Eileen Fisher is an American clothing designer who founded the women’s clothing company that bears her name in 1984. Fisher’s designs are characterized by simplicity and her company is known for using people with appearances outside the fashion industry standards in her advertisements, including her own Employees. The designer was responsible for changing the way women dressed in the United States by focusing much more on the self-awareness, comfort, and well-being of her consumers and the planet, through more sustainable production processes, than on the industry’s pre-established standards, which often translate into the objectification of women. The company, with 2015 sales of over $300 million, has over 1200 employees and over 56 retail stores in fifteen US states. In 2011, the company expanded outside the US, opening its first Canadian store in Vancouver, British Columbia, and then more stores in London, England in October 2012. Since its formation, the company has expanded its distribution to over 1,000 wholesale doors and 68 retail stores. Fisher’s company emphasizes sustainability, with 70% of the cotton used in its clothing coming from organic cotton. To reduce fabric and fiber waste, the company has started a recycling program. Customers donate their “gently used” Eileen Fisher clothing in exchange for a $5 gift certificate per item. After dry cleaning, the items are resold – with business grants for women and leadership programs for young women [1]Eileen and I were introduced in 20XX by Professor Otto Scharmer of MIT Management Sloan School, USA, during a course on his Theory U, and found that we shared the same vision about the process of personal transformation and its implications for organizations. She invited me to join her organization during a change process that took four years, during which time I visited the company for about a week each month. Eileen Fisher is a 90% female owned company that had grown a lot and was challenged to gain more efficiency and performance by better defining boundaries and processes, but at the same time did not want to become bureaucratic. We worked to design and implement a more rounded management model, using holocratic and sociocratic principles by circles, and on building a leadership team (there called FLT – Facilitation Leadrship Team) and engaging the other managers (through a program called GET – Grow, Empower & Transform). The leadership should sustain in terms of cognitive and emotional maturity the complexity of the new proposal. The approach we used was Vertical Learning, that is, we employed a process similar to the Natura Engagement Process, and also included activities aimed at the personal development of employees. During the workshops, we worked on somatic and emotional issues, by means of methodologies aimed at recognizing the Personal Shadow, cognitive issues, by means of activities to identify Limiting Beliefs, spiritual issues, by means of developing Mindfulness practices, and issues related to improving the quality of internal relations. We conducted all these activities aimed at the learning and cognitive and emotional maturity of the leadership group and to disseminate these achievements to all other employees in the company. As a result, we revisited all the leadership roles at Eilleen Fisher and achieved a major evolution of the entire organizational system. [1] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Entry: Eileen Fisher. Available at < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Fisher>. Accessed May 28, 2020.
Eileen Fisher
chieintegrates2021-05-23T03:49:38-03:00