CLIENT'S CHALLENGE

Week after week, employee complaints about the company’s security guards poured in.  Led by a tired and resentful end-of-career security department hold-out, the Corporate Security department had systematically alienated most of the employees working at the headquarters location and even across the enterprise.  They were widely regarded as rude, unprofessional, and unhelpful.  Their consistently adversarial approach to employees, visitors, and other vendors – i.e., their “brand” --  proved toxic.

“We need a whole new approach,” this client’s key point-of-contact shared with us, as we prepared to join the security team as “outside experts” and help rebuild the department’s reputation and professionalism.  “A substantial culture change.”

MATADOR’S SOLUTION

A member of the Matador team was embedded within the troubled department for nearly a year as a new direct report to the department head.  Step-by-step, they worked closely with business unit leaders to identify, plan, and introduce a wide range of security personnel best practices.  A major priority was authoring a comprehensive set of security policies and procedures that, among other areas, (1) defined the authority, role, responsibilities and resources of security guards, (2) prescribed tasks and duties relevant to many types of interactions with the buildings occupants, and (3) documented the company’s expectations of the security officers with respect to professional standards of behavior.

IMPACT ON THE CLIENT

At the end of a year, the department had achieved significant progress across many measures of a high-performance and agile security function.  New hires were onboarded based on their respective experience, capability, fit for the new culture, and ability to understand and support a positive agenda for internal cultural change.

Most importantly, the relationship among managers and employees throughout the enterprise was significantly better.  With support from the new roster of policies, training courses, mentoring and regular performance feeback sessions, the retained officers began to earn accolades for their helpfulness, friendliness, and overall decorum.  And, little by little, the department began reflecting the progressive characteristics that can emerge from scrum or agile project management sytems and a new focus on what true corporate and team leadership can achieve, arguably, in any organization.