Trilling Foods, a regional bricks-and-mortar grocery chain, has recently provided its frontline managers with new tools for using data. Allison Andersen, Trilling's VP of Data Science, has spearheaded these efforts. Yet, as she works with Kent Wade, the general manager of one of Trilling's grocery stores, Andersen quickly discovers that many frontline workers are not bought into it. Taking the perspectives of managers from across multiple levels of the organization, the case examines how individuals with different backgrounds and experiences manage digital transformation.
This case examines the challenges and opportunities of doing business in Peru. It highlights Peru's economic transformation in the decades leading up to 2023 in the context of its history, culture, and politics. The case gives an overview of some of the main obstacles faced by businesses operating in the country, contrasting these with the efforts undertaken by the government to improve the country's business climate. This is illustrated through the discussion of a fictional business dilemma.
At the end of 2018, Applied faced questions of stakeholder management and scale. Glazebrook wanted clients to get rid of CVs altogether. To do this, they would have to help hiring managers and recruiters easily build task-based assessments of the skills that their positions required. Applied used several strategies to encourage clients to rely more strongly on skills assessments.
The UK government's Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) needed to hire a new associate and were trying to increase the diversity of their job candidates. This decision was based on academic research showing that recruiters and managers often fell into common traps like "stereotype" and "affinity" bias, where they hired people who looked the part or who were similar in appearance or background as themselves. To overcome these biases, the team had spent hours using a permanent marker to redact the names and educational information from each candidate's CVs, one-by-one. This painstaking process inspired Kate Glazebrook to develop Applied-a technological solution to debias hiring. Applied was a recruitment and hiring platform that used technology to eliminate biased language in job ads and used task-based assessments to reduce favoritism, among other features. Years after founding the company, Glazebrook considered asking her clients to remove CVs altogether. Could Glazebrook convince her new and existing customers to use the platform, even after taking away CVs?
Ment.io was a software platform that used proprietary data analytics technology to help organizations make informed and transparent decisions based on team input. Ment was born out of founder Joab Rosenberg's frustration that, while organizations collected ever increasing amounts of data, the information gathering process did not capture human insights, which he viewed as critical to the use of the data. In early 2020, Rosenberg felt that the company he had started five years ago was taking off, but he wondered how to manage the team's limited engineering resources to help Ment stand out in a crowded software market. Should the company improve Ment's user interface, develop new features, or focus on its innovative algorithm?
This is a supplement to the People Analytics at Teach For America (A) case. In this supplement, situated one year after the A case, Managing Director Michael Metzger must decide how to apply his team's predictive models generated from the previous year's data.
As of mid-2016, national nonprofit Teach For America (TFA) had struggled with three consecutive years of declining application totals, and senior management was re-examining the organization's strategy, including recruitment and selection. A few months earlier, former TFA corps member Michael Metzger had spearheaded the launch of a predictive analytics team responsible for integrating strategy across TFA's recruitment and admissions continuum. Metzger believed that predictive analytics could help address TFA's recruitment and admissions challenges. Now, TFA's senior management wanted Metzger and his team to put their data models to the test. From a data modeling standpoint, what variables and models should TFA consider as it began a new recruitment season, and more generally, how heavily should TFA rely on predictive models to reverse the negative trends?
A private equity-backed fast food chain has hired McKinsey's new People Analytics group to help it improve performance. As the final client workshop approaches, Associate Partner Alex DiLeonardo ponders the best way to present the team's findings, especially those that conflict with the client executives' long-held intuitions. If successful, the project would help People Analytics build its reputation both internally and with clients. But to be successful, DiLeonardo knows his team must convince the client that their results are credible and actionable. In addition to discussing the specifics of the fast food project, the case also provides an overview of the people analytics field more broadly through the lens of McKinsey's client portfolio.
In 2017, Sarah Powers, VP of Sales at an automation hardware firm, is trying to understand why some members of her sales team have been underperforming. She is tasked with analyzing her firm's email and calendar data to try to find relationships between communications and sales performance.
In 2016, Susan Cassidy, VP of Sales and Marketing for the packaged foods division at CPG firm Bertram Gilman International has to make a promotion decision. Should she choose the person she has been grooming for the position, or another candidate recommended by central HR based on the firm's promotions algorithm?
Describes the challenges and successes encountered by GE's Aviation business in implementing a teaming work structure and culture in plants across its supply chain. GE Aviation leadership had seen dramatic gains in productivity, quality, and worker satisfaction in manufacturing plants where it had implemented teaming, which was designed to move decision-making as close to the product as possible by delegating authority, responsibility, and accountability to front-line workers. The case describes what teaming looked like in two of GE Aviation's plants and discusses the benefits realized in teaming sites. It also describes the challenges GE Aviation leaders had encountered in implementing teaming in the face of an entrenched work structure and culture in one particular plant, and discusses the difficulty management had faced in moving forward in transforming the culture of the plant.
This note, which describes the architecture and processes that characterize effective teams, begins by detailing the steps involved in designing a team, from diagnosing the complexity, interdependence, and objectives of the task to harnessing the key resources teams need from their environment. It describes the qualities to search for when selecting team members, including finding the right number of people, individual skills along both technical and interpersonal dimensions, and a mix of skills appropriate for the task. Once the team is designed, team leaders and members need to shape and monitor team processes, starting with the team launch. Describes how to diagnose emergent team processes such as information exchange, collaboration, decision making, impression formation, and underlying identity dynamics. Includes steps managers can take to improve dysfunctional team processes such as restructuring and shaping the social forces within the team. Ends with a discussion of bridging differences in teams across both geographic and cultural divides.
High interpersonal congruence-meaning alignment between team members' self-assessments and their appraisals of one another-improves the performance of diverse teams. And 360-degree feedback can help.
The senior managers of the India Design Center used 360-degree feedback to develop their team competencies. Now, three new managers are about to join their management team, and Ashok Kumar, director of the center, must decide how to integrate the new managers in a way that maintains the team's newfound trust and camaraderie. Describes the managers' work activities, including engineering, human resources, and finance responsibilities, to allow a diagnosis of how the managers can benefit from working together as a team. Also notes the challenges these managers face as they work with their bosses and counterparts at the company's headquarters in California, which is 13.5 time zones away. The team is one that could presumably benefit from better cross-functional coordination and communication regarding their collective relationship with the company's headquarters in California.