The Need
To ensure rapid growth continued, the Hitachi Energy Transformers business unit needed to give new supervisors the core skills to drive collaboration, innovation, and growth.
The Solution
An engaging frontline leader learning journey that gave leaders foundational skills to effectively lead their teams, with learning tools and content from DDI's leadership development subscription.
The Result
Hitachi Energy’s Employer of Choice Index score almost doubled, plus salary employee monthly turnover dropped 60% and hourly employee monthly turnover dropped 22%. The company estimates $13M in savings over the 12 months following the training.
Providing Supervisors with Core Skills to Drive Growth
Hitachi Energy’s North American Transformer business unit experienced rapid growth, but to ensure it continued, a few key challenges stood in their way: dwindling employee engagement, increasing turnover, and new leaders lacking core skills.
Ninety percent of the unit’s supervisors and frontline leaders had been with the organization for fewer than two years. Many of these new employees were also coming into leadership roles for the first time, bringing limited knowledge of the leadership skills the organization needed to drive collaboration, innovation, and growth.
To help them navigate these challenges, Hitachi Energy partnered with DDI to create targeted development for their supervisors and frontline leaders in North America. The program focused on providing leaders with the core skills to impact key metrics like absenteeism, attrition, engagement, and their Employer of Choice Index.
Creating a Common Leadership Language Based on Core Skills
The unit’s training and development team, led by Mike Von Bargen, Global Operations Training Manager at Hitachi Energy, envisioned building a common leadership language across all their supervisors across all transformer sites in North America. He knew there was no better partner to help than DDI, who had been working with Hitachi Academy, the company’s global learning and development university, and many other Hitachi units worldwide for nearly two decades.
With DDI’s leadership development subscription content and DDI’s expert team, Hitachi built a learning journey personalized to the core skills their frontline leaders needed to succeed. The basis of the program was simple and focused on helping supervisors improve their foundational skills around what Hitachi called the 3C’s: Communication, Coaching, and Conflict.
The initial cohort included an impressive 950 Hitachi plant supervisors across North America trained using a blend of DDI and Hitachi-certified facilitators. Plus, many Hitachi senior plant leaders supported the program by attending themselves, as well as to help reinforce the learnings with their teams. [potential quote from Mike on how important senior-level support was to the success of the program: “Having senior-level leadership support our development program was crucial for participant engagement,” Von Bargen says. “We got feedback from our supervisors that they truly felt invested in.”]
Building a Standard Operating Procedure for Human Interactions
The 3C’s program leveraged DDI’s proven foundational leadership subscription content, including half-day engaging face-to-face sessions offsite over the course of two to three consecutive days. This setup ensured that on-the-floor supervisors could get focused learning time. Courses included Communication: Connect Through Conversations, Coaching: Move People Forward, and Resolving Workplace Conflict. Each course included plenty of time for skill practice and used relevant examples to help Hitachi supervisors connect their learning to common on-the-job situations.
DDI also worked with Hitachi to make sure content across topics connected with their supervisors on a deeper level. The basis of the development included DDI’s Interaction EssentialsSM and Key Principles for effective interactions, but framed them in a meaningful way for supervisors, as a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for human interactions on the plant floor—a structural framework supervisors were already very used to for many other lean and safety processes. Using this method also helped to establish a common leadership language between supervisors and senior and continuous improvement leaders throughout the unit.
To enhance development after the training, Hitachi uses DDI’s leadership development subscription technology and tools, such as My Pathway: Leadership Core, a personalized self-paced development experience that gives leaders hyper-relevant recommended content to further development, as well as microcourses on the 3C’s to refresh and reinforce key learnings. Additionally, DDI’s design team created custom posters and other collateral for supervisors to have handy while working on the plant floor.
You can have all the latest technology and state-of-the-art equipment available, but still without trained and motivated people to operate it, it will be just a piece of steel.
Bartek Wielebnowski, Global Operations Manager, Hitachi Energy
Real, Measurable Results
DDI worked with Hitachi to provide an impact evaluation study on the success of the initial cohort of 950 plant supervisors across North America. After the training, more than two-thirds of participants say the program increased their engagement and the engagement of their teams, and an incredible 92% say they are engaged in their jobs.
Participants also said:
- “I felt challenged to think about my future and what I can do to better myself.”
- “The tools, techniques, and principles were super relevant. I can start applying them NOW!”
- “It showed me that the company is interested in helping develop future leaders,”
- “I felt emotionally safe to share my own experiences.”
After the training, Hitachi Energy’s Employer of Choice Index score almost doubled in just over one year—jumping from 45 to 85. Salary employee monthly turnover dropped 60% and hourly employee monthly turnover dropped 22%. Hitachi also estimates almost $13M in savings over the 12 months following the training.
The positivity of the team members was palpable as I toured the factory. I can tell that investing in our people’s development is encouraging our employees and building trust in the organization.
CP Vyas, Head of Global Operations, Hitachi Energy
What’s Next?
With the success of the 3C’s program at Hitachi Energy North America, the organization is continuing training quarterly based on specific site needs to ensure development is relevant and ongoing.
They started expanding delivery into Europe and plan to launch learning journeys across all functions and levels across all global Hitachi Energy Transformer units. Their goal is to reach all 2,500 employees and continue to embed their common leadership language across all leader positions—from top to bottom.
Learn more about DDI’s leadership development subscriptions.
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