Communications Challenges and Strategies

Case 2: Global Shared Services, McDonald’s Corporation As the world’s leading foodservice retailer serving nearly 70 million customers daily in more than 100 countries, McDonald’s recognizes the importance of having good people in place in order to deliver an exceptional customer experience. McDonald’s has a rich history of developing leaders. Founder Ray Kroc, once said, “As long as you’re green, you’re growing.” McDonald’s supports this philosophy and commitment to their people by providing opportunity, nurturing talent, developing leaders, and rewarding achievement. This is evident in McDonald’s tradition of promoting from within: nearly half of corporate managers and 60% of owner-operators started as crew members. For many people, McDonald’s represents a first job—a place to develop basic skills that can help them achieve success in future life pursuits. For others, McDonald’s represents a pathway to a long-term career that provides rewarding opportunities to grow, contribute, and advance over many years. McDonald’s values state their belief that a team of well- trained individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences, working together in an environment that fosters respect and drives high engagement, is essential to their continued success. Shared Services Business Challenge. McDonald’s Shared Services team began their partnership with us in 2008. At that time, Shared Services was part of McDonald’s IT group, which was decentralized in structure, but needed to function as a cohesive team to drive common global solutions. The CIO recognized the importance of developing teamwork and alignment across IT leaders and engaged us to lead this effort. After the IT Leadership Team had gone through The Leadership Circle process, the CIO asked each of the officers, including Kelvin McLaurin, then VP of Shared Services, to engage their teams in the program. Soon after The Leadership Circle was introduced, the Shared Services organization evolved into Global Shared Services (GSS) and became the first global function at McDonald’s. McLaurin recalls: “We needed to build a diverse, global team with leaders who could expand beyond their current capabilities.” He wanted to establish leadership effectiveness as a priority early with the team he was building and leverage the Leadership System to make this a reality. In 2012, McLaurin transitioned to a role leading McDonald’s Finance Transformation. Debbie Ballard, who had been a member of the GSS Leadership Team since 2005, took over leadership of the GSS organization. Having experienced the value of The Leadership Circle, she was already a supporter of the Profile and its benefits. Ballard explains: “The Leadership Circle process helps me professionally and personally. It enables me to step back and see why I am behaving the way I am behaving, and it helps me grow as a leader and to model the things that I am asking my leadership team to do.” GSS continued their focus on leader- ship development and further engrained The Leadership Circle program into its culture. Strategic Solution: The Leadership Circle. When The Leadership Circle was introduced in 2008, the GSS leadership team was skeptical. Introducing an exercise that required not only getting feedback about individual strengths and opportunities, but then sharing publicly with their fellow team members would not be easy. However, the team committed to the process, knowing the first session would be hard, but trusting that outcomes would make it worthwhile. Despite the initial hesitation, the GSS has become the group that applies The Leadership Circle most holistically and consistently. While other groups at McDonald’s leverage the Profile, GSS is unique in that they continue to use public feedback with each team member talking about their strengths and weaknesses in front of the group. McLaurin explains: “The Leadership Circle has become the common language across the GSS Leadership Team to onboard and develop our leaders.” As new members join the leadership team, either from GSS or a support partner, they are expected to participate in The Leadership Circle. GSS also engages their high-potential managers in the process. In 2014, GSS added The Leadership Circle Pulse Survey to hone in on opportunity areas and ensure more frequent feedback to drive development in those areas. McLaurin, who now leads Finance Transformation, brought The Leadership Circle practice to his new leadership team as well in September 2014. In addition, the Finance Transformation team also incorporated individual LCP assessment with team development opportunities. Outcomes. The Leadership Circle helped GSS to become a true, shared leadership team and build a culture of openness, support, trust, and high performance. Ballard explains: “It is part of our DNA, part of who we are. We have now done multiple offsite meetings with our leadership team focusing on individual and collective effectiveness. As a result, we have forged a cohesive, high-performing leadership culture and system.” Team members are empowered to mentor each other, talk openly about their opportunities, and gain support using a common language. Each leader’s candor, paired with their support for one another, enables GSS to drive business results at an accelerated pace. Instead of ignoring issues that could hinder progress, the team talks through them. Since the team respects The Leadership Circle process and one another, gaining awareness of strengths creates a culture of trust and support. Ballard notes: “Leaders were afraid at first of publicly showing people their development opportunities, but then they see that this supportive environment is designed to help you become a better leader, not discourage or embarrass you.” The culture that The Leadership Circle has helped to create in GSS contributes to their success: “We achieved our five-year strategic plan in only three years, and then set in place the GSS 2020 Strategy to continue our momentum toward our vision to be a world-class shared services organization.” Both McLaurin and Ballard continue to be strong advocates for The Leadership Circle process, driving application in their organizations and sharing their experiences with others in the McDonald’s System.

Purpose of Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to provide students with an opportunity to apply communications theories, research, and conversation with class colleagues to actual business situations, through the development of applicable strategies.

Assignment Steps

Read Case 2: Global Shared Services, McDonald’s Corporation located in Mastering Leadership.

Write a 700-words report in which you analyze the communications and group behavioral issues that might arise in an organization hiring employees for their first job based on the discussion from your learning team.

Include a strategy to address these challenges.

Format your report consistent with APA guidelines.

Click the Assignment Files tab to submit your assignment.

I wrote two essays, but I feel I did not meet the requirements. So I hope one people can help me to modify it.

