CSC Transforms Executive Assimilation with 9Lenses

We’ve talked a lot about the difficulties new executives face when they enter into organizations or new roles. Barriers that prevent new executives from thoroughly understanding their new positions and the new people they will work with in their new positions result all too frequently in costly executive turnover. To better illustrate the value that 9Lenses can bring to HR departments that are attempting to lower executive turnover, we’ve published a case study around how CSC, a global leader of next-generation information technology services and solutions, used 9Lenses for executive assimilation.

New executives at CSC needed to assimilate quickly

During a period of transition at CSC, many executives were entering into new roles. In order to succeed in their new roles, these executives needed to rapidly understand the challenges the organization faced, discover the strengths of their teams, and develop a strategy for success. Many executives found, however, that they lacked a means of quickly tapping into institutional knowledge in order to make successful strategic decisions.

Traditional executive assimilation methods were slow & expensive

The best method CSC had for assimilating executives involved extensive travel and numerous all-hands meetings. Not only did this method require significant amounts of time and resources, but these methods were also largely based on the subjective perceptions of only a handful of strategic stakeholders. Often the executives found themselves struggling to get honest feedback from in-person meetings, and they found it difficult to capture the information in a uniform format. Executives could spend anywhere from 6 to 18 months trying to fully understand their roles using this method, with 4 to 6 of those months spent collecting the necessary information.

9Lenses gave new executives powerful insight into the organization

Using the 9Lenses platform, executives were able to quickly gather the perceptions of people from across their global teams at all levels of the organization. Team members were receptive to this approach, with an average response rate at around 70%. 9Lenses analytics allowed executives to quickly sort the data in different ways in order to find the information they needed to isolate trends in the data and determine how to immediately begin improving areas of responsibility.

“It’s amazing, the amount of information you can get. . .. The data is so flexible. [The executive] was able to see quickly where his biggest gaps were.”

~ Betsy Conner, Principal, Talent and Organizational Development, CSC

9Lenses reduced executive assimilation discovery time by 90%

While it might take executives 4 to 6 months to gather sufficient information to assimilate effectively, executives were able to use 9Lenses to gather meaningful insights in under three weeks, reducing discovery time by 90%.