There was no crisis. That was the problem.
A publisher with its own printing works saw its circulation more than halve, and grew into a media house
The company was not in acute distress. There was no deadline and no moment at which it went wrong. There was financial pressure, overcapacity in production, and a little less room to choose every year. The circulation of the main product had more than halved over the years, in a home market that was steadily shrinking.
What the company had was a silent crisis. That is exactly what made it hard: nothing was forcing the issue.
Two things stood out in the first diagnostic, and they said more than the figures did. The management team did not bring one story to the rest of the house. Whoever was critical had learned to stay silent.
There was something hopeful too: many employees saw for themselves that this could not go on.
The change load: where it strained
The company was not built to change anything thoroughly. The departments worked as islands next to each other, the structure was complex for an organisation of this size, and processes were nowhere described. Every step therefore had to travel through the whole house.
On top of that, there was no direction to take that step in. No shared goals, no operational translation of them, no measurement points. The question of where the company had to go had never been decided.
Those two together explain why it did not go wrong all at once but a little every year. There was nothing to change towards, and whatever was attempted anyway slowed down until it disappeared by itself. What remained was a culture shaped around that: little ambition, little pride, and the conviction that the client could be happy the work got done at all.
The separation sat in the building too. Production downstairs, management upstairs. People on the ground floor did not know those above, and the other way round. Whoever was critical had therefore not only learned to stay silent; there was barely anyone to say it to.
The approach
Two tracks running at the same time instead of one after the other, each following the same order: agreement at the top first, then the cascade downwards.
It started with the question that had not been answered. Together with the board, the course was reconsidered and set, with client proximity and operational excellence as strategic priorities. Only when that choice was fixed did it go to the management team, which got the same thinking frames so that people at every level spoke in the same terms.
That choice immediately determined what had to shift. Thinking in client value instead of production volume. Working as one whole instead of as separate departments. Steering on processes instead of on machines. Each of those three takes years, and whoever tackles one without the others is left with half a transformation.
The culture track started with the leadership team itself: what kind of team was it today, and what kind did it have to become. Alongside that, there was resistance among employees, and it was not unwillingness: no one had ever explained why anything had to change. Management and employees were therefore brought closer together, covering the why, the how, the what, and what it meant for someone personally. Between the two floors, knowledge sharing got going and collaboration was strengthened. From that followed client-oriented core values, translated into observable behaviour so that they became discussable, and a competence framework for leadership. A diagnostic of the capacities in production and among middle management made visible who was strong where and where training could make the difference. Out of that came the first training and development plan in the company's history.
The structure track named the core processes and gave each of them an owner. Then came the redesign: simpler, with more authority for middle management and with a clear outward gaze. That touched positions too, because authority concentrated with one person was redistributed. The difficult decisions that followed were carefully prepared and openly communicated, in a house where people had known each other a lifetime.
Middle management got seminars on process thinking and training in situational leadership, in which the full leadership team sat together in one room for the first time. Finally, the HR system was rebuilt around the new way of working.
One choice typifies the approach. The process analysis showed that the main product could be made in considerably less time than was being spent on it. That insight could have led straight to personnel decisions. I deliberately did not take that step in middle management's first work sessions. Whoever teaches people to see waste and immediately uses that insight against them makes thinking about it impossible for good. The conversation did come, but only once the group could carry it itself.
The turning point
The moment when the leadership team started seeing itself as one team instead of as the sum of department heads.
From that point on, strategic choices could be made with conviction, and middle management got room to take responsibility. At the same time the language in the company changed: no longer about volumes and machines, but about clients and service delivery.
What it delivered
A production company that became a media house. From internally focused and barely coherent to a recognisable profile as a service provider, with core processes that had owners, a middle management with real authority, and an HR policy built around the new way of working.
The most visible difference sat elsewhere. Middle management took decisions itself for the first time, in dialogue and as a team. Improvement capacity from then on came from the employees themselves instead of from external interventions. That also removed the reason the company had been sinking a little further for years: change no longer had to travel through the whole house, it was absorbed where it arose.
Structure without culture gives resistance. Culture without structure gives good intentions without execution. Working integrally requires more orchestration, and it delivers the only result that lasts.