When David Lingafelter became president of Moen Inc. in late 2006, the flow of prosperous times had been replaced by a plug of economic uncertainty.
Moen’s business is faucets, sinks and accessories, and it’s significantly dependent on the U.S. new construction market, which started declining in October 2006 and rapidly continued downward throughout 2007. That was hard, but then the global financial crisis hit, too.
“Just when we thought, ‘OK, is this thing going to bottom out,’ the rest of the world takes a dump,” Lingafelter says. “Everything else just goes in the swirling uncertainty. Consumers back even further away, so a business that was many, many years of record sales, year after year, you have this transition. That’s been the toughest challenge.”
Add to that, this entire decline was happening as Lingafelter was taking over his new role as president.
“The normal thing of going from a product manager to a president has its own challenges, but those are manageable compared to a business environment in one of your core markets in one of your core segments declining 70 percent,” he says. … “Most people say, ‘Wow — good timing.’”
While it was challenging, it wasn’t all hopeless. The company was strong in other areas, and he recognized that, as well.
“We’re a billion dollars,” Lingafelter says. “We have a highly recognized consumer brand, and we have a good team. So it wasn’t, ‘Oh my gosh — let’s start over.’ It was, ‘OK, what’s changed, what is changing, what does the trajectory look like, and what does that mean to us?’”
What that meant was sticking to what had gotten the company where it was — good strategic planning and accountability.
“It’s not that we’ve done it differently because of that, but it’s just more important, and what we’ve done throughout the year is we’ve had to iterate more,” he says.
Moen’s approach to planning involves aligning the leadership team, diverging and converging, prioritizing initiatives and then measuring. Sticking to this process, even in the challenging times of the past few years, has helped Moen continue to build its $1 billion brand.
“We’re still bullish on our growth in China and with the retail markets — it continues to grow as consumers look for that value in do-it-yourself,” he says. “It’s good. It’s not double-digit growth, but we’re positive. We’re positive on our growth opportunities in places, but we’re not out there spending way ahead of the growth, so we’re continuing to be cautiously optimistic.”
Align your team
Before you can do any game-planning, your leadership team has to understand what’s guiding the process.
“First and foremost, your leadership team is aligned,” Lingafelter says. “If your leadership team is not aligned, then they’re coming in with different headsets. They’re coming in with different glasses on.”
This is the time to look at your vision, mission and strategic initiative pillars to understand why you’re in business and what the purpose of your organization is. Keeping these elements at the forefront of each executive team member’s mind will ensure that your team stays on the same page.
“If everybody says, ‘OK, yes, we understand our vision, yes, we understand our mission, yes, we understand our goal, [and] yes, we believe in our strategic initiative pillars,’ then you get better alignment,” he says. “Then you have a balanced discussion. It’s still not easy, but having those guideposts to help you through the decision process, I think, is key.”
If your team isn’t aligned already, Lingafelter says you have to recognize it’s not going to happen quickly.
“You can’t do it in a [single] meeting,” he says. “It’s not like we’re going to set the vision from 9 to 10. It’s not a completely evergreen process because you don’t want to change it all the time, but I think you have to have a disciplined process of understanding your marketplace, understanding your opportunities, understanding who you are and have enough vision to say, ‘Here’s the direction that we want to go,’ and that process you need to have as much fact-based information as you can.”
At Moen, the company’s three main strategic initiatives are growth, business improvement and organizational excellence, so anything the company as a whole does has to support one of those initiatives. Then that cascades down to each business unit level, and anything that unit proposes must also support one of those three initiatives.
“We use the same language as it moves through the organization,” he says. “Common language makes communication a heck of a lot easier.”
If you can start with these commonalities, the entire process of prioritization and planning is going to be a lot easier.
“It must start with leadership alignment,” he says. “If you don’t have that, you don’t have a prayer because everybody will communicate differently. It’s OK to have a different style, but your fundamental message has to be around those strategic guideposts and those initiatives.”
Diverge and converge
Once you’re aligned with what your vision and mission are, then you have to lead your team through a process of diverging — brainstorming — and converging — bringing everyone back together again to decide what’s most important.
“The diverge and converge can happen at the team level, the group level or the corporate level,” Lingafelter says. “The process is the same — it’s exactly the same — if you boil it down.”
Often you’ll have to facilitate this process yourself because it’s not something that comes naturally to many team members.
“Allow them to diverge on the facts, and then you converge on to your strategy,” he says. … “[It’s a] process that says, ‘OK, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to talk about our marketplace, and we’re going to get information on our marketplace — let’s all get on the same page. Let’s talk about the company. What are we good at? What are our strengths? What are those things that we think are our competitive advantage and how do those marry up with the marketplace?’”
The amount of people that you involve in this process depends on the size of your business.
