Subaru of America President and CEO Thomas J. Doll led the company through the 2008–2009 financial crisis to 12 years of growth at a time when the auto industry faced significant challenges. He did this by modeling the characteristics in Hogan’s recent research showing the link between humility and strong leadership: remain open-minded, do not self-promote or seek the spotlight, and focus on getting along with others over personal gain. See: Humility: The Antidote for Bad Leadership.

Doll and his leadership team have placed a heavy focus on customer service, staff welfare, and giving back, as evidenced in the Subaru Love Promise, which is deeply embedded in the company’s culture: “More than a car company: The Subaru Love Promise is our vision to show love and respect to all people at every interaction with Subaru. Together with our retailers, we are dedicated to making the world a better place.” Subaru has donated more than $176 million since 2008, including notable charitable contributions to the environment, health, hunger, education, and animal welfare. Doll also quickly championed the donation of 50 million meals through Feeding America in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Making Culture a Statement

This leadership style does not come without its challenges. Doll was originally overlooked for the top job at Subaru. After serving as the automaker’s CFO, he eventually did land the CEO role, given the company’s need for someone with strong financial acumen and deep knowledge of the company and industry. But that was not all it took for him to secure early wins. Doll’s first bold move as CEO was to create a new statement about the culture with a focus on unmatched customer service and a positive experience for employees, retailers, external partners, and the community, which over time became deeply embedded within the company.

In 2017, Doll was proud of Subaru’s success, culture of being a nice place to work, and low attrition. However, he felt the company could accomplish more with the right level of structure and a focus on accountability and feedback. He needed a new CHRO and went outside of the company to hire Peggy Verdi. According to Verdi, their efforts focused on “beginning a multiyear journey to increase employees’ skills and comfort with having difficult conversations, as well as driving accountability.” Verdi said, “It is a major shift, and we needed to change but also protect the core Subaru culture of humility because that’s what has made — and will continue to make — us successful.”

Shifting Gears

Their work focused on employees having individual goals tied to company priorities. In the past, other than sales targets, goals were not consistently set at the beginning of the year. As a result, the focus turned toward training managers and employees on how to give constructive feedback in reviews and now have distributed performance ratings. When performance reviews were given previously, nearly everyone was rated as exceeding expectations or exceptional, and a large portion of people were high potential. Doll and Verdi went a step further with the executive management team, providing Hogan assessments and coaching for each individual leader and at the team level.

Finally, the company revamped its leadership competencies to focus on the behaviors needed for future success, such as Fueling the Business, Driving Results and Accelerating Change, Engaging People, Diagnosing Self and Shifting Gears, and Igniting Development and Coaching. A recent survey of all employees showed people recognise that change is underway, and a vast majority are very supportive.

Subaru is currently wrestling with how to recognise exceptional individual contributions within a culture that prefers to recognize team success. “People sometimes assume requests for recognition would come from the sales force, millennials, or the new employees we’ve hired, given our growth,” said Verdi. “But it comes from mid- and late-career professionals as well — people at every stage in their career. Employees report staying because of the altruistic mindset, despite not feeling individually recognized. The programs are there; we just need to remind managers to use them.” Verdi added, “We are starting to use individual recognition to spotlight rising stars, showcase underrepresented voices, and help attract talent, but we can’t let it get so big it no longer feels genuine at Subaru. When people aren’t modest here, they often struggle.”

Doll makes clear that being humble is not the same as not being fiercely competitive, working hard, or having a focus on the bottom line when your legacy is to make the world a better place.

The post Humble Leadership in Action: Subaru case study appeared first on Peter Berry Consultancy.

A multinational company based in Europe, one of the largest companies in the world, was looking for a new approach to developing and identifying high potential leaders. As part of this new approach, they reviewed their current leadership assessments and recognised a need to enhance their assessment suite which included their multi-rater survey. They then engaged PBC to customise the Hogan 360 (a globally benchmarked multi-rater leadership survey) to align with their Leadership attributes. The intention was to use this multi-rater survey to identify the strengths and development priorities of their leaders across the globe in relation to these attributes using a valid assessment tool. The organisation had also done previous research that showed increasing engagement in their people improved safety outcomes to a notable degree. Safety was a critical performance indicator, and the results of the multi-rater would assist in identifying those who were more likely to engage their staff, and ultimately, encourage safer work behaviour.

