Creating A Culture Of Team Effectiveness Within Kerry Foods

YSC Consulting has been a long-standing partner of Kerry Foods. We initially worked with the top team to formulate and articulate the organization’s Purpose, Vision and Values to serve as an inspiring, binding and motivating force to drive business performance.

Since then, our work has been anchored in these defining principles: partnering to create a coaching culture across the business, and providing in-depth assessments to benchmark, select and develop talent in alignment with their leadership strategy.

More recently, Kerry Foods has become an increasingly matrixed, interconnected organization. The new organizational model which moved from business units to integrated Demand/Supply Teams created a need to index team effectiveness.

Kerry Foods selected YSC as their partner because of our collaborative approach, extensive experience of working with executive teams, and knowledge of the latest research and practice in this field.

We worked closely with key stakeholders to define an appropriate solution to satisfy their five key objectives. Namely, it needed to be cost-effective, sustainable, suitable for any level of team within the organization, increase the performance of individual teams and lead to longer term cultural change.

Collaborating with HR, YSC designed a tool kit to help leaders optimize the effectiveness of their teams. The tool kit contains a framework for thinking about High Performing Teams (HPT) and provides practical exercises to be facilitated by leaders of teams. It also includes a diagnostic which can be used by individuals, teams and stakeholders to evaluate a team’s effectiveness.

This tool kit draws on cutting-edge research, and is also a pragmatic and practical guide; the language and techniques are anchored in the business. The HPT tool kit was tested and refined through an iterative process, which included a focus group with senior leaders, facilitated team development sessions with Kerry Foods’ top teams.  This approach helped business critical teams work more effectively and helped embed the HPT tool kit into the business. YSC trained HR facilitators to support the line in using the tool kit.

There has been widespread adoption of the HPT Model, with shared understanding of the framework and the power of teams in driving business goals.

Through a combination of YSC facilitation and in-house use, there is increased capability in focusing and aligning team effort around the key elements that enable a high-performing team.