Grainger Accelerates Corporate Growth with Coaching

W.W. Grainger’s senior leadership knew that a change in culture was required in order to accelerate growth in the wake of a global recession. The culture change required leadership that went a step beyond. The Leader-as-Coach initiative started with the simple question: “What can the company do to help leaders be better leaders?”

The answer was a leader-led development program based on coaching.

The Leader as Coach

W.W. Grainger is North America’s largest distributor of maintenance, repair, and operating products. Recognized as a Fortune 500 company and a perennial member of Fortune magazine’s Most Admired Companies list, Grainger serves 2 million businesses and institutions in 157 countries. Today, one-quarter of Grainger’s business is outside the U.S. and includes operations in Europe, Japan, Mexico, India, Colombia, China, Puerto Rico, Panama, and the Dominican Republic.

While each Grainger customer is different and faces different problems, they all share the same requirement: when they need one of Grainger’s products, they often need it right away. With more than 21,446 team members, the Grainger team works closely with customers to better understand their challenges and provide cost-saving solutions. Grainger’s team members serve customers around 96,000 times every day through multiple channels.

A Global Challenge

Grainger’s senior leadership knew that a change in culture was required to accelerate growth in the wake of a global recession—a change from conservative to agile, from US-centric to global, and from departmental silos to cross-functional collaboration. This cultural change required leadership that went a step beyond. The Leader as Coach initiative began with the simple question “What is the company doing to help leaders be better leaders?” The answer they discovered was a leader-led development program based on coaching.

Grainger’s Learning and Development organization began the development of its leadership program by gathering resources—employee engagement surveys, industry research and benchmarking data, and the expertise of external talent development and coaching experts. Team members interviewed Grainger senior executives and leaders throughout the organization, individuals selected based on their reputation as great natural coaches. The goal of these conversations was to ensure an understanding of the expectations and desired outcomes of the leadership development program.

Senior management identified the five performance drivers essential for success. They were: customer service (“Wow the customer”), team building (“Make the team better”), positive outlook (“Have a winning attitude”), striving for excellence (“Drive for best results”), and solid leadership to bring it together (“Leaders lead the way and build teams”). Five learning areas were identified as critical to driving higher engagement and performance levels in coaching at Grainger. These areas of learning became the foundation of the five Leader as Coach program modules. They were:

• Leaders understanding the expectations in their roles as coaches.
• Communications skills that drive more effective coaching conversations.
• A simple, systematic, time-saving coaching process.
• Concepts and skills to create a safe and trusting environment.
• Knowledge, skills, and tools to grow and sustain high-performing teams.

Through feedback and discussions, Grainger identified front-line managers as the strongest drivers for team member engagement and discretionary effort.

The Solution

In 2009, Grainger launched Leader as Coach, a five-part leadership development program that helped prepare managers to align their teams to company goals and performance drivers. The Leader as Coach program delivered shared expectations around coaching for all leaders and a common coaching language. The program also delivered tools to enhance self-awareness, improve listening, and improve feedback conversations to enrich performance.

To kick off the program, L&D produced a video featuring key senior executives discussing the importance of talent management for the global organization. The video was incorporated into the program registration process so participants could see leadership endorsement for the program prior to training. Leaders for the U.S., international, and global supply chain areas also videotaped messages that shared examples of the best coaching conversations they had experienced and highlighted the importance of coaching and the expectations they had for themselves and their leaders as the coaching journey began. This served as an effective prelude, preparing participants for the program ahead.

The Leader as Coach program consists of five modules:

Module 1: The Role of the Leader as Coach

This first module is thought of as the change management module. Leaders guide their managers through discovery learning to link coaching to the company’s strategy. They define good coaching, identify the leader’s role in coaching and develop action plans to eliminate any barriers to coaching. This module develops a clear understanding of the expectations for all leaders to commit to the coaching journey and a common grasp of the coaching roadmap.

Module 2: Effective Interpersonal Communications

Effective Interpersonal Communications involves leaders guiding managers on how to construct clear and concise messages, how to apply active listening and questioning techniques, and effectively giving and receiving feedback.

Module 3: Coaching for Performance

Key elements for this module include how to keep team members focused on the right things to profitably drive Grainger’s business, identify and close performance gaps, partner with team members, and conduct coaching conversations. A primary component of the Coaching for Performance module is InsideOut Coaching™, a manager-as-coach training program.

Based on the G.R.O.W.™ Model (GROW), InsideOut Coaching focuses on two primary elements 1) understanding key elements of human performance and how to influence them and 2) learning and applying a process for holding coaching conversations. The GROW Model represents the four stages of decision-making. Targeted questions at each stage provide the practical framework for holding effective coaching conversations. “GROW represents the collaborative style we want to foster at Grainger—we want our leaders to coach in that fashion.” said John Lawson, Grainger’s Director of Learning & Development.

Module 4: Partnering for Results

The fourth module, Partner for Results, emphasizes how leaders can create an open, trusting environment for their teams, how to overcome challenges to that trust, and role-play several coaching scenarios where trust must be gained before team members are receptive to coaching.

Module 5: Effective Teamwork

This final module focuses on pulling everything together to optimize the coaching process and extending the coaching conversation to enable managers to lead high-performing teams. This includes recognizing the characteristics of a high-performing team and stages of team development, identifying how team dynamics can affect team performance, and providing a model for teams to create goals and solve problems.

By the end of the program, leaders can adjust their coaching approach based on individual team members and situations, set performance standards, clearly communicate expectations, monitor progress with candid, constructive feedback, and demonstrate their strong commitment to developing people.

Early in the process, Learning & Development opted to develop a blended learning approach to meet leaders’ varied needs. Today, learning methods such as formal, informal, face-to-face, virtual classroom, e-learning, and on-the-job experiences are central components of the program design. To deliver the learning methods to diverse leaders, the team created a Lead the Way online portal as a one-stop-shop for leaders to access tools and resources.

Participants expressed increased confidence in their coaching skills and reported that they are seeing improvement among their direct reports. They also see their efforts as having a positive effect, which reinforces and propagates good coaching behaviors. And teams that are being coached have a better experience in the coaching process; they are happier with their coach and more willing to develop and implement solutions.

During the last two years, Grainger has increased its focus on talent management, improved its leaders’ coaching skills, and defined clearer links between individual, team and business goals. “We achieve sustainable, profitable growth when we focus on talent development and excellence, from the top down,” said Joseph High, senior vice president and chief people officer for Grainger. Grainger reported record sales, net earnings, and earnings per share for 2011. Sales of $8.1 billion were up 12% compared with $7.2 billion in 2010 and net earnings of $658 million increased 29% compared with $511 million in 2010. Earnings per share of $9.07 increased 31% compared with $6.93 in 2010.

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