Strategic Leadership and Change Paper, Part III

RUNNING HEAD: STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP AT COMCAST 0

Strategic Leadership and Change: Comcast

May 15, 2017

Sencca Fairley, Nellie Largha, Monique Rapolla, Jason Wichman, Sahaboob Yassin

LDR/535

Dr. Terica Pearson

Strategic Leadership and Change: Comcast Corporation

Comcast is the nation’s largest cable and internet provider specializing in the whole home experience with home phone, security, internet including the nation’s fastest Wi-Fi, and the innovation of X1 for your TV experience. In addition to being the trend setter for the nation for video content with the X1 platform, Comcast has set the bar with the nation’s fastest broadband internet that specializes in Xfinity Hotspots.

In addition to the residential side, Comcast features and focuses in on businesses that range from Home Based to small and medium sized business to enterprise level. Comcast is also the parent company to NBC and NBC Universal, providing world class entertainment both with broadcasts like the Olympics with NBC to record setting movies like the Fate of the Furious, from the Universal Pictures side. Comcast also operates Universal Studios worldwide locations, folding in DreamWorks into the mix as one of the newest acquisitions of Comcast. Comcast currently ranks in at #37 on the Fortune 500 rankings (Fortune 500, 2017). This paper will discuss Comcast leadership structure and how the organization dealt with the implementation of the Net Promoter System (NPS).

Current executive leadership structure

Comcast follows a hierarchical structure. Comcast is headed by a Chairman who is also the Chief Executive Officer. Second in command is the Chief Executive Officer who also assumes the duty of Senior Executive Vice President. The Senior Executive Vice President who also acts as the Chief Financial Officer comes next in the chain of command and is followed by the Senior Executive Vice President. The Vice chairman is then next in command. The President and Chief Executive Officer of Comcast Cable who is also the Senior Executive Vice President of Comcast and his Executive Vice President, also the Corporation’s General Counsel and Secretary, follow respectively. The Executive Vice President of Global Corporate Development and Strategy comes in next, and he is followed by the Executive Vice President and Chief Communications Officer of Comcast. Last in command in the executive leadership structure is the Executive Vice President who is also charged with the Regulatory and State Legislative Affairs of Comcast.

Comcast structured its organization to enhance better customer care relations. It has three major regions; Northeast, Central, and West. These regions have been further divided into 15 subsections that attend to customers in a particular region. This structure has improved their service delivery because employees in these specific subsections are able to relate with the employees and are able to give them immediate assistance.

How effective is the current leadership team in providing strategic leadership

Comcast’s current leadership could be described as being strategic because it has given essential direction and inspiration that has fundamentally helped achieve the goals of the organization. Once the leadership noted that it was losing customers, the leaders identified the problem and made a strategic move of adjusting its vision and mission to address the issues. By the current leadership making a consciously intended thought and coming up with a set of guidelines that equipped the organization with an ability to deal with losing customers, it showed strategic leadership within the organization.

Another trait of strategic leadership that the current leadership in Comcast exhibit is the changing of the organizational culture to a new one that fits the corporation’s mission and vision. Only strategic leadership would be able to change its employees’ culture. The employees’ change of culture in terms of their attitudes and mindset enabled them to provide better service delivery and hence growth of the organization.

Comcast has also aligned its statement of ethics to help it achieve its goals and objectives. It reads, “Pioneering new ideas while also acting with the highest standards of integrity are key principles that have gotten us to where we are today,” (Comcast, n.d., p. 1). It is only strategic leadership that helps such.

A critique of the organization’s mission statement and strategic vision

Comcast’s mission statement reads, “We will deliver a superior experience to our customers every day. Our products will be the best and we will offer the most customer-friendly and reliable service in the market” (Comcast, n.d., p. 1). From this statement, it can be noted that Comcast main priority is excellent service delivery and customer relations. The management is more concerned with satisfying its customers. This mission statement is excellent because it will essentially help the organization to grow by ensuring that the customers are happy and attracting new customers. By offering its customers better services and technology, their employees are motivated to put in more effort. Carter (2015), reported that this has proven to be fruitful and is evident because their customers have experienced fewer technical issues and the waiting times have significantly been reduced.

