The story of the programs implemented between 2010-2012 by the Evolutiv team at ArcelorMittal Galați started in 2009, a tough year for the company, and for the Romanian economy as a whole. A new reality unfolded at the largest Romanian steelmaker’s doorsteps. The price of raw materials had unexpectedly grown. The huge demand - which brought about, in 2006-2007, outstanding profits – collapsed. New competitors, employing better technology and delivering higher quality, emerged. The country’s best steelmaker had to relearn what winning was like in this new world. Here's the story of this endeavor.

1. The ACT project, a learning and
development program developed
by Evolutiv in cooperation with
both the plant’s top management
and the HR team in Galați, is
unprecedented in terms of
complexity in ArcelorMittal – the
no. 1 steel producer of the world.
ACT’s mission (whose designation
came from the initials of the word
collocation “Acting Constantly for
Transformation”) was to translate
the business objectives of
ArcelorMittal Galați - increased
quality and productivity, reduced
operational costs – in training
objectives. The program was
envisaged to include some 1,500
participants (about 20% of the
plant employees) and almost
100.000 hours of training. This
was one of the reasons the
program was thoroughly and
minutely designed to be readily
applied by foremen and engineers
in their daily work, after the
training was completed. The
program provided the middle
management both with adequate
tools (management concepts,
methods and techniques) and
appropriate behaviors, with a
focus on five key competencies in
ArcelorMittal.
The program „drilled” deep indeed
in people’s beliefs and motivation.
It alligned diverging interests,
explained and made things
smoother, revealed various
aspects, and generated „aha”
moments – not only for the people
in ArcelorMittal, but also for those
in Evolutiv, who tested their limits
in such a difficult and challenging
project. These are the things that
made ACT both unique and
outstanding: it has brought
together hundreds of people who
have discovered, looking at one
another, that they actually want
one and the same thing: a work-
place where they can contribute,
where their ideas are valued,
where their effort makes sense,
and where the individual welfare is
a result of the common welfare.
TWO ACTS EVOLUTION
EVOLUTIV CONSULTANTS NETWORK A LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT PROJECT
case study
Partners: Evolutiv and ArcelorMittal Galați
How It Has Begun...
2010, GALAȚI. Evolutiv trainers Delia Andrieș, Gigi Andrieș and Letiția
Lucescu side by side with Liviu Bogdan, head of the Learning Departament
of ArcelorMittal, the man who made possible for such a giant program -
98,000 training hours - to be run by the clock, without any disruption.
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ArcelorMittal Galați, one of the largest
Romanian industrial companies, launched a
tender in 2009. The tender included offerings
for a training program dedicated to more than
1,000 foremen and engineers whose mission
was to fulfill one of the streams in the
company transformation program –
ArcelorMittal Romania 2012 (ARC 2012).
The program focused initially on mindsets and
behaviors of the ArcelorMittal employees.
The training brief read as follows: “Each
participant will understand and accept his/her
role and contribution in the new leadership
culture of ArcelorMittal Galați”.
The tender allowed for the participation of
several training and consulting companies.
The proposal put forward by Evolutiv, a 100%
Romanian company, was selected, in January
2010, by a committee made up of members of
the ArcelorMittal University and ArcelorMittal
Galați. This is how, in 2010, Evolutiv started a
project due to which 10 trainers became part
of the Galați community.
The pages that follow tell the story of one of the most complex organizational
transformation programs ever undertaken in Romania.
Transforming ArcelorMittal Galați
“We, in Evolutiv, have decided to focus on training and developing middle
management because we feel that this is the main breach in Romanian
organizations. This is where we can make a difference”.
ArcelorMittal Galați, a company living, by any
definition, at the steel’s melting temperature

2. internal diagnosis of 2008, conducted
before the crisis undiscriminately broke
industries and countries altogether,
showed middle managers and foremen
in Galați were unaware of basic
management tools, didn’t know their
roles and objectives, proved low
initiative, and, obviously, poor
interdepartmental collaboration. In an
post-crisis world the plant could not
achieve great results living up to the
same old rules. Without a profound
change, in ArcelorMittal there would be
no talk about quality, productivity, low
costs and profits. A bold decision had to
be made.
The decision came from Thierry Le
Gall, the steelmaker’s CEO, in the fall
2009, when he initiated ArcelorMittal
Romania Crestere 2012 – ARC 2012
for short -, an unprecedented change
program, by scale and complexity, in
the 280.000 employees corporation.
