Gordon & Gotch was formed in 1853 when Alexander Gordon gave John Gotch a job selling newspapers. Gordon offered Gotch a partnership if he could sell as many newspapers in the goldfields as he sold from his market shack under which they both slept at night.
In 1899 the company began its activities in New Zealand. Gordon & Gotch continued to operate in NZ as a monopoly, until 1989.
Nowadays, it's the oldest brand in the Ovato group of companies. And, in the latter part of the 20th century, we were part of the Gordon & Gotch story too.
The Gordon & Gotch assignment highlights a terrific use case for Promana: data-driven, objective intelligence that informs executive decision making
As a fairly small but high performing organisation with a flat structure, Gordon & Gotch's hard working people often wore many hats.
Chief Executive Barrie Hitchon, who had risen through the ranks to reach Brigadier in the NZ Army, had grown accustomed to using intelligence to inform good decisions.
And, now at Gordon & Gotch, with such a diverse workforce performing a range of functions in a flat structure, Hitchon was looking for an objective way to assess on-the-job performance behaviours, so that his HR decisions could be as evidence-based as possible.
He reached out to Promana (at that time trading as the Professional Management Consulting Group) for help.
As the newly appointed Chief Executive, and having the skillset of a professional manager underpinned by a military background, Hitchon knew from hard experience that good quality objective data needed to flow in order to have the best chance of understanding the human factors that made up the Gordon & Gotch business operation.
But, as almost any new hire would attest, on Day 1, this information is often hard to come by. For Barrie, the issue at hand was that he didn't really know anything about anyone's on-the-job capabilites, performance or potential.
He wanted a way to get to know the critical performance factors of the people he led and he asked PMCG to get it for him.
At the time, PMCG offered seven assessments (today there are twelve), and after a short consultation, Gordon & Gotch elected to apply six of them to the assignment. The assessments were Activity Interests, Time Actions, Transactions, Action Style, Activation, and Team Roles.
Thirty-three members of staff were inducted into the assignment and each of them completed their assessments remotely and unsupervised.
Data was collected and analysed manually. Each respondent spent time with us one-to-one, to go over the results and discuss the outcomes. This important step helped to reinforce the openness of the process, as well as validate that the responses matched with the respondent's own reality.
One of the 33 respondents took over 4 hours to complete one of his assessments because he was pausing to do his day job as he went. The responses and the reports were still highly consistent due to the situational context remaining constant
Upon completion of the assessments and interviews, the data was packaged up for delivery to the Chief Executive, Barrie Hitchon.
An important and sometimes overlooked distinction can be made here. In the modern era we often hear of data-driven businesses and of the value embedded in "data". But, what we had done through our process was to take the next and most fundamentally important step: to turn that data into "knowledge".
In the case of a critical thinker like Hitchon, this was the "intel" he had set off to obtain. He was now much better equipped to make informed, data-based decisions about organisational matters like training, succession, and outplacement.
Mission Accomplished!
