Adizes Change Management

A Lack of Entrepreneurial Spirit

A company with 4,000 employees is involved in various types of construction, including building construction, civil engineering, industrial construction, and construction of metro lines . There is a single owner who is also the general manager and is very active in the company, particularly in acquiring clients.

The company’s diagnosis was Premature Aging, which means that there was a lack of entrepreneurial spirit in the company. This was especially evident in the conduct of the operating units, which were organized by type of construction. The directors of the units operated them like classic production lines. They waited for someone to bring them work, and they were practically just civil engineers responsible for building something. Of course, this led to a drop in business because only the owner was actively with the market, and it was impossible for him to constantly bring in work. The metro sector, for instance, did not want to diversify, and there were 400 people sitting, waiting and getting paid for it.

The first step toward increasing entrepreneurial spirit was the introduction of multifunctional synerteams, which started to solve operational problems. A group of internal integrators was trained and a continuous process of improvement began. Of course, greater changes than this were expected.

The mission of the company, among other things, stated that it wanted to become a leader, to increase sales, to increase its client orientation, and to reduce costs and introduce new construction technologies.

When creating a structure it is very important to define the purpose of each organizational unit because the name of the organizational unit can stay the same, while the responsibilities and desired behaviors can be completely different. The structure had to support the commitments of the mission. The organization was still divided into types of construction, however their responsibilities changed completely. Instead of individual units they became profit centers with all of the corresponding powers, which meant that they were responsible for sales, or at least for marketing. In order to increase sales, the directors had to start visiting investors and they thereby reduced pressure on the general director. We introduced a marketing unit, and even called it “coffee with investors”. Additionally, we introduced project managers as profit subunits in order to have more people running the business and actively concerning themselves with costs. Until then the directors of business units had been at the top. An additional unit was introduced at the highest level to develop new technologies, with the goal of actively working on improving construction techniques and increasing efficiency.

After improving the structure we worked on setting up a system of financial responsibility for the entire system, so that soon each organizational unit, whether a profit, service, or cost center, had its own budget. Their deviations from it were monitored on a monthly basis and corrective action taken. Additionally a company-wide system of concretized objectives allowed us to focus our activities not only on operations, but on entrepreneurial and integrative goals.

Altogether, the training of employees through synerteams, new structures with project mangers, directors who began to care about the market, and the introduction of new technologies and accountability systems led to the company taking a leading position in the region and returning to the Adolescent phase, on the path to Prime.