Brendan McNulty, Vice President and General Manager for UK and Ireland, Johnson Controls, Building Efficiency

What was your goal in implementing Strategy Deployment?

To identify new ways to continue Johnson Controls’ leadership in delivering building technologies and services by setting priorities, focus energies and resources, strengthen operations and engaging our employees towards achieving common goals.

What were the problems to be overcome?

The business had seen continuous change and as such our employee engagement and customer focus needed improvement.  In addition, roles and responsibilities were unclear and we lacked visibility of the talent within the organisation, all of which created challenges with business performance.

What did you do next?

During the first year we focused on fundamentals.  We complimented our existing talent with fresh talent at the leadership level and focused on the specific challenges of each business.

In year two, having built the foundations we focused on growth, we implemented a robust process that enabled us to drive strategy bottom up within an organisation – a change from the previous top down approach.

How did you approach Strategy Deployment (SD)?

SD workshops were initiated at the European level and breakthroughs were defined and aligned by myself and my leadership team. A further SD workshop was held with Subject Matter Expert’s (SME) project leads and their program teams from across the businesses. The training provided a very practical approach, which enabled people to think differently about the business.

What benefits have been achieved from SD?

We focused on organisation, roles and responsibilities, metrics and stabilised the business in year one with an 8% improvement in our customer retention rates and significant improvement in the business profitability with utilisation also improving by 8% .  Our second year saw top line growth increase by 5% and the bottom line by 30%.  We also saw a 7% improvement in our employee engagement scores.

What Lessons have you learned in implementing SD?

SD is not easy and initially teams struggled to think in a logical process orientated way. Traditionally, we worked on many strategic initiatives with low levels of traction, concentrating on doing a few things well proved beneficial.

Monthly reviews showed the phenomenal progress we made. The culture had changed, with team members demonstrating passion, creativity and the will to succeed. That shift change in the engagement of people sold me on the SD framework and process.

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