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Case Studies - How we are helping our clients succeed…
Fujitsu…
70% of Commercial Managers have skills challenges in their business.* The role of Commercial Managers continues to evolve from ‘policemen’ in a control paradigm to ‘enablers’ in a deal leadership and innovation paradigm. What Fujitsu Services spotted though is that traditional Commercial ‘IQ skills’ alone would not give them the edge. Winning and retaining business today requires highly developed Emotional Intelligence, or ‘EQ skills’. EQ is all about self awareness, managing one’s emotions and recognizing the emotions of others, motivating oneself, and handling relationships.
So Oxygen Learning and its partners put together a ‘Commercial Academy’ which tackles both sides of the equation. Oxygen’s approach of ‘stripping away convention’ leads to an experience delegates will never forget. The feedback from delegates and executives alike has been excellent.
Fujitsu Services is one of the leading companies in the IT outsourcing market. It manages highly complex IT infrastructures for its customers delivering cost and efficiency benefits as well as providing the basis on which new processes and systems can support future business needs. It serves its customers by providing cutting edge technology, impeccable service and flexible and creative commercial solutions. It sees its ability to be innovative commercially as something that makes it different from the pack and for this reason it invests extensively in developing its Commercial Managers.
Business Challenge
In 2004, Fujitsu Services were looking for new ways to continue to raise the skill levels of its Commercial Managers. The company had been successful over a number of years and had a mix of long-term employees and new recruits in the Commercial department.
A recognized leader in the field of technical and service solutions, with a strong background in government contracting, Fujitsu Services recognized the need to enhance its ability to be innovative commercially. Customers in both government and civil sectors were demanding ever greater flexibility in contracts to enable long-term outsourcing relationships to accommodate their ever-changing business environment. Commercial Managers needed to have both a solid grounding in the IT and legal aspects of contract negotiation and management, and also a high degree of expertise in the softer skills of building long-term relationships and getting things done through people.
Solution
So they asked Oxygen Learning to come up with a Commercial Academy that would provide a series of development programmes. These were to be attended by all staff from the Commercial department, at all levels of seniority and experience, to ensure that the whole Commercial function had a sound base level of understanding of the material.
The Commercial Academy addressed first the pre-contract phase of the customer relationship (bidding for, winning and negotiating the deal) and then the post-contract phase (contract management after the deal is signed).
Oxygen Learning designed and developed these bespoke programmes together with partner companies. These partnerships enabled programmes to be offered which comprised both expert IQ content (techniques and tools to enable outstanding Commercial Management) and leading-edge EQ content (techniques and tools for dealing with people and effecting behaviour change, through relationship building and empathic intelligence).
Working in groups of ten to fifteen Commercial Managers at a time, Oxygen and its partners provided three and four day residential programmes, based on Oxygen’s proven accelerated learning and experiential principles, developed for maximum learning, retention and recall. This provided an exhilarating and fun learning experience to maximize the impact of the programmes.
EADS…
Having defined competencies and behaviours required to deliver top commercial management in EADS Defence and Security Systems, the Commercial leadership decided to present to the Commercial community the way forward on personal development. It was important that the follow-on training process to the competencies exercise be well thought-out and presented at a team event, to give the Commercial community a clear feeling for the future direction of their personal development.
It was decided to hold an event to do some team building and present the way forward on the competencies work. This would help to set up the objective setting and review process for the year. Oxygen Learning were asked to facilitate the event and deliver group exercises designed to get the team to step up to the challenge, including building on their current skills and competencies.
European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (‘EADS’) is a global leader in aerospace, defence and related services. The Group includes the aircraft manufacturer Airbus, the world's largest helicopter supplier Eurocopter and the joint venture MBDA, the international leader in missile systems. EADS is the major partner in the Eurofighter consortium, is the prime contractor for the Ariane launcher, develops the A400M military transport aircraft and is the largest industrial partner for the European satellite navigation system GalileoEADS employs about 113,000 people at more than 70 production sites, above all in France, Germany, Great Britain and Spain as well as in the U.S. and Australia. The company has 30 offices worldwide.
Business Challenge
The Commercial function in EADS Defence and Security Systems consists of 25 people, including five commercial architects. The group sells solutions to customers, requiring flexible, innovative deals. Many of the Commercial team joined the company in the last two to three years.
A lot of great work had been done on rewards and structure. In particular, a Commercial Toolkit Skills Matrix was produced. This showed all the skills, competencies, behaviours, knowledge bases, experiences and approaches that are used in commercial roles.
The Commercial people had been assessed against the matrix and in general the competencies and skills currently in the team were of a high level. The review of the results enabled priority areas for development to be identified.
Solution
Oxygen designed and delivered a one day offsite meeting for the Commercial community. The day included keynote speeches by a Director of EADS, a senior EADS customer representative, EADS’ Finance Director, and group exercises designed to achieve experiential learning in the key areas identified.
Subjects included business acumen and relationship building, working in partnership with customers, and risk management. The Oxygen facilitator MC’d and linked the sessions, organized the group exercises and the day ended with ‘the breakthrough experience’, a high-energy board-breaking session.