Canadian HR Reporter

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014 CANADIAN HR REPORTER & STRATEGIC CAPABILITY NETWORK Credit: Rawpixel.com (Shutterstock) As the winner of the 2015 Prism award from the International Coach Federation (ICF), it's safe to say Rogers knows a thing or two about coaching. But that wasn't always the case, according to Jim Reid, CHRO at Rogers in Toronto. e organi- zation has undergone massive changes over the past decade or two, and is currently undertaking an ambitious transformation plan. "We've completely rebuilt our executive team. Eight out of the 12 people on the team are brand new so I get to work alongside incred- ible, talented people," said Reid at a Strategic Capability Network event in Toronto. But it's not just the brand recog- nition or talented leadership team that make Reid relish his role and opportunity with the company — it's the potential for transforma- tional culture change. "It's a great honour for me to be at Rogers, not just because I'm at Rogers, a company that's branded and well-recognized in Canada, but it's being at Rogers at this mo- ment in time," he said. "After our founder died, we lost our focus, we drifted, we gave up the lead position in the market- place, and what we want to do now is get it back." Five years ago, when he got the call to have a dinner about the CHRO job, Reid had mixed feel- ings about Rogers, he said. His mentor even advised him against taking the job — having worked at Rogers himself, he felt it was a culture that couldn't change. "But, of course, over the past few years, I found out that that's not the case. We are changing Rogers, and for the better. We're not done yet, we've got a lot more work to do," said Reid. "We all know in this room that if you want to be successful in life, you have to play to your strengths and your passion. And part of my passion is I love messy, compli- cated change. Turnaround type of change." And there's a lot of potential. Currently, Rogers is the largest diversified communications and media company in the country, said Reid. It has about 30,000 employees and revenues of just over $13 bil- lion, he said — and now, it has an overarching change strategy to re- capture the top spot in the market. "We call our strategy 'Rogers 3.0.' It's kind of a play on words in some ways. Guy (Laurence) is the third CEO in the history of the company — we're 56 years old this year — and it's a three-year plan to get back into a lead position in the marketplace," he said. "A big part of what Guy's legacy will be is reinvigorating the people and the culture of the company. Our goal is simple: To win and also to make Rogers one of the best places to work in Canada." One of the most important things about transformational change is to realize it's not all about slashing and burning — people have to recognize what elements are working and what practices are worth preserving, said Reid. "One of the things we learned in kind of architect-ing the jour- ney that we're on is that when you think about change, the first ques- tion we needed to answer was not what to change — it was, rather, what not to change," he said. "We're very focused on making more explicit and driving into the foundation of the company the kinds of things that we think are going to help us win longer-term." But the people plan underpins the entire strategy, he said. "It has five work streams and 20 initiatives — it's a very ambitious plan, it's a multi-year plan. And everything that we're doing in this place is really trying to shape up a winning culture," said Reid. "Everything we do is grounded in three tenets that we think will help build a more grounded com- pany, a more competitive com- pany, a more customer-focused company." Rogers has a strong focus on talent, and on teams, engagement and culture, and it is also focusing on a coaching culture. "Leaders set the tone in terms of performance in the company. And I think we also recognize… that as leaders, we get the culture we deserve. So when we thought about the magnitude of the cul- ture change we're driving, and the things we're trying to do on the customer side, and the fact that it's going to take us years to get from good to great, we saw very quickly that to be successful, our leaders needed to lead differently," he said. "So rather than go a mile wide and an inch deep to build skills, we made a decision to go narrow and very deep on one skill set, and that was coaching." Rogers hired a company called Essential Impact to learn more, then identified within the organi- zation which employees already had an aptitude for coaching, with the intention of moving the peo- ple who were the best and had the strongest aptitude right through to ICF certification. "We focused on three areas. First, we equipped our HR busi- ness partners — who are a young, talented team, but we weren't when I first joined driving high- impact HR into the business. We took all of our HR business part- ners and we gave them the first 60 hours required to become an ICF- certified coach," said Reid. "We then took our best ones on to ICF certification to give them the confidence and to lean into the business in terms of talent and our teams and engagement agenda. We then took our director-level leaders, and there are 650 of them, and gave them all coaching skills. We're now driving that down into the management level." Coaching for call centres e other thing they've worked hard on is introducing coaching to the call centres, said Reid. With call centre agents who are dealing directly with customers all day, every day, there is a huge opportunity to influence the way customers perceive the brand, said Andres Piderit, vice-presi- dent of consumer care at Rogers in Toronto. "We've been focused very hard on making sure we're setting up those agents for success," he said. Rogers rolled out coaching to several of the call centres after having identified coaching as an enabler. ey trained 400 team man- agers across the country around facilitating these changes, he said. And the positive impact was al- most immediate. "Coaching is a non-negotiable," he said. "Coaching enables the trust." "Everything we do is grounded in three tenets we think will help build a more grounded, competitive company." Building a coaching culture Why Rogers decided to revamp its culture BY LIZ BERNIER

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