Transformational Leadership that Drives Growth
Helping organizations achieve successful strategic growth has been the over-arching passion of my professional career. As a business advisor and board member, I have helped a wide variety organizations perform better, grow faster and generate higher financial returns. Some of the management boards that I currently serve on include Vermeer, WIKA, TBM, Duke Medicine, SIBF/GNF and SEALA.
As a management consultant it has been a privilege to work with many incredibly bright and talented people over the past 25 years. My professional expertise and specialty areas include strategy deployment and execution, leadership development, operational excellence, lean manufacturing, lean six sigma, and business process improvement. Together our efforts have accelerated sales and earnings growth at hundreds of companies around the globe.
Strategic Growth
Most management teams have taken the time to create and communicate a company mission and vision. You’ve posted them throughout your facilities. You’ve talked about them at employee meetings. And then, for the most part, everyone has pretty much ignored them.
The problem is that most companies don’t have a process—or there’s a weak or largely ignored process—for pushing their vision and strategic execution down into the business and the daily work of employees. There has to be a robust process for translating the mission and vision into focused objectives and detailed action plans that employees must act on for the company to succeed. Then you must have a disciplined review and countermeasure process to get back on track when things do not happen as planned. This process is called strategy deployment (or hoshin kanri or policy deployment).
Strategy deployment is a carefully orchestrated process that enables a business to execute their vision. It accelerates the execution process through proven tools for collecting and analyzing information, providing alignment and buy-in, identifying focused objectives, and specific targets for one year at a time. The planning phase of the strategy deployment process can be completed within a couple of weeks, and produce a plan that can be summarized on a single page. The challenge then becomes how to use root cause analysis and countermeasures to execute the improvement plans.
Competitive Growth
When market demand evaporated as the 2008-2009 Recession settled in, many businesses were stuck with excess capacity and inventory. In the ensuing months they struggled to right-size their operations fast enough to survive. Unfortunately, many failed, or were weakened and gobbled up by more nimble competitors.
These failures could have been prevented if managers had taken steps years ago to make their businesses more lean, agile and responsive. Legacy, command-and-control management systems harking back to the early 1900s were the root cause of this inability to react quickly to rapidly changing market conditions.
Today’s volatile economic environment is characterized by global linkages, geopolitical turmoil, accelerating change, and heightened competitiveness. Competing in such a world requires flexible processes, teamwork and a workforce that is personally engaged in fulfilling the needs of customers. This means having the right people in the right jobs with the right training and tools. Everyone has to have a clear sense of direction, understand their day-to-day responsibilities and how they contribute the company’s success.
Leaders create the environment. Employees make it work.
Leadership Growth
Whatever your company calls its approach to business improvement, whatever tools you happen to use, you won’t get anywhere if your leaders don’t understand what’s possible. If they don’t believe, and if they’re not passionate in that belief, there’s no way that they can make the managers who report to them understand or believe.
The essence of successful leadership is fairly timeless. It starts with a clear and compelling vision that is effectively shared with the organization. Leaders must share their passion for their company, for their products and for helping their customers find the solutions they need. And they also must listen, attentively, to what their people are saying, as well as what isn’t being said.
Successful leaders are engaged and involved. They are ambitious and yet humble and open to new ideas at the same time. They are approachable and lead by example to inspire others because they know development of future leaders is essential for long-term success. They are also authentic. The best leaders lead with their strengths and they’re not afraid to be themselves or admit their own shortcomings.
When it comes to execution, successful leaders are great coaches. They provide the vision of where the company is going, and then get buy-in from other management team members on both that vision and on the organization’s current state. They use policy deployment to inch the organization toward the future state. And, instead of jumping in, they help their people develop their own problem solving abilities.
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Building an organization and developing people who adapt and improve every day makes it possible to grow simultaneously in all of these areas. Daily incremental improvements can add up to radical improvements after a few months and years. Even if every idea doesn’t work out, by discovering what doesn’t work people can more quickly move on to the next solution.
The net result of such gains, when coupled with breakthrough projects, are significant cost advantages that boost profit margins, or that extend product or service level advantages—such as faster lead times—increasing sales and growing market share. Reaping the full financial returns from such advantages before your competition catches up in this non-stop race requires dedication, energy and results.