Transform Culture and Improve Performance

Background

The Taunton Press, located in Newtown, Connecticut, is a niche special interest publishing company committed to providing information that helps people express their creative imaginations. Taunton’s leadership team wanted to help its employees communicate better and have more effective meetings.

Solution

The company initially trained 70 managers and 18 Fierce champions in a two-day session off site. Taunton was very committed to Fierce concepts and in fundamentally changing company culture; to help drive Fierce’s adoption company-wide, Sue Roman set three goals for Taunton:

1) Move to a culture where there is open, honest, respectful communication;

2) Design and execute initiatives crisply, with active participation and clear accountability of all involved;

3) Have people throughout the company feel energized and empowered to perform with agility.

The champions established three sub-teams to develop a plan for the three key areas needed for ‘Tauntonizing’ Fierce: training, PR, and measurement. As part of the initial plan rollout, members of the Fierce Champions group held a series of employee meetings to explain the commitment as well as the general concepts and goals of Fierce. A benchmark survey of attendees gathered data on employees’ thoughts about communications effectiveness in the company and their early impressions of Fierce.

What Changed

“All of the activities in the execution plan helped to bring Fierce to the forefront of everyone’s consciousness,” said Carolyn Mandarano, Senior Managing Editor and one of the Fierce champions.

Now two years after the first training sessions, “People are giving frank input more often; it allows for the tougher conversations that they may have avoided in the past. We’re able to tackle tougher challenges and be more nimble. Meetings go better and we accomplish more,” says Marotti.

Fierce Conversations®