LIXIL Corporation, Japan

Team-building, leadership, and culture-change with Lumina Spark and Lumina Leader

Mireille Watanabe Handover, Lumina Learning Partner

“I always thought that I was an easy and co-operative person to work with. However, the Lumina Learning workshops showed that in reality I left my “easy co-operative” style at home and, previously in my working environment, sometimes it was not easy for my colleagues to co-operate with me.”

LIXIL is a global leader in housing and building materials, products, and services. It has over 80,000 employees in 150 countries. In Japan, LIXIL employs approximately 35,000 employees and boasts #1 share in windows, doors, and bath systems.

Business Need

The new LIXIL president and CEO, Kinya Seto, identified an urgent need for the company to increase its global competitiveness. He drove a company-wide initiative to create a new culture that embraces entrepreneurial behaviours with a ‘bottom-up’ mind-set, open dialogue, more communication, greater risk taking, experimentation with the ability to embrace and learn valuable lessons from failures, and horizontal and cross-functional collaboration to break through functional silos.

Lumina Learning Solution

Lumina Learning developed a series of team-building, leadership, and culture-change programmes for LIXIL. These aimed to bring people together, as well as to enable effective and robust workplace connections to meet the increasing number of deliverables, gain a mutual understanding of individual behavioural and work style preferences, and establish open communication and collaboration.

Programmes included:

• Workshops integrating Lumina Spark and Lumina Leader for best practice, team collaboration, leadership development, and stronger communication and relationships. Workshops involved exploring shared team values, building stronger team relationships, and creating a shared language for more effective communication.
• Activities such as rapport-building through real-life role-plays, feedforward, team mandalas for goal-setting, creating team culture collages, and desk posters with team commitments.

Results

Programmes were delivered across nine departments to over 180 participants. Individuals gained self-awareness and understanding of the diversity of communication and work-style preferences. Collaborative team relationships were also strengthened by building a common language amongst individuals, teams, and departments.

Ongoing employee feedback provides evidence that Lumina Spark and Lumina Leader Portraits have helped participants to communicate more effectively and positively with colleagues and managers. Participants have also been able to work from their strengths, to appreciate the different communication and work needs across the team, and to better value others’ diverse input and ideas.

We asked the client:

Question: What specific actions have you taken to support effective communication and collaboration in your team since you attended a Lumina Learning workshop?

 

Answer: As my Portrait showed that I am better at one-to-one communication than group discussions, I became more conscious of that Aspect and have tried creating more one-to-one communication opportunities.

 

Question: Can you tell us one goal you have set as a result of attending a Lumina Learning workshop?

 

Answer: To create an environment of trust within my team where members can communicate and share ideas without worrying about being judged.

 

Answer: To try to shrink the difference of how I portray myself to others and how others perceive me in order to reduce the frustration in communication and expectations.

Feedback

“The Lumina Learning workshops helped me to understand the different personalities within the team and their respective strengths and weaknesses. This has given me more awareness of how I can work and communicate better with them.”

 

“The most valuable part of this initiative by far was getting the Japanese legal team to open up and engage in real communication with members of the global team and the business legal team.”

 

“By referencing personality traits in communications more actively, team members have been more understanding of the way others talk and work and have made efforts to build better rapport with each other.”

 

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