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TABLE OF CONTENTS

§ About L.L. Bean
§ Translating Vision into Reality
§ Building a Foundation for Change
     The Leader's Journey
     The Right Team
     Leveraging the Effort
     "The Meeting Before the Meeting"

A Five-Stage Model
§ Stage One: Forming the Team and Defining the Project
     Getting to Know Each Other and Our Differences
     Working Together and Making Decisions
     Understanding Implications
     Revisiting Authority and Responsibility
§ Stage Two: "What We've Got" Versus "What We Want"
     Facing up to the L.L. Bean Culture
     Redesigning or Rethinking?
     From Process Thinking to Systems Thinking
     Order Takers, or Partners?
§ Stage Three: Exploring a New Department Structure
     Service Teams
     A New Resource Center
     "Work Pods"
     Shopping the Model
§ Stage Four: Implementing the Plan
     "Peopling" the New TQHR
     Transitioning from the Old to the New
§ Stage Five: Assessing the Transformation
     Processing Feedback
§ Reflecting on the Process
§ Lessons for Leaders
§ L.L. Bean and TQHR Today


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deborah Heller, PhD, is a partner in HellerCunningham, Brookline, MA, which provides counsel and resources that integrate superior business judgment and leadership practices to help organizations achieve long-lasting results. She works with senior executives in both small and large business, in healthcare organizations, manufacturing companies, technology start-ups, large internal information-service divisions, financial services, professional service firms, universities, and government agencies.

A graduate of Smith College, Deborah received her master's and doctorate degrees in sociology from Boston College. Recent clients include the State Street Corporation, Association of American Medical Colleges, Economics Resource Group, Inc., and the Massachusetts Bay Chapter of The American Red Cross. You can visit her Web site (www.hellercunningham.com/) or email her at dheller@hellercunningham.com.


EXCERPT

People often say they want to change, that they welcome change, and that change is exciting. Every day at work, people have ideas for how to do things better. Unfortunately, many companies fail to grapple with the differences between small and big changes, the difficulty of designing and implementing systemwide change, and the inevitable new challenges that crop up during a change initiative. The fact is, change is messy. Not everyone believes that there's a need for it. And not everyone shares a common vision of the future. Sometimes there are no visions of the future—only a sense that the present state is no longer adequate.

This volume describes a change journey undertaken in 1993 by L.L. Bean's Total Quality and Human Resource department (TQHR)—a journey that took more than a year and that ultimately proved very successful. However, the experience was difficult—exhilarating at some times and frustrating and demoralizing at others. For some participants, the whole thing unfolded too fast; for others, too slowly. Some had clear ides of what to do and how to do it; others felt confused.

The adventure described in this volume highlights some universal team-learning issues that many companies face. As we will discover, the design team that coordinated TQHR's change effort made a deep commitment to organizational learning—to reflect the process, to identify lessons learned about both mistakes and successes, and to share their understandings internally for the benefit of both the TQHR department and the company as a whole. This volume is an extension of that commitment. Reading about this journey may deepen your understanding of the complexities of change and team learning and help you avoid some of the pitfalls experienced at L.L. Bean. The volume also attempts to open a window onto, and to honor, the process and discussions that led the team to its decisions. At times the experience proved iterative, disjointed, bumpy, and circular. We hope that, by reading this story, you too will find yourself more willing to examine and learn from your own process. Most of all, we hope that the L.L. Bean story will encourage you to invest sufficient time and flexibility in change planning and implementation in your own team.