Fuji Xerox Singapore Pte Ltd

Building leadership capability and reinforcing core values in its Dream Team

Fuji Xerox Singapore Pte Ltd is a wholly owned company of Fuji Xerox Asia-Pacific, together with other operating companies in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. For over 30 years, Fuji Xerox Singapore has stood out as a premier document production and processing equipment leader, with a significant share of the markets for advanced colour printers and multifunction document systems. From a copier company, Fuji Xerox has evolved to become the leading provider of document and knowledge management solutions. Today, the company provides cutting-edge software, hardware, consulting and business services that effectively help businesses to capture, archive, retrieve and distribute knowledge residing in multi-faceted document forms. As a key innovator in the Enterprise Content Management arena, Fuji Xerox provides a suite of solutions ranging from document management, content management to knowledge management. Supported by a strong team of consultants and solution architects, Fuji Xerox’s commitment is to help businesses transform complex information and experience into knowledge with innovative solutions to enhance competitiveness, accelerate growth and increase revenue.

Challenge

Although Fuji Xerox Singapore (FXS) grew from strength to strength over the course of 40 years, it yearns for an important ingredient to sustain business expansion, a formal leadership development program to support their leaders in terms of management capability enhancement and core values reinforcement. In 2006, to accelerate leadership development, the senior management team led by Mr Bert Wong, Managing Director, conceptualised a framework integrating both the organizational strategy and desired cultural and behavioural aspects envisioned to be paramount for thriving in times of volatile market changes and intense regional and global competition. They also chartered a FXS Dream Team to develop it into a role model of a desired FXS leadership team through shaping and cultivating team behaviours anchored in corporate values based on the framework. However, the senior management realised they still lacked a relevant and appropriate leadership framework to fully develop the Dream Team themselves.

Solution

In 2006, FXS sought out PACE to design a series of customised leadership development milestone programs centred on The Leadership Challenge® (TLC) to align core values of the Dream Team leaders with those of the organization, and ensure a strategic fit between organizational needs and leadership development requirements. PACE consultants recommended that the Dream Team undertake this leadership milestone journey over a period of 14 months to allow them to gradually learn leadership concepts and practices while continuously applying and reinforcing desired behaviours and competencies back in the workplace.

To identify leadership competency gaps and develop ongoing awareness in each Dream Team leader on his/her progress, FXS used PACE’s Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI), a 360-degree assessment instrument that allowed the leader and his/her observers to rate the leader based on evidence-based leadership behavioural constructs with the ratings reflecting how the leader was perceived to be applying The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership®.

Results

Senior management witnessed significant improvement in the quality of projects on applications of leadership concepts and practices presented by the Dream Team at each milestone program.
LPI scores for the Dream Team leaders were reported to have increased significantly across-the-board after each milestone program, which implied that the Dream Team leaders were perceived to be practising the core values and they were earning admiration from their direct reports, managers and co-workers.

“What I like about the milestone concept is that it provides sustained learning where post-workshops will help to recapitulate what is learnt at the workshops. Every quarter, the post-workshops require the Dream Team forming sub-groups to work on various projects, reinforcing the beliefs and values. I don’t believe in going for training once and have it considered finished."

“The ten commitments of TLC are aligned with the core values of the Dream Team and without this alignment, it would just be another normal training session for my team."

“PACE is a very professional OD organization. The knowledge and practicality in terms of their teaching aids has been very good. They are a group of very committed people and I am very impressed for PACE is one of the best OD organizations I have ever worked with. We were never wrong in believing in PACE.”

– Bert Wong, Managing Director, Fuji Xerox Singapore Pte Ltd