Corporate Initiative: Virus or Vaccine

For global giant companies, full of corporate structures with VPs, how do you initiate and prove global change? 

There you are, the Global VP of ??????????? (Insert Compliance, Talent Management, Ethics, Continuous Improvement, Sourcing.... etc). Your boss the CEO wants a significant reduction in costs/increase in performance of your chosen field across all Geographies. How do you do it?

Many take the route of launching a global initiative. Elements might include:

• A single contracted in service (recruitment, lean six sigma)
• A set of standardised methods, PowerPoint slides
• Regional appointees to manage the process through

Such an initiative is then "Rolled out" across the business onto the divisions and units that are delivering the business. Cynics might say "Rolled over".

So a healthy but hard-pressed body (the business) is faced with the initiative. Now would you liken it to a Vaccine, described as:

• "A mixture that is given to help stimulate the body's own immune system to produce antibodies to fight a certain disease"

Or a Virus:

• "the causative agent of an infectious disease"

Of course the metrics of success can be highly visible, such as training courses run, projects completed, savings made at the Corporate P and L level. However the benefits can be harder to nail down and recognise at the local level.

So taking a challenge and making it into an initiative may not always be the best route... Will it be the equivalent of a corporate Vaccine, strengthening internal processes, adding to resilience, fighting off competition, or more of a Virus, creating a sapping debilitating disease that weakens the organs? 

What to do in recovery/review

So what might we do during the recovery/review period (see previous post)?

For individuals it might include:

            Re-assessing how we store and retrieve important information

            Update our list of contacts, sources

            Sign up for training, follow a few tutorials on a complex spreadsheet operation

            Find out a bit more about how another department or part of the industry works

For a Team leader:

            Carry out some cross training

            Revise some procedures that were found wanting

            Re-visit existing supplier relationships, maybe look at alternatives

            Look at your tools and equipment (software or hardware) and skills at use

           

For a business leader:

            Was that the sort of work we want to be doing?

            If yes, how could we do it more productively next time?

            What is the succession planning like now on reflection

            How could I use that work to build a new offering?

And lots more… let me know yours and I’ll post them.

Improvement comes from the recovery

Those that know me know that I am a persistent but slow runner. Over 25 years of training and competing over distances up to the Marathon has given me the excuse to read some training and coaching manuals. One of the principles behind training is that better performance is delivered by the repetition of "train and recover" cycles. Small cycles such as train hard one day, easy the next and larger cycles such as train hard in the winter cross country season then rest before spring track training.

Just training without recovery is dangerous because without rest and recovery you are prone to injury. Of course all rest and you descend into couch potato life!

Apply this to our working world:

Working hard as an individual or in a team to deliver a project, meet a major deadline or complete a significant change programme would all count as training. (You could argue that this is competing, but the analogy still works).

We test our skills, procedures, our equipment and ourselves; we test our suppliers. After that we need to reflect, allow ourselves to review what has worked and not worked in order to make changes for the next one. Without that review we may not recover or improve efficiently. If you manage a team, it can seem imperative to rush onto the next thing, but reflection needn’t be time consuming. You may have had experience of “Project Review” tasks being shelved… but don’t fall into the trap of it yourself!

Balancemark

Balancemark

Just finished another key meeting? Worked hard, challenged the Status Quo, pulled the team to a consensus?

Did you spend your time on the right issues?

If you are a senior or executive team, the benefits of rapid reporting, accessible data and of course your own team’s deep knowledge of the operation can blind you to your real role.

Should your team be focusing on the last and next day, reflecting on the last or next month, or the next year or two? And then if you decide you are looking ahead, who does focus on the other timeframes?

Balancemark™ is a new process designed to show you where you and you team’s heads are now and where you want to be. Get that right, empower your Operations teams to manage the here and now and start carving out the future your business deserves.