Monsanto Chemical Company

Convening Issues:

How do we re-establish a working relationship between labor and management in a way that secures the site's future? How do we remove layers of management, redesign the owrk of the labor force and put union members in positions of decision-making? How do we implement a new organization that relies primarily on the wage force to understand and meet customer requirements?

Critical Success Factors:

Build a collaborative working relationship between labor and management. Engage the workforce in securing its future, when all of the data and trends suggest closure. Off-load the work that used to be done by managers and management to the union members and leaders. Do all of this while better aligning to the customers needs, redesigning old ways of working, and overcoming years of animosity and tension between labor and management.

What we Did:

Leadership Development and Alignment:

Labor Management Team: Over the course of two years PDA designed and facilitated the Labor Management Teams development as an integrated leadership team. This team developed a unified strategy for the organiation, drafted a mission, vision and values to be shared with the organization. During this time, this team developed collateral structures for managing the critical integration issues of the new structures and developed strategies for building the teams at the workforce level.

Much of our focus with the Labor Management Team was to develop their common understanding of each other and each other's organizations; develop their meeting and working protocols as a new team, and create processes that enabled self-sufficiency in their ability to manage the transition.

Work Teams: Once the new structures had been developed and agreed upon, PDA worked with the organiation to launch the reorganization of the entire site. Rather than launch one group, and then move in a linear fasion to the rest of the teams, Monsanto elected to launch all of the teams simultaneously. Pda designed and facilitated the process of moving the entire organizatin forward. This included teams interviewing their customers, redesigning their processes, deploying new roles and responsibilities and executing a new accountabilities matris for everyone across the site.

Organization Alignment:

Aligning the new organization, top to bottom, took several forms. The first was aligning the organization on a new mission, vision and values. Secondarily, the current structures of the company had to be integrated and realigned to the new company's strategy. Units had to be combined, product decision made, and consolidation efforts undertaken to streamline the new organization. This had to be done in a way that involved all of thekey stakeholders from both companies and it had to honor company cultural differences and the current labor contract. Finally, new processes had to be created, or at a minimum, base level decisions had to be made about how to operate. Business processes from across the company had to be aligned, integrated and, in some instances, recreated to allow for wage employees to make greater decisions.

Organization Design

Restructuring efforts took place over the year preceding the final announcement and the launch of the organization. PDA designed and facilitated a process that was common across the company for developing and deploying these organization designs. This included creating tools and templates and facilitating the cross organization interactions necessary to assure coorcination and integration across the new company. This process led to one of the fastest and most egalitarian structural integrations in Monsanto's history.

Process Design

Many new processes had to be determined. PDA designed and facilitated a process that enable each team to redesign the critical processes within each unit as well as assure the integration of processes across functions.

Return to Previous Page | List ALL Case Studies

Our Partners

Mary Curran

Nancy Reuscher

Paul Tolchinsky

Charles Tweedly

Contact PDA

Email Contact info@pdassociates.com