Margerison-McCann Team Management Profile

Breaking the ice at Nestlé Waters

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The challengeWhen Jonathan Rennotte joined Nestlé Waters in2006 as director of talent, performance andlearning, he realised that if the company was tosustain its competitive edge it would have tofundamentally change aspects of its culture. Thebusiness had gone through a period ofconsolidation after several years of rapidacquisition-led growth, but its traditionalhierarchical management style was serving itpoorly when it came to meeting challenges suchas fostering innovation and dealing withenvironmental concerns and the prospect of aneconomic downturn.

“We needed to address the way leaders interacted withother people in the organisation and how everyonewent about their day-to-day work,” explains Jonathan,who began working with Contact Consulting UK (Ltd)consultant, Graham Stickland, three years ago toanalyse and then shift the management culture withinNestlé Waters. The Margerison-McCann TeamManagement Profile is playing a major role in helpingthem achieve a sea change in management approach.

The businessNestlé’s bottled water business had grown rapidlyduring the 1990s on the back of a string of acquisitionsand, at the turn of the millennium, the company startedto consolidate, modernise and standardise practicesacross its different businesses round the world.

“In practice, that meant lots of Nestlé technical expertsin areas like quality, distribution, engineering, supply

chain and logistics would descend on a business to‘show them how to do it’,” explains Graham. “So theculture didn’t change and the company was unable toreally exploit the talent and capability of its people andto foster innovation – things that become essential in achallenging business climate.”

The solutionGraham used the Team Management Profile to helphim and Jonathan determine the strengths andshortcomings in the prevailing Nestlé Watersmanagement style. “We found that managers felloverwhelmingly into the Thruster-Organiser,Concluder-Producer and Assessor-Developer part ofthe Wheel, with scarcely any representation in theUpholder-Maintainer, Reporter-Adviser and Controller-Inspector segments on the opposite side.”

© TMS Development International Ltd, 2009

Jonathan continues: “It’s very much a manufacturingmentality: we need doers, because we have very thinprofit margins and we live on operational efficiency.But we needed to balance that approach withpreparing the ground, exploring wider options,researching what exists elsewhere, and so on. What’smore, there was little orientation towards forwardthinking or long-term business planning. The TeamManagement Wheel showed us very starkly how poorwe were as a company at doing some of these things.”

He knew he would never get the company’s 3,000managers to sign up to a coaching course. “But there isalways an intrinsic appeal for people in tools thatallow them to find out more about themselves. So weused the Team Management Profile as a hook intowhat we wanted to achieve, which was to create amore democratic, egalitarian culture characterised bya listening and coaching rather than ‘telling’ approach.”

Graham and Jonathan developed the Essentials ofManagement (EoM) programme, which was designedto improve the quality and consistency ofmanagement throughout all Nestlé Waters businesses.

Graham explains: “Within it we used the TeamManagement Profile as a way of opening the debateby getting people talking about their ownmanagement style, and showing them how closelytheir own approach mirrored that of Nestlé Waters as awhole. From there it was a short hop to get them tounderstand the strengths and shortcomings of thatstyle and to appreciate the value and contributionpeople with different skills can bring. That, in turn,encourages a shift towards more of a coachingmentality. So we are using Team ManagementSystems, in effect, to unfreeze the prevailing mindset.”

The resultBringing the Team Management Profile alive byapplying it to actual situations is often a revelation toteams,” says Contact Consulting UK (Ltd) consultant,Helen Hinds. “On one EoM course I delivered, SteveBendix, global head of manufacturing for NestléWaters, provided a great example of how the TeamManagement Profile could have helped in a particularproject he had been involved with. He felt the teamhad, in classic Thruster-Organiser fashion, rushed toinnovate a product, throwing money and people at it,despite the fact that, even at its most successful, itcould only ever have made a negligible contributionto overall profits. More Reporter-Adviser research upfront might have flagged up that that level ofpotential profit did not justify the level of financial andhuman resource they were investing in it. It turned outto be an unnecessary distraction from the corebusiness, which might have been avoided with a morebalanced team.”

Around ten per cent of Nestlé Waters’ 3,000 managershave now gone through the EoM programme and,says Jonathan, “The message has clearly stuck.” Heexplains: “They see the projects they need to tacklethrough the prism of the Wheel, and they keepcoming back to it in discussions.”

It is just as well, because the EoM programme, and theTeam Management Profile within it, is the foundationon which the sea change in manufacturing approachthat Nestlé Group as a whole is seeking, will be built.

“They are part of the forming DNA of the neworganisation, and therefore, hugely valuable,” Jonathanconcludes.

Further information:

www.nestle-waters.comwww.tmsdi.com

“We used the Team Management Profile as a way of opening the debate by getting people talking about

their own management style.”

© TMS Development International Ltd, 2009