Comcast adjusted its vision to be one whose primary concern is to satisfy their clients. Their realization that happy clients are what make a business thrive was the best strategic move that the management achieved. This move is a reflection that the leadership is giving a listening ear to their customers and using their complaints and suggestions to shape its vision and mission. After losing customers due to technical hitches and poor service delivery, the leadership took a prudent move of re-evaluating its vision and mission to address these issues and it has since bore fruits.

Is the long-term vision adaptive and supportive or rigid and resistive?

Comcast’s long-term visions are adaptive and receptive to change primarily because their vision solely revolves around pleasing their clients. Therefore, as the customer needs and preferences change, so does the vision. Adjusting the vision to the customer’s preferences and satisfaction will ensure that the business continues to nourish. This is also attributed to the fact that technology is dynamic and changes with time.

The surrounding competition has also shaped Comcast’s long-term vision to some extent; in that, it analyzes its strengths as well as its weaknesses that their competitors would use against them. After identifying them, it then shapes its vision in a manner that would make them achieve their goals. These internal and external factors are bound to change, and if their long term vision could be affected by these factors, their vision will also be adaptive to change. Their vision is to grow and change is inevitable where growth is concerned.

Nature of the Change

Approximately 18 months ago, Comcast hired Charlie Herring to lead and develop the customer experience that would become the new version of Comcast. As many people know, Comcast had a viral call a few years ago that made world news due to how poor the employee treated the customer. In part of this call, and the failed TWC merger, Comcast made the decision to transform the employee experience and make sure that this became the number one product. The change was the introduction to NPS (Net Promoter System) and the impact that this made on Comcast and the customer experience.

Most large companies are utilizing the system of NPS. It is a way to judge and predict the customer experience with one basic question of “how likely are you to refer friends and family to said company?”, which is measured on a scale of 1-10, where you take 9’s and 10’s and subtract all that are below 7 and 8 which are passive. That number gives you a reference point to what customer feel is your NPS. Best in class is positive 80’s, whereas we started with a -17 as a company. The goal was to ensure that a move of positive 7 within three years. Currently, we are positive in the West Division, but at 0 as a company. This tremendous growth is implementing this system.

The Role of Leadership During the Change Process

Comcast corporation leadership are united with a shared vision which aimed at revealing the future through media and technology.  Leadership is committed to learning and improving the quality of work experiences for all employees.  Comcast is in the business of shaping the future and how people see media and technology. They strive to pursue innovation by creating the best content that will delight their customers viewing experiences, at the same time driven innovation to create an entertainment and online experiences to a whole new level.  Comcast is actually reflected in their values which aimed at shaping the future of media and technology. The leaders ensure that their employees keep striving to earn the respect and trust of their customers, shareholders and the communities they serve. 

The role of Comcast leadership gather collective actions needed to support the change initiative that the leadership has proposed and insure successful implementation of the process.  They have been engaged in eliminating policies that might undermine the change efforts, ensuring there are adequate human and financial resources to support the strategy.  Most importantly the leadership kept the process transparent by sensitizing their employees of how the change will benefit both the corporation and work flow for the employees. With the introduction of Net Promoter Score (NPS) which is used to measure how customers experience the services provided and is also able to predict the company growth using a metric to transform work experience. 

Is the Change Successful?

Prior to Net Promoter Score (NPS) implementation the company started with 7is, then the leadership knew there was a need for a change.   When NPS was identify as the most effective system that will transform the organization, the leadership took time to introduce the new system and train their employees on how to use NPS effectively.  After the implementation of NPS, the organization ratings increased rapidly. By using the metric system, the company work flow has transformed.  After the completion of training, employees are now able to use the NPS as a key to measure customers' overall perception their services and this has increase growth.  It served as the best anchor for customer experience management (CEM) program and all employees are pleased with the new system.

The NPS is straightforward and easy to understand. NPS helps employees to better engage with customer experience and this has brought about trust in the system among the workforce. The use of NPS enables organizations to predict their businesses growth, with the focus on improving performance. In terms of success, the organization is trending in the right direction, though still in the implementation process, employees are happy and so are the customers. Comcast keeps revolutionizing customer experiences with its newest technologies and entertainment. The company growing workforce make up of technologists, software architects and engineers keep raising innovative technology to new level.

