Case Study

Team Coaching in Shanghai for New World Cyberbase

New World Cyberbase is a rapidly growing software and IT services company, and is a listed company on the HKex. In September of the year 2000, NWCB acquired Jetco Technologies. Jetco had enjoyed a leading position in the China software market for a number of years, with a client base that included the Shanghai Municipal Council, the Agricultural Bank of China and Ping An Insurance. The areas of specialism are workflow, document management and GIS systems. NWCB now has approximately 300 employees in China, located in offices in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Yvette Ong, the CEO of NWCB, remained focused throughout the whole acquisition on the people dimension of the merger. This strategy paid dividends, with a smooth transition from the previous owner-managers to a new leadership team and high levels of retention amongst core Jetco staff. The Jetco staff had been wholly absorbed into a single organization and a new NWCB culture was emerging. Not only did this involve overcoming the old company/new company barrier that exists in every acquisition, but the newer eBusiness skills of NWCB had to be effectively combined with the existing software knowledge to create a new customer proposition.

Naturally, given the pace of growth in the China software market and the urgency of bringing, the leadership team faced many cultural and organizational challenges.

It was in this context that Yvette sponsored a team building event. The urgency was to bring together the new leadership team in China and to get them focused on how to enhance their management capability and develop a common NWCB management style.

The program was conducted by Andrew Atter, co-founder and Managing Partner of Corporate Coaching Partners.

In developing an approach, Andrew had to take account of the fact that the NWCB leadership team were a very experienced group of people. Most of them had backgrounds with major companies, such as Microsoft and Oracle. They were also really busy, with the new LogicBASE shortly to be launched. "The issue was not really training", Andrew commented, "but how this team was to find a common style, a way of doing things that was effective and unique for NWCB".

"Initially, it was tough getting the managers to commit to the program", recalled Annie Lee, HR Director "despite the best intentions, they were all so busy. But we knew the event was important, so we persevered. The team building event not only had to be effective - we only had one shot at this - but we also wanted the effects to be sustained. This could not be just a flash in the pan".

As a result the program had to have high impact over a short period of time. A three day event was planned, with Team Coaching as its theme. "Rather than tell them how to be mangers, we wanted to bring out their potential", explained Andrew "and this is the real difference between a training and a coaching approach".

The underlying methodology used the Myers Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI) and the related team building materials.

The first day was spent taking Annie and her HR team through the methodology, conducting an individual MBTI on each member of the team and then assessing the overall team type. Not only did this session enable the HR team to understand what was to become an "organizational language", it also helped the team members understand their strengths and weaknesses. "We felt better equipped to support the change process", recalled Annie.

The real test came the next day. How would the sixteen managers respond to a whole day program on team building?

"The first part was tough", recalled Andrew, "we decided to go straight into completing the MBTI instrument with everyone in the room. With hindsight, this was the best thing, because we then had so much powerful material to use for the rest of the day, but at the time I was nervous that they would take calls or simply rush out to deal with some urgent matter".

They did stay. The breakthrough came when the whole group started mapping their individual types into the team type. "That's when the penny dropped", recalled Annie. People began to see that their personality and management style had an impact on the whole functioning of the leadership team. The whole group began to debate energetically about how they worked as a team, and not just as individuals.

"The role plays in the afternoon were lots of fun" remembers Annie " and people really got a lot out of this. And the coaching framework introduced provided a simple and effective framework for the managers to understand".

By the end of the day, a picture was emerging of what the team needed to do to become more effective. Yet, the learning was still at a group level. Everyone could buy in so far. But what about what each person had to do to change. The third day addressed the issue of how to make the learning stick.

Andrew conducted individual coaching sessions with eight key members of the leadership team. Leading with the question "What are the implications of yesterdays learning for your job?", the sessions went deep into the changes at the individual level that would help the whole leadership team work more effectively. "It was the coaching that really made the whole program work. The discussion got down to specifics and I could see that there was a real commitment to change form the managers. This is different from most courses, where the reaction is "ok, that was interesting, but so what. I have noticed a real change".

"I have detected a real shift since this event" commented Yvette Ong "and we have begun to function more effectively as a leadership team. There is now doubt that change starts from the top, and this was a good start".

And what about the participants, what did they think. In a post-event survey, the overall satisfaction rating was x%. Interestingly, when asked whether this event was worthwhile given all the other challenges they faced, x% said that it was.