Crowley Maritime Corp. Enables Growth Through Change Capability

Crowley Maritime Corporation is a U.S.-owned-and-operated marine solutions, transportation and logistics company providing services in domestic and international markets. Crowley is a complex organization made up of six business units with approximately 6,000 employees. It operates in over seven countries for over two billion dollars in annual revenue.

In the Spring of 2015, Crowley recognized that its acquisition, technology transformation and business transformation strategies would involve a lot of change. Further, leadership recognized that the organization’s bias toward immediate action, while important in achieving company goals, made change even more difficult. They resolved to invest in making change happen more easily and quickly throughout the organization.

The Challenge

To build enterprise change agility that would enable large-scale change to happen more quickly and effectively throughout the organization.

The Solution

• Adopt the Prosci change management methodology through an organizational license
• Stand up a change management team
• Create a Change Leadership Strategic Roadmap
• Conduct a company-wide awareness campaign about change management to build overall capability
• Lead change management efforts on strategic, high-impact, high-risk projects
• Provide project-specific training to those impacted by these strategic initiatives

Keys To Application

The Change Leadership (CL) department used a variety of creative and intentional campaigns to build an awareness and understanding of change management throughout the organization. These campaigns and activities included:

• A video distributed on the organization’s internal social media platform that featured senior leaders holding up signs to explain the letters in the Prosci ADKAR Model
• A “change leadership by the numbers” postcard delivered to all employee desks, visually and humorously highlighting key information about Crowley’s change leadership initiative and basic change management research data from Prosci
• A series of micro-learning webinars on basic or intermediate change management topics made available monthly to all interested employees
• A Change Gallery Open House exhibit to show all senior leaders and members of IT participating in change projects what change management deliverables look like

The Results

Just one year into their aggressive four-year plan for implementing an organizational change capability, the Crowley leadership and CL team had exceeded expectations on their progress. After establishing a baseline change management maturity score of 1.8 in 2015 based on Prosci’s five-point Change Management Maturity Audit scale, they targeted an improvement to 2.1 as the goal in 2016. They exceeded this target in every capability area measured, ending the year with a change management maturity score of 3.0.

Read the Full Story

Learn how the Crowley change leadership team selected four projects to initially apply change management to, and discover more about their impressive results, by clicking the link below to download the story.