive Care about me as a person

Empowerment Delegate effectively/

provide exposure

Trust me and showcases my talents

Performance

Management

Complete performance

appraisal /check-ins

Provide ongoing, honest

feedback—positive and

constructive

Coaching &

Development

Complete IDP and support

my career progression

Stretch me and invest in my

development

Integrity Are honest and truthful Are self-aware, have high

standards and lead by example

Focus Group Data: Great is Clearly Different!

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Great Managers – What’s Different?

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Great Good Bad

Recommend Mgr

Communicates with Me

Effective People Mgr

Regular Feedback

Effective Coach

Using Climate Survey Data, Created Three Groups of Managers

Based on Employee Response

Now what do we do?

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Leader Engagement & Learning

One over One IDP

Lots of Activities

Metrics &

Accountability

Accessible

Tools

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Iterate and integrate

• Launched corporate-wide “Building Great Leaders” 1-day course for all directors and officers including individual Hogan and corporate data

• Engaged SLTs, hosting great manager town halls, mandatory objectives for Managers, and Great Manager IDP lunch and learns.

• Created some resources just for managers including an onboarding resource guide, leader circles for 14 different groups of managers, and some "manager essentials training“ complementing other courses.

• Used video to share stories, 180 feedback, and mentoring for new managers and peer to peer support.

• Leveraged prioritization and clarification of purpose as well as top down, personal commitment, 1 over 1 IDPs, and finally manager meetings and integration into regular training and onboarding.

Use IDP to help managers find one behavior to do differently

•Strongly encouraging managers to use their own IDP (Individual Development Plan) to become a better manager

•Use new assessment of 20 specific behaviors that most describe Great Managers

•Custom portal with Harvard Business Publishing

•Communications targeted at managers for IDP season

The Great Manager IDP Plan

• Managers driven to new tool in January and February

• Developmental and emotional appeal

• Simple (thin) design to provide easy links to:

• Self-assessment,

• Development resources from our Harvard ManageMentor v10 content mapped to specific Great Manager skills, and

• Easy to follow next steps/tools in one place

• Pulling live feeds from the best of the web and Harvard Business Publishing

• Encouraging use of our own internal best practices

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20John Mancini, President of AIIM, February, 2011

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The General Mills’ Business Case

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“We have a strong hallway culture.

How do we scale that around the world?”“ I just wish there were

one easy way to tap into all the knowledge that

the General Mills community has” “ If only General Mills

knew what General Mills knows!”

Key Features and Purpose

• Profile

– Key to people finding you and building connections

• Newsfeed/Microblog

– Narrate your work and ask questions

• Search

– Key to finding/following people, communities, and content

• Communities, Blogs, Discussions

– The social tools

• Document storage and links

– Shouldn’t replace a team site or intranet site

• Outlook, RSS, and mobile integration

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Where are we at now?

•Beta included 2,000+ users, 900 actively posting

– 400 visits per day

– Great uptake in I.S. and I.T.Q

– 75 communities

•Live Enterprise Wide February 1

– Soft launch, no broad promotion, viral marketing

– 2,000 visits per day this week, avg length of visit 1 hour

– 50+ new community requests – managed process including community manager training

•Some bright spots…a live look

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WWMZ do?

• He would allow the crowd to compare two managers against each other right?

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A Community of Great Managers

• Idea from Accenture’s “30-day challenge”

– A girl, a blog, and 30 days to business impact

• Our own social experiment

–Planning for managers to share ideas with each other through a community

–Recruiting 30 bloggers to share insights over 60-day period

–We’ve already gathered some ideas/input from a “live” jam session with managers

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What’s next?

•Cultural change

–Technology isn’t magic

–Building adoption slowly

–Collaboration across silos

–Social learning

– Iterate the platform

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Summary

• It all started with three e-mails

•Measurement (and building the story) was key

•When we boiled it all down: Invest, Value, Stretch

•Managers want to be better, they need tips/tools

•What if managers could teach each other?

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