“It’s tough to do on your own, but I would say, no matter what, get multiple heads in there to help you at least with the assessment because a lot of times, different views get you to a different place,” Lingafelter says.
For Moen, this happens across the organization at the business unit level.
For example, if one business unit says they want to grow with new construction plumbers, they may start by brainstorming what they know about them. What are the facts? What are the trends they’re seeing? What do they think the future state as it relates to that specific area looks like?
“This is not days and days,” he says. “It’s let’s spend a few hours talking about this, and then you get to the next session, and someone facilitates and says, ‘Let’s take off our headsets and let it run.’”
Sometimes, you need to do some pre-work to these sessions. In those cases, Lingafelter says unit managers may ask their team to brainstorm on their own and come to the table with their top 10 things that they think are challenges with new construction plumbers.
From there, the diverging has to end, and the converging begins.
“Then you do simple things like, ‘Let’s prioritize all these ideas. What do you think? Let’s bring it in a little tighter,’” he says. “It’s not rocket science. You just need to facilitate through the process.”
From there, that business unit will come to the corporate level with, say, its top three things they want to do because they feel those are the priorities as it relates to new construction plumbers. That unit would then take those three items to the corporate level and talk about not just the ideas but what they think they can return on each item and how much each will cost.
“They’ve gone through diverge, converge and this is what they’re recommending they can do,” he says. “It’s not hard, but it’s a process — you have to have a discipline.”
By doing this within each business unit, it helps the corporate level not get bogged down in initiatives that aren’t very important and focus on what will be most beneficial.
“We’ve done this long enough, and our people are seasoned enough to know that wish lists aren’t going to fly,” he says. “The more confusion that they create, the less likely they are to get their initiatives communicated.”
Prioritize
After every unit brings its top initiatives, from there, the leadership team has to prioritize which initiatives out of all of those most-important ideas to focus on.
“When you’re talking about strategic tradeoffs you’re not diverging anymore,” Lingafelter says. “You’re trying to converge on the decision.”
At this point, every business unit has identified what its most important priorities are, but now you have to take it a step further.
“It’s not like we have a bunch of initiatives — ‘Oh, some of these aren’t so important,’” he says. “No, we neck it down to the most important initiatives. So you say, ‘OK, now we’re going to neck it down to only the most important, and you have to make prioritization discussions.”
The vision, mission and strategic initiatives drive those discussions and help identify where tradeoffs will be. This process starts with discussion to identify the facts.
“You try to get everything on the table — have the conversation about tradeoffs,” he says. “Listen to the downside. Otherwise, if we don’t do this, here’s the implication, and you have to vet both of those because a lot of times, the premise on the upside is probably higher than it actually is, and the scenario downside is probably lower than it actually is, so as leaders, you have to try to manage the message or manage the communication a bit. It’s probably not that bad, and it’s probably not that good.”
First, he looks at what the costs are for each initiative. It’s important to look at total costs — operational, finance, IT, human resources, etc. — not just what’s on the surface, and include any of those in the total cost. Then you have to look at what the returns on those investments are.
“A lot of it comes back to getting results,” he says. “If you say, ‘Look, is this in a shorter-term strategy, where it’s within the calendar year? Is it a longer-term strategy? Is it further out than that? Is it changing our positioning?’ You look at how long it takes for that to pay off, and we make calls that way.”
You also have to look at what your company’s strategic initiatives are that everyone was aligned to.
“A vision and strategic initiatives don’t just tell you what to do — they tell you what not to do,” Lingafelter says. “When you’re making tradeoffs without having guideposts, you can naturally steer off course. You have to have leaders that say, ‘OK, wait a minute, let’s remember — what’s our strategic initiative? What’s our focus? How is this relevant?’”
For example, at Moen, Asia is a growth market for the business, so they’ll make investments there, even if they could get a higher payback somewhere else. Sometimes that means cutting one business unit’s budget to fund that other initiative. Someone may get upset and ask why his or her budget is getting cut when three of his or her projects have a higher return than what the company is doing in Asia. But Lingafelter explains to people that the company will still fund that Asia initiative because its strategic guidepost says it wants to grow internationally and diversify from U.S. new construction.
“You come back to those guideposts,” he says. “You come back to those decisions. You know why? Because everybody had the same glasses on when you elected that process. It may not have been exactly the way they thought, but everybody needs to be aligned so you can have rational versus emotional discussions.
“This is not a perfect science. It doesn’t come without stress. It doesn’t come without discussion. Compromise can be dirty sometimes, but you can end up in a better place. I believe that. Taking your marbles and going home because you’re not getting everything doesn’t work.”
It’s important as the leader that you properly facilitate this process so everyone has the opportunity to share what their priorities are and why they think they’re important.
