When Navigant Consulting Inc. acquired Troika (UK) Limited in
August, the small, London-based financial services firm’s 40-plus
employees were welcomed by Julie Howard, the president and
COO of Navigant.
Who better to welcome them aboard than Howard? After all,
Howard joined Navigant when the company she worked for was
bought in 1998. Clearly no stranger to change, Howard draws on
her experience as both the acquirer and the acquired as she guides
the specialized consulting firm through the challenges of executing
a strategy driven equally by organic growth and growth through
acquisitions.
“If there’s one thing that we can be certain of, growth creates disruption,” Howard says. “Disruption can discombobulate people, so
having an awareness of the expectations of the firm, the expectations that you can have for your peers and the knowledge that
things are similar and consistent helps manage that disruption.”
As an organization whose product is intellectual capital, Howard
says Navigant’s growth typically means growing by people. And
while its employee base has expanded to more than 2,500 worldwide, the firm’s financial growth has also been on the rise. During
the past three fiscal years ending in 2006, Navigant recorded annual revenue of $482 million, $575 million and $681 million respectively.
And while Howard says communicating the standards and
expectations of the organization to new and existing employees is
the first step in successfully executing a strategy, ensuring that
Navigant avoids the disruptions and pitfalls of change as it continues its growth requires much more.
“It’s important to probably overcommunicate when you’re trying
to instill a new strategy or effectuate change management,”
Howard says. “But the other equally important thing is that you
need to build your strategy into your infrastructure, the processes
you have in place, and the programs you use to measure people’s
performance, to evaluate and promote their development and to
compensate them.”
Creating flexible goals
Because marketplace conditions are constantly shifting, Howard
says a successful strategy is one that can adapt and change over
time. As such, she is careful to avoid describing the development
of Navigant’s growth strategy as a “process,” a word she feels
might give the connotation that at some point the strategy is complete. Though Howard says many businesses, including Navigant,
spend time throughout the year working on strategic plans and setting goals, it is imperative that those plans and goals allow room
for adjustment.
“I am a strong believer that developing your strategy is something
that’s on a continuum and something you’re doing all the time,”
Howard says. “Your strategy is evolving based on the information
you’re taking in to the organization and what you’re learning as
markets change and they react to your business. It’s a constant
evolution, and there isn’t any one point in time where you can say,
‘This is our strategy.’”
In fact, Howard might suggest you take your organization’s long-term plan and toss it out the window. While she agrees short- term
to midterm overarching goals are helpful in framing a company’s
overall direction, Howard says the specific nuts and bolts of how those goals will be achieved are in a state of constant flux.
“I don’t know that there’s any benefit to anybody to have a 10-year goal because the market will evolve and change so much,”
Howard says. “One of the major tenants of our strategy is that
we’re going to follow the marketplace. I am quite confident that we
will not be doing some of the services we do today several years in
the future. We will have retooled and evolved our services to match
the new opportunities in the marketplace.”
One of the primary information sources that Navigant utilizes
while assessing and further developing its strategy is the organization itself. Encouraging what Howard calls a “feedback loop,” key
leadership positions across the company are consulted on how to
continually update Navigant’s strategy to better reflect the conditions of the market. Additionally, over time, Howard has looked
to form relationships with individuals in the firm whose experience and position gives them broad awareness and context from
which to offer continued insight. In all, Howard says the more
input that can be efficiently gathered, the better.
“There is not one individual that sits in a room somewhere and
says, ‘I have developed this strategy for the firm,’” Howard says.
“We have a lot of people who are in midlevel, listening-post positions in the organization, people who are out in different regional
areas and different practice areas. Those people can feed you
information and help you test some of your thoughts and ideas on
strategy and how it plays in their local market.”
Howard says everyone in an organization needs to understand
and have the ability to articulate the path they’re following.
Soliciting input and feedback from multiple layers of the organization not only helps build awareness around a strategy but also
inspires employees to buy in, which Howard says is a crucial ingredient to any strategy’s effectiveness.
“There has to be some level of buy-in, and they have to feel like
it’s a common goal that they can get on board for,” Howard says.
“You need participation in the development of and a willingness to
carry out the strategy with senior leadership and with people who
have influence in the organization in helping us to define programs,
set measurements and help carry it out.”
Developing new leadership
Regardless of its size, no organization can be driven to success on
its strategy by one person alone. Every individual at every level up
to the highest position on the organizational chart has a different
contribution to make. As an organization grows, Howard says it is
imperative that its leadership team expands, as well.
“The more you grow and the greater your platform is, the more
you’re going to need a larger team of people contributing and
bringing different skill sets,” Howard says. “If you don’t have developed leaders in place, it can be the one thing that can seriously
impair you from reaching your strategies when you’re growing.”