Resistance to Change

The biggest resistance to change that we faced was the fact that “we had heard this all before” or “it will just go away in a bit like all the other things” or the fact that it was a big impact on workloads. The biggest change for the leadership ranks was doing NPS call backs, where 10 times a week, we speak to customers about their feedback. Those in the call centers were accustomed to this, but those who had no interaction with customers on a daily basis this could be a very daunting thought to call and speak to a customer. To help with this, we partnered call center customer facing individuals with those who are not of that.

In addition, we were able to take individuals out of the role to help roll out NPS and train how as a company we wanted to handle NPS. With that we trained how to do the call backs, what they should or should not be, how to hold a huddle, how to address feedback, and most importantly how to elevate concerns to other parts of the company for change. The biggest thing to manage through was time management concerns. Now that we have had NPS for a while, we are into a lull where there can be a loss of interest if the leaders are not vested in, which is something we are currently working for solutions on. Given the results we have seen and the changes made, the impact to the change has been minimized overall.

Leadership and Resistance to Change

Mindful leadership has minimal control, if any, over the changes that occur within an organization. Leadership can however control the way the organization responds to how employees feel about change. Leadership must first understand the common reasons employees object to change and find opportunities to use strategies to address these factors. Some suggested reasons employees resist change are that they believe there isn’t a real need for change, that change will make duties harder for them, that risks may outweigh the benefits and that they believe the implemented change will fail.

An organization can best address the change and uncertainty by creating a culture of trust between organization and employees. Transparent communication and positive interpersonal relationships can help ease the tension of change and create a less resistant approach to change. When change is expected, employee involvement and discussion can see a minimization in the resistance to change. It is important that the new changes and ways makes sense to all levels of employees within the organization (Rick, 2013).

Intra and Entrepreneurial Competencies Applied During Change

Intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial competencies are important to organizations and their leadership especially during change. Major changes within an organization are usually a result of growth. The goals of intrapreneurship is to create the entrepreneurship mindset and infrastructure needed to support growth. This is a framework for transformation and creates a system to generate new business growth. Innovation is important to change. It is a key element in providing aggressive top line growth. Intrapreneurship provides an environment to support and sustain innovation over time. Intrapreneurship requires a set of competencies and behaviors that allows leaders to think and act differently. They will have different motivations and aspirations that make leaders more capable of leading new growth initiatives. Intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship enables organizations to effectively accelerate and mange changes within an organization (Foley, 2016).

Conclusion

Comcast is the nation’s largest cable and internet provider. The company leadership structure is hierarchy and is very effective in providing strategic leadership. The mission and vision statements of the organization have been revamped to provide adaptive and supportive change. Comcast underwent a change in how they predicted the customer experience by implementing the NPS. The system was successful but was not met without some resistance. However, the leaders managed to keep the overall resistance to a minimal. Therefore, the strategic vision and mission to prioritize its customer’s helped in retaining their customers and attracting even more and maintain the loyalty of the employees.

References

Alden, W. (2014). The Comcast-Time Warner deal, by the numbers. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/the-comcast-time-warner-deal-by-the-number/?_r=0 11th May 2017.

Carter, T. (2015). Comcast rolls out strategy for new emphasis on customer care. Retrieved from http://msbusiness.com/2015/05/comcast-rolls-out-strategy-for-new-emphasis-on-customer-care 11th May 2017.

Comcast. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://corporate.comcast.com/our-values 11th May 2017.

Foley , S. (2016, February 26). 5 Reasons Why Intrapreneurship is Important. Retrieved May

14, 2017, from https://corporate-entrepreneurs.com/2013/11/08/5-reasons-why-

intrapreneurship-is-important/

Fortune 500 (2017). Comcast, accessed from: http://beta.fortune.com/fortune500/comcast-37

Rick , T. (2013, February 04). Change is not the problem - resistance to change is the

problem. Retrieved May 14, 2017, from https://www.torbenrick.eu/blog/change-

management/change-is-not-the-problem-resistance-to-change-is-the-problem/