“You try to facilitate consensus and communication because I have very skilled, very smart and very capable people, and you don’t want to disenfranchise them in the process,” he says. “You don’t want people taking their marbles and going home, so you continue to go back to, why is it important? Is it a growth initiative? Is it a business improvement initiative? Cost, quality, service, new products? Is it organizational development?”
You also don’t have all the time in the world to have these conversations and make these decisions. At Moen, they’re constrained by when they have to provide guidance to the parent company, Fortune Brands. It’s important to communicate those time constraints as well so people understand when the stopping point is.
“There are hard stops,” he says. “This is the decision time frame. This is when we need feedback. This is the discussion we’re going to have. This is the prioritization discussion we’re going to have, and we have to stick to those timelines.”
Lastly, you have to look at your budget and what, of all your ideas, is feasible within it. Fortune Brands has a performance expectation for Moen to get results, so he can’t get caught up in something that is risky or too expensive.
“It isn’t a wish list, but it’s a heck of a lot more than we can afford,” Lingafelter says. “It’s prioritized because it’s a strategic initiative that we’ve talked about. There’s never enough funding. This is no different than any other business. The government can print money — we can’t, so we have to control the budget.”
Once you’ve heard all of the initiatives and looked at the facts, then it’s time to make the important decisions of what to focus on and communicate that to your team.
“You try to listen and then repeat back, ‘OK, this is what I’ve heard. I think these are the tradeoffs, and I recommend this is how we go forward,’” he says. “Are there times a leader just has to say, ‘We’re going north?’ Absolutely.”
Taking this approach to prioritization is also helpful when last-minute opportunities arise long after you’ve done your planning.
“That gives you things on deck, too,” he says. “You can say, ‘We have a few extra dollars, where do we go?’ It’s not, ‘Oh my god!’ We can say, these are the three things on deck, and let’s go fund them.’”
Measure
Once you choose your top initiatives, then you have to make sure that people focus on them and follow through.
“Every initiative has the ability to track it,” Lingafelter says. … “Each initiative rolls back, at the end of the day, to growth, business improvement or organizational development.”
For example, a metric in organizational development could be that every employee has an individual development plan. A way to measure that is to say that every employee will have an IDP by March 1.
“That’s a metric,” he says. “That means you have to spend one-on-one time, you have to establish an IDP, log an IDP — those kinds of metrics have to be tied to your initiative.”
It’s critical to take the time to put in some sort of way to measure each initiative.
“If you’re not disciplined with prioritization and establishment of initiatives and tying a metric to it, then it will be tough to track,” he says. “Are you executing and exceeding or excelling in your initiative? You have to just be disciplined to say, ‘OK, here’s the initiative, what’s the metric — how are you going to measure it? What’s the cadence? Again, it sounds simple, but everybody has to have that same headset of process of here’s how I want to present my initiatives.”
At Moen, a new three-year strategic plan is completed every year. That plan is put in a binder or spiral bound, and each initiative is given its own page that outlines the key action, the things they’re going to do to reach it and the timing.
Then, when Lingafelter meets with the person in charge of that particular initiative once or twice a quarter, he asks how they’re doing with it in regards to both progress and timing. Each initiative is coded with green if it’s on track, yellow if it’s a little behind and red if it’s falling behind or being killed. If it’s red, then he discusses the reasons — did they have enough resources? Is the situation different than they originally thought? Have business conditions changed? Or did you just miss it?
“As long as you don’t have too many, then you move on,” he says.
Each initiative will have a plan not just for that current year but also for each year in that three-year plan.
“They’re much more detailed than the next year — a little less detailed the next year and a little less detailed the following year,” he says.
As the company moves through its strategic plan for that year and prepares the next three-year plan, because metrics are such a crucial part of measuring progress, Lingafelter can adjust numbers up or down as needed so that the next plan is likely to be achieved. For example, in the fourth quarter of 2008, numbers got worse, so he adjusted the numbers for 2009 to reflect that.
“It’s generally one of two things — most recent performance and trend lines,” he says. “We look at how we did last month, how is the quarter going and how does the future forecast look. We do a lot of modeling, so we look at what’s happening in the market and we say the trajectory looks like it’s going to be up, flat or down, and we make adjustments based on that. We use a rearview mirror on performance and we use the windshield on forecasting and trend lines so we have that dialogue all the time.”
While this is a lot of work and requires a lot of give, take and communication, Lingafelter recognizes that this process is why Moen and his 3,000 employees are still doing well despite its largest market being down.
“When your culture is built around this kind of teamwork, it helps,” he says. “Leadership’s job is to continue to facilitate that and continue to lead. I think our organization has done a heck of a job through the adjustments that we’ve had to go through.”
How to reach: Moen Inc., (440) 962-2000 or www.moen.com