ARC 2012 projected a change on three
dimensions. The first one was about
operations system. How strong was the
connection between tactics and
strategy? All the internal processes
were analyzed, redesigned, optimized
and integrated in a Master Plan. The
second dimension was related to
management infrastructure. Internal
processes, staffing and organizational
schemes were redefined, employees
were evaluated, a career management
plan was started.
Last, but not least, the change had to
address mindsets and behaviors. How
effective could the 8.000 employees
take action for the implementation of
the established tactic?
To address ARC 2012’s third direction –
mindsets and behaviors – a whole new
program (Acționez Constant pentru
Transformare - ACT) was elaborated.
It was a learning & development project
specifically tailored for the steelmaker’s
needs by the joint teams of Evolutiv
and ArcelorMittal.
Company’s business objectives –
increasing the quality and the
productivity while reducing operational
costs – were translated into training
objectives: Evolutiv program was
focused first on the appropriate tools
(ACT 1) and then on the appropriate
behaviors (ACT 2). ACT 1 targeted the
development of a proactive,
participative culture at a middle
management level; the development of
a common culture and a common
language; personal initiative; being
“IT’S TIME FOR A CHANGE”.
2 EVOLUTIV CONSULTANTS NETWORK
The story of the
programs implemented
between 2010-2012 by
the Evolutiv team at
ArcelorMittal Galați
started in 2009, a tough
year for the company,
and for the Romanian
economy as a whole. A
new reality unfolded at
the largest Romanian
steelmaker’s doorsteps.
The price of raw
materials had
unexpectedly grown.
The huge demand -
which brought about, in
2006-2007, outstanding
profits – collapsed. New
competitors, employing
better technology and
delivering higher
quality, emerged.
The country’s best
steelmaker had to
relearn what winning
was like in this new
world.
The financial crisis unexpectedly
revealed, in fact, the steelmaker’s
vulnerabilities, deemed less relevant
during the economic boom years. An
“The difficulty is not
about knowing what we
have to do. The difficulty
is to implement. To
succeed in maintaining
the new procedures we
have decided upon”.
THIERRY LE GALL
ArcelorMittal Galați CEO
(2008-2011)
“For ArcelorMittal Galați
it’s a first that a program
is built and designed on a
scientific analysis”.
MIHAELA CRĂCIUN
HR manager
ArcelorMittal Galați
ACT 1 Program*
Time lapse: February 2010 -
February 2011
Participants: 1,162
Groups: 72
Training hours: 47,856
Post-training: follow-up
sessions for every group
Applicability: 132 FACT
projects during the two
months following the training
*nominated at Performance Excellence Awards 2011, the annual prizes of ArcelorMittal University

3. THE STORY OF A L&D PROGRAM
“I have a dream: that this
plant is making money,
has no accidents, young
people want to work for
us, and our customers
keep on doing business
with us”.
BRUNO RIBO
ArcelorMittal Galați CEO
(2011-present)
UN PROJECT OF
LARGE NUMBERS
NO. OF TRAINING HOURS
(ACT 1 & ACT 2)
98.000
NO. OF EMPLOYEES WHO
ATTENDED EVOLUTIV
TRAININGS
1.500
NO. OF TRAINERS
INVOLVED IN THE PROJECT
10
“If we were to quantify the
savings achieved by those
132 projects from ACT 1,
there were hundreds of
thousands of dollars. The
investment in training
paid back in only two
months”.
LIVIU BOGDAN
Head of Learning Department
ArcelorMittal Galați
Programul ACT 2
Time lapse: November 2011 -
October 2012
Participants: 1,185
Groups: 78
Training hours: 50,000
Post-training: follow-up
sessions for every group
Applicability: internal client/
internal supplier contracts
accountable; basic management
instruments.
ACT 2 was designed to cover to the
steelmaker’s competencies needs.
An internal research conducted in 2011
at ArcelorMittal Galați - about 1,000
employees out of a total of 8,000 were
interviewed for the assessment -
showed that of the ten key skills
required at a corporate level, five were
below the required threshold in Galați.
"This is the first time in history of
ArcelorMittal Galați when a program
is organized and built on scientific
analysis," said Mihaela Craciun, the
company's HR manager, at one of the
opening sessions of ACT 2. "It’s first
time," the HR manager told the
trainees, "when this company is
assesing the needs of the organization
as compared to the competencies of its
employees - and practical training and
threads are specifically constructed to
meet these gaps".
And the five skills covered by the ACT 2
program – that "gap" referred to by the
steelmaker’s Human Resources
Manager - were as follows: 1.
teamwork and collaboration; 2. effective
communication; 3. strategic thinking; 4.
developing people; 5. initiative and
delegation.
