The Challenge: To create a culture where people felt freedom and initiative in accomplishing goals and to create an atmosphere of managing by values.

The Solution: A management development course was developed to help new and existing supervisors lead and develop others in alignment with the company’s values.

The Results: The course was so popular that classes had to be increased from once a month to once a week. Feedback from participants has been phenomenal in terms of the value and content.

They’ve been doing things the Williams way since 1908 when two brothers, Miller and David Williams, started their own construction business in Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Today there is a workforce of more than 21,000 employees that is still growing. There are on average 500 new employees each month throughout the organization’s worldwide reach, and 5,000 new hires are expected to come aboard in the next four years in Tulsa, Oklahoma where Williams has been headquartered since 1919.

At the turn of the new century, learning—the Williams way—employs stateof-the-art, computer-based technology offered by Ninth House Network^® to teach the timeless principles of Situational Leadership II (SLII) presented by The Ken Blanchard Companies.

“Because we’ve had so many acquisitions, we want to make sure we maintain our Williams culture, which is based on our Core Values and Beliefs,” explains Barbara Jergensen, senior curriculum designer in Williams’ leadership, learning, and performance department.

In the years and decades since the Williams brothers started their company, it has changed and grown into a global energy and communications leader.

Through a series of divestitures, mergers, and acquisitions, from 1966 through 1998, Williams has created a network of pipelines stretching from coast to coast, making it one of the largest volume transporters of natural gas in the United States and a powerhouse in the energy industry.

Williams expanded into the communications business in 1986, by innovatively running fiber-optic cable through decommissioned pipelines and creating the nation’s fourth largest long-distance network. Since that time, Williams has become a single-source provider of national business communications systems and international satellite and fiber-optic video services. It serves more than 133,000 customer sites in North America and provides multimedia network and professional services to a wide range of communications providers including regional Bell operating companies.

Leveraging its domestic strengths, Williams is actively pursuing energy and communications infrastructure projects, investments, and operations worldwide—spanning more than 20 countries from Europe to Latin America and Australia to the Pacific Rim.

While business has grown and changed, the legacy of the Williams brothers burns brightly as the company is still driven by its belief in honest business dealings and an entrepreneurial spirit that relentlessly pursues innovation. That’s why Ninth House Network and The Ken Blanchard Companies are perfect partners for Williams.

When it comes to values, actions speak more loudly than words. “In fact,” says Fred Harburg, Williams’ vice president and chief learning officer, “we encourage our employees to strongly communicate the Core Values and Beliefs, but to use words as a last resort.”

In most organizations, a merger or acquisition means that a lot of people lose their jobs, but this is not so at Williams, according to Jergensen.

“When we get good people, we don’t want to lose them. That’s why employee development is so important.”

Jergensen says she became intrigued with the SLII model a long time ago, first when she was getting her master’s degree in human resource development, and then again when her husband’s company began using it in management training.

“When I came to Williams in May of 1999, I was given the task of finding the best way to design a performance management training program.

I investigated the SLII Model because I felt its principles are timeless and it includes a working model that people can learn and apply. It’s not something that they learn and then forget,” Jergensen says. “And when we learned it could also be offered through interactive computer-based delivery, the combination was very appealing.”

CLO Harburg adds, “At Williams University we have a vital need to fully engage learners. The approach that Blanchard and Ninth House Network® have taken fits perfectly with the value we place on providing engaging, intelligent learning opportunities for Williams people.”

For a company that turned its decommissioned pipelines into a network of fiber-optic cabling, thinking in the future tense is part of the corporate culture.

Williams is a company that believes in giving employees the freedom and initiative to do their jobs—in taking chances, celebrating diversity, holding true to a set of solid, respectable values.

Jergensen designed Managing Performance—The Williams Way, a management training program to assist managers and supervisors to lead—the Williams way. The course, which weaves the company’s Core Values and Beliefs throughout and addresses the core competencies needed by managers and supervisors, begins with a one-day seminar: one half-day on Situational Leadership II, and one half-day in a computer lab. Then, course attendees spend two weeks going through the SLII exercises offered by Ninth House Network®. This is a full-motion interactive video through which students practice their Situational Leadership II skills and get feedback on the decisions they make by seeing good or bad consequences.

After participants complete the computer portion of the program, they participate in a two-day skill-building component that was customized for Williams with the help of Blanchard consultants Vicki Halsey and Pat Zigarmi.

This is still a new course offering at Williams, but Jergensen says it is a great success. “We’re not quite finished with our first pilot of 200 supervisors and managers and already we’re planning training for 5,500 more,” she says.

Even more impressive, she explains, is that the managers and supervisors who go through this program are encouraging and paying for their direct reports to go through a class in Situational Self Leadership (SSL). “This class has become so popular that we had to increase its frequency from once a month to once a week,” Jergensen says.

“This is probably our best early evidence that the program is meeting its goal of acquainting all of our employees with the Williams culture.”

And, it’s always nice to get testimonials. One of Jergensen’s class participants from the Williams legal department sent her a note: “The training is incredibly valuable and worth whatever it costs. It is the best use of a computer-based training approach to learning I’ve ever seen.”

The Williams way is to have training choices, and because people have been so excited after experiencing the combined SLII and Ninth House Network program, Jergensen has now designed three follow-up classes. “And, they will all be built on the foundation of the Situational Leadership II Model and what our employees learned through the offerings of The Ken Blanchard Companies and Ninth House Network,” says Jergensen.