Fielding a winning team
Even the best coach can’t win without good players, and
good players are vital to winning games.
“One of the lessons that we learned in running this company is
probably the most important thing the CEO does is put the winning team on the field,” Cyr says. “That means doing a good job of
signing up the talent you have on the field and making sure you
know what they’re good at, and then making sure that they play to
their strengths. One of the things that I think too many people have
done is spend their time trying to fix the
weaknesses through their opportunity areas rather than leveraging their strengths. My focus has been that if somebody is good at
something, I have them do that over and over again to the benefit
of the company and, hopefully, play the game in a way that the
weakness is not exposed. That’s my mission, that’s my job, to find
out where the strengths are and leverage them as much as I can.”
But while he sees value in keeping players in slots where they perform exceptionally well, he’s not averse to changing the chairs
around when it means a more effective lineup. Cyr has strengthened the team by viewing individuals in the organization not in
terms of their titles and responsibilities, but in the context of their
competencies.
“One of the things we’ve done is we’ve made our organization
very fluid,” Cyr says. “People all have the same titles and responsibilities, but we view every person as having a broad range of skill
sets, not as a title or job description. If their skills are best used in
working on a different project than what they’re working on, then
we sit down with them and talk with them about what the benefit
would be in terms of broadening the skill set by working in a different area. They’re usually fired up about it, and they move on.”
For example, one of the tactics the company decided to use
was to preserve its traditional price points by revamping its packaging. The manager who ran Sunny Delight’s price-point management initiative is the same person who manages its logistics.
“Typically, a logistics guy would not be involved in the development of a new package and the manufacturing start-up of it and the
selling with our customers, but we needed to get that initiative into
the market in a short amount of time,” Cyr says.
In another case, Cyr took a process Sunny Delight used in one
part of its operations and applied it to another, again using a manager from another functional area to lead the effort because of
his set of competencies.
“We took the lean (manufacturing) tools, and while we’ve been
using them in our manufacturing operations for quite some time,
we turned them loose on our back office operations,” Cyr said. “In
fact, we brought in one of our plant engineers and had him lead a
kaizen, a process that you use in lean manufacturing, and had him
lead it on our back office trade spending program … and we found
tremendous opportunities to cut our costs by having those tools
applied to a back office operation. We applied it to legal costs, we
did it on marketing costs.
“We attacked every single process we had, and the amount of
money that fell out of that process was tremendous, and that was
a real breakthrough for us.”