Here are all of the requirements

The assignments will consist of TWO short essays of about 5 paragraphs responding to two different topics. You MUST write on both topics, and you MUST engage your texts. This requires a) preparing carefully for the exam by choosing a set of quotes that you think could fit into essays on both topics before you get the thesis statements. An essay that doesn’t use direct quotes from the textbook will not pass.

Trying to find quotes during the exam will almost certainly lead to a poor result.

You may use your textbooks and discussion boards (a good rule of thumb is at least one direct quote from the textbook per paragraph) to answer two specific questions that will be given in the exam.

The two general topics (again, you must write on both):

1. Images of Gender–we have been discussing this theme all term–it was on the Mid-Term, but our discussions keep coming back to this topic, so I think it’s worth exploring over the course of our readings.
2. Images of Morals and Morality coming from heroic figures (of all kinds) in World Literature. This has also be a theme in many of our discussions–so think about what the lessons are that these stories suggest to us and whether or not they have continuing value today.

be detailed and specific–a response without direct quotes from all three texts you choose will likely not pass.

Here is the link of texts.

https://ung.edu/university-press/books/compact-ant…

The file is what I wrote.

American Plastics had fared rather worse than its competitors during the economic downturn. With revenue, quality, and productivity down, management set several goals to reverse the company’s fortune. One area in need of improvement was human resources and “Janet,” the newly appointed HR Director faced a daunting challenge: to quickly re-invent the Human Resources function, reposition it a strategic partner to the business, and improve employee perceptions of her department. Her predecessor retired after leading a major reduction in force causing a significant exodus of key talent, some unexpected. Janet was charged with finding a way to retain top talent and develop a steady but highly-qualified stream of candidates to fill regular as well as critical positions. The CEO agreed with her that differentiating the human resources function was essential for the company’s strategic plan to succeed.

In her first two weeks on the job Janet discovered:

• Job descriptions were inconsistent, long but vague lists of high level “duties and responsibilities” and qualifications
• Job titles didn’t reflect the work people did, used instead as a framework for budgeting and compensation as many were doing unique work requiring different knowledge and skills.
• Aside from providing a coordinating function, human resources had outsourced recruiting to third parties who presented candidates based on their internet postings and other sources. No matter the level or criticality of the open position, human resources rarely conducted interviews or assessments before or after handing over the third party resumes to the hiring organization and would get involved again only when a candidate was selected.
• HR’s participation in the onboarding process of new employees was limited to having them attend a half-day orientation session where, between a video and a slide presentation about the company, they filled out benefits-related, payroll, ID and other paper forms.
• Training and Development (T&D) had largely been outsourced to several companies that provided generic on-line courses.
• The recent departure of several mission-critical employees disclosed no systematic means of capturing expertise from employees; when they left, their knowledge left with them.
• The Performance Employee Evaluation Program didn’t align with anything, was viewed by managers and individual contributors alike as a burdensome annual chore that interfered with people’s “real jobs.”

The management of talent is one of a handful of strategic services human resources can offer. The decline of traditional HR functions through automation, self-service, and outsourcing demands a “culture change” within human resources: adopt a business focus by an organization still structured largely around benefits administration, time and attendance reporting, labor cost processing, and similar transactional operations.

Write a communications plan not to exceed 1,050 words to support the strategy of American Plastics.

Justify why they were important for your strategic HRM planning process.

Recommend how to address these considerations.

Focus on resolution of the human resource management challenges in order to support operational strategies.

Cite all sources according to APA formatting guidelines.

Question 1

Case Study: Online Purchasing at McDonalds

Read the Online Purchasing at McDonald’s case study on page 507 of your text book, and answer the three questions at the end.

The requirements below must be met for your paper to be accepted and graded:

• Write between 750 – 1,250 words (approximately 3 – 5 pages) using Microsoft Word in APA style, see example below.
• Use font size 12 and 1” margins.
• Include cover page and reference page.
• At least 80% of your paper must be original content/writing.
• No more than 20% of your content/information may come from references.
• Use at least three references from outside the course material, one reference must be from EBSCOhost. Text book, lectures, and other materials in the course may be used, but are not counted toward the three reference requirement.
• Cite all reference material (data, dates, graphs, quotes, paraphrased words, values, etc.) in the paper and list on a reference page in APA style.

References must come from sources such as, scholarly journals found in EBSCOhost, CNN, online newspapers such as, The Wall Street Journal, government websites, etc. Sources such as, Wikis, Yahoo Answers, eHow, blogs, etc. are not acceptable for academic writing.

Questions 2

Toyota’s safety recalls – Are they indicators of problems associated with quality management, outsourcing or simply indicators of setting inconsistent competitive priorities in operations strategy?

Toyota is known for its innovative operations management practices. Over the last three decades Toyota has received many awards for their excellent quality and performance. The marketplace has rewarded them with higher sales and market-share, ultimately making them the world’s largest producer of automobiles. So what went wrong in January 2010? Are the safety recalls due to faulty gas pedals an example of an isolated, one-time problem or are they symptoms of bigger long-term problems with Toyota and also the automobile industry?

Topics that the essay must address:

·How has operations strategy and competitive priorities evolved in the automobile industry during the last 100 years

·What are the positive and negative tradeoffs associated with outsourcing production functions to supplier organizations?

·What quality systems and procedures and systems should Toyota have followed to ensure that faulty automobiles are not delivered to the customers?