Dozens, maybe even hundreds of
recurring problems got to be dealt with
using management tools taught during
the training hours - and that led to
savings of hundreds of thousands of
dollars for the plant.
In addition, between the two main
stages of the program ACT, the top
management of ArcelorMittal Galați
decided to also develop project
manager skills for a selected group of
employees.
The program lasted for six months, and
was carried out during the ACT 2
project design process, ie between April
and November 2011.
48 plant employees were initially
selected for this program to be
attended, but the program soon
gained a larger importance than
expected, reaching over 250
participants. Top management goal
was to have the company a "reservoir"
of already trained project managers,
who would handle key investment
projects that ArcelorMittal Galați planed
to carry out. All participants received a
post-training theme: three weeks to
implement one specific project using
the project management skills acquired
during training.
By the end, of those 98,000 hours of
training conducted over three years,
ArcelorMittal Galați came to be a
different company from the one it was
in 2009. People understood that what
they do affects the company’s overall
performance - and that the job’s
security of each of them depends,
fundamentally, on this performance.
They learned, moreover, to cross
collaborate, to pass the information
quickly and more accurately, to work
together and to seek for solutions
instead of scapegoats. And, perhaps
most important of all, they started
talking again about the future of their
“combinat”.
case study
3
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4. CONVERTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE
4 EVOLUTIV CONSULTANTS NETWORK
The key question for all
the projects designed by
Evolutiv in the three-
year partnership with
ArcelorMittal Galați:
how will the people
implement tomorrow
what they are learning
today?
There were ten Evolutiv trainers that
shared their knowledge, starting 2010,
in the classrooms of the Galați training
center - Gigi Andrieș, Letiția Lucescu,
Marian Staș, Delia Andrieș, Gogu
Ștefănescu, Cristina Țirulnic, Dragoș
Trâncă, Dan Pricop, Corina Curta,
Ștefania Stuller.
The program was challenging indeed:
each concept, each module, each
exercise were carefully calibrated to
answer the business goals of the
company. Each suggestion of the board
members was included into the training
work flow. And each curricula bit had to
clearly answer the key question of the
project: how would all those
classroom theories be readily
applied down tomorrow, in the
workplace?
All three big projects - ACT 1, ACT 2
and the Project Management Program –
were crafted along the same red thread:
to provide practical tools for the
company’s needs. As a recognition, the
first of three projects, ACT 1, was
nominated at the Performance
Excellence Awards 2011, ArcelorMittal
University’s annual competition: the 132
de internal projects that grew from the
training program succeeded in solving,
with no investment at all, recurrent
problems clogging the plant’s
processes.
They were short term, two-month long
projects that came to be known in the
company’s lingo as FACTs (from Fast
Active Constant Transformation). “If we
were to quantify the savings achieved
by those 132 projects from ACT 1, there
were hundreds of thousands of dollars”,
said Liviu Bogdan, ArcelorMittal’s Head
of the Learning Department. “The
investment in training paid back in only
two months”.
In its turn, ACT 2 was also designed
from a practical perspective. Trainers
guided participants to readily apply what
they learned about the five key
competencies in each of their daily life
at work. “We deployed, for example,
specific assignements about strategic
thinking, which is a rather abstract
concept, and all projects were
presented and discussed during the
follow-up sessions. Moreover, we
decided to build on the employees
current activities rather than improvise
new tasks extracted from some
textbook study cases”, Gigi Andrieș,
Evolutiv trainer and project manager for
ACT 1 and for ACT 2, explained.
In the end, this “two ACTs evolution” is a
story about two partners, a steelmaker
and a consultancy, sharing their skills
and strenghts to climb together the path
to the common objective.
Certainly, after every such project part
of the energy assembled in the
clasroom fades away – that is a fact.
Why is that happening? Maybe
because, as Albert Einstein used to say,
“in theory, theory and practice are
the same. In practice, though, they
are not”. Not surprisingly, the logic of
the exceptional theorist Einstein is
followed here, at ArcelorMittal, as well.
It seems, though, that more and more
frequently it fails to apply. Hundreds of
steelmakers left behind, lately, the
above thinking pattern.
And if you happen to stop by in Galați
and talk to the people of ArcelorMittal
you may feel around them some sort of
heatwave.
Of course, you may say, it’s the touch of
the steel’s melting temperature. What
you may not know is this temperature
miraculously rose lately with few
hundreds degrees coming from a new,
clean, fresh source - from the heat of
”yes, we can make it”.
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