Identifying and developing future leaders — or as Howard calls
them, “high potentials” — requires, first and foremost, that a leader
not lose his or her relationships within the organization, regardless
of what title he or she holds. Not only will maintaining and deepening that connection help you better understand the inner workings
of the company, but it will also allow you the ability to gain perspective on and monitor those individuals who are displaying the potential to eventually assume leadership roles.
At Navigant, Howard says high-potential employees have also
been identified with help from a 360-degree evaluation process
whereby the peers, staff members and senior team members have
had the opportunity to evaluate some top-level practitioners on
attributes that have been identified as key leadership indicators.
Howard also gives future leaders a chance to display their talents
by allowing them to participate on broader-scope assignments
beyond their normal job responsibilities, which she says, is beneficial to the organization as well as the individual.
“Another way to really get at your high potentials is to allow people from all different levels and all different capability sets to participate on firmwide projects and initiatives — things that are normally outside their everyday jobs,” Howard says. “It’s a benefit for
the company because you’re getting new perspectives and you’re
also helping to form those relationships that otherwise wouldn’t
occur. It also allows us a chance to observe young professionals
and emerging professionals and the development of their skills.”
Howard says that while Navigant does not have a specific program for developing future leaders, by making space for those
identified high potentials to contribute to the organization on specific companywide projects, it allows those individuals the opportunity to perform for a broader group and have their progression
be monitored with increasing levels of responsibility. And although
a shift in roles and responsibilities within the leadership team can
cause some consternation, Howard says the development of new
leadership during phases of growth is a natural and necessary evolution.
“It’s natural as a company grows, and you need to widen the leadership net that there are those that were in those positions when
you were smaller (who) may feel infringed upon or that they’re giving up certain responsibilities,” Howard says. “But the whole idea
is that you’re supposed to be creating opportunities for people and
ultimately finding the person who is going to replace you. So it’s
really imperative that you expand your leadership team.”
Retention through growth
While it’s no secret that employee retention is a key contributor
to the success of an organization, Howard says it is especially so
of a company experiencing growth. In an organization like
Navigant, where monetary growth is accompanied invariably by
employee growth, employee retention creates stability and consistency as new team members are added, be it as individuals or as
part of an acquired company.
“It facilitates your strategy,” Howard says. “It stabilizes the framework for people. In our firm, growing means that we’re growing
our intellectual capital. Therefore, we are growing by people.
We’re humans; we have our own internal motivations and personalities, and by retaining while you’re growing, it stabilizes the
framework for on-boarding people into a common culture.”
Howard says that while employee attrition is costly for an organization from a monetary perspective, its negative impacts go far
beyond that.
“We lose key intellectual capital that has to be rebuilt, we lose an
investment we’ve made in our people to train, mentor and develop
them, and others in the organization perhaps have lost a leader or
a boss who was allowing them to develop their careers,” Howard
says. “On one hand, it’s natural, to be expected. On the other hand,
it’s very impactful to the company.”
Understanding how to retain employees means understanding
and being conscious of the expectations and motivations of your
work force. Whether it is a generational difference or simply a sign
of the times, Howard says employees today have different expectations than did employees 20 years ago.
“Younger professionals today want to receive more immediate
feedback, recognition and rewards — and probably more frequently than we are used to as an organization,” Howard says.
“They’re looking to be challenged and to obtain a rapidly higher
education and constantly be developed, so we’ve put a lot of effort
into developing more on-time recognition programs, tuition reimbursements and tuition grants.”
While Howard says compensation drives behavior, and therefore, it is necessary that a compensation structure reflects the
goals of an organization’s strategy, compensation alone will not
keep employees from leaving. In the same way that Navigant
strives to be adaptive to the market in adjusting its growth strategy, it likewise makes efforts to ensure the compensation and the
environment Navigant offers its employees is on par with what
they might find elsewhere, and it makes efforts to better understand employees’ motivations.
“We’re in the midst of a benchmarking study against our competitive environments, both domestic and international, to ensure
that we know not only what the competition is paying, but if people are leaving, why they are leaving, and where they are going and
for what amount of money or for what intangibles, so that we can
adapt our systems and our support structures,” Howard says.
Ultimately, Howard’s ability to shepherd Navigant through its
growth initiative, be it by building awareness, developing new
leadership, tweaking the organizational framework or adjusting
compensation structures, requires that she and her organization
be ever-ready to embrace and celebrate change.
“Change management is probably the No. 1 responsibility that I
have in the organization,” Howard says. “It’s acknowledging that
the solution you applied yesterday will likely not work tomorrow,
and that’s the biggest challenge of managing growth.”
HOW TO REACH: Navigant Consulting Inc., (800) 621-8390 or www.navigantconsulting.com