Approach

PBC collaborated closely with the organisation for approximately 12 months. During this time, PBC:

• Customised the Hogan 360 to the organisation’s leadership attributes, of which several versions of the survey were created to cater for different leadership streams.
• Created a self-administration platform for those employees selected to participate in the multi-rater survey. Self-administration included downloading and interpretation of their final report.
• Developed top quartile benchmarks against which leaders could compare themselves to top performing external global leaders.
• Assisted in the analysis and interpretation of data gleaned from the administration of the survey to over 4,500 participants annually.

Use

• The primary use is to support the leadership and commercial solutions across the company and develop strong business, functional and people leaders, with the capabilities to deliver results for today and in the future.
• The Hogan 360 assessments are used for both development and identification of potential.
• Historically the company used its own in house 360 assessment. In 2017, an internal analysis of this assessment showed poor validity.
• The Hogan 360 was mapped to the company model and is readily interpretable in a competency language with which the company employees are familiar.
• The 360 data is used to identify future commercial leaders and technical leaders and enrol them in high-potential development programmes. At a strategic level, the 360 data is used as a part of senior succession planning, to compare their aggregate profile to external top quartile performance, and to identify the strengths and gaps in relation to their strategic aims (e.g., those at the core of the business versus those who are leading transition).

Outcomes

• The assessment enables the company to compare themselves to external benchmarks and leverage the 360-assessment data to; provide insights to the business at team, organisational and strategic levels and supports analytic projects shifting the organisation towards evidence-based HR.
• At the company engagement is central to their performance management philosophy. Analytical work demonstrated higher engagement scores predict higher performance ratings and higher engagement scores predict fewer safety incidents. They further learned that leadership at the team or organisational level accounts for a large proportion of engagement.
• An internal study demonstrated a strong relationship between leadership and team performance. Using 360 assessments, the organisation was able to understand the causal effect between engagement and sales in various parts of the commercial organisation.
• In the process, they re-validated the factor structure of the Hogan 360 and in so doing, highlighted its superior technical qualities.
• The organisation found a strong association between team engagement and 360-based leadership competencies.
• The findings generated interest from the organisations internal stakeholders and led to the implementation of several interventions in the organisation including: a) a leadership development program b) annual feedback to line managers on how well they engage their workforce; c) targeted communications about business strategy and how a specific unit can contribute; and d) interventions to improve personal safety where needed.

Summary

PBC was able to assist one of the world’s largest organisations in terms of customising a multi-rater survey to meet their unique requirements, while providing them with the internal capability to manage the administration process. Collaboration between PBC and the organisation from a data analytics perspective also allowed the organisation to improve and streamline its leadership assessment methodology using a robust scientific approach.
The 360 data will be used to help validate other assessments including leadership potential. The 360 tool assists in the education of stakeholders on the importance of valid and reliable assessments and ultimately to make evidence-based HR decisions.

Read the case study here

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Peter Berry Consultancy were asked to provide a customised Hogan 360 and Group Report with mapping to their leadership capability framework.

Canon needed an individual and group 360 that could

• Increase strategic self-awareness
• Analyse team strengths, weaknesses, and values
• Benchmark leadership capability

PBC provided the following solutions to enhance Canon’s talent management initiatives;

• Ability to measure against a consistent framework across the employee lifecycle.
• Provision of the opportunity to measure ROI from development investment as the Hogan 360 is a repeatable tool. Data analytics reporting options are also available.
• With sufficient volume, different leadership level benchmarks can be applied to reflect the Canon Australia leadership levels. An internal Canon Australia benchmark may be calculated following sufficient data collection. This is in addition to the global benchmark

Results #1
Canon can now apply different leadership level benchmarks.

Results #2
Canon can drive real behaviour change as the Hogan 360 uses evidence-based diagnostics and highly effective feedback for individuals.

Results #3
The Hogan 360 Group Report allows Canon to implement targeted team building programs to address team development opportunities and drive organisational performance.

For more information, please contact us at info@peterberry.com.au

“We were already using the standard Hogan 360 in our business so it was familiar for our leaders, but we loved the fact it could be customised to reflect our Leadership Framework. The immediate impacts to the business were leaders were able to make some small changes to their behaviour immediately to be seen as more effective by their stakeholders. Yes, absolutely, we would recommend the Hogan 360, self-awareness is a great starting point for any leadership program and the practicality of having that awareness linked directly to the behaviours you want to see in your business is useful for leaders.” Jennifer Voss, Learning & Development Manager, Canon Oceania

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