There are many ways to provide value to leaders who seek to turn ideas into benefits. Leaders of services firms need to get and stay clear about how they help leaders in order to perform and grow to their full potential.
Click the figure below to view a presentation on how to think about helping leaders turn ideas into benefits.
Whether one wants to change personal habits, implement a new information system, improve a business process, get team members to work together, increase a community’s appreciation for diversity, or even to topple a monarchy, taking seven actions driven by seven disarmingly simple truths will individually and collectively help achieve the goal.
Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World is a workbook that top educators, consultants, and executives use to help their students, clients, and staffs become effective leaders of strategic change. Manage to Lead serves as the core content for a class in Organization Leadership, Analysis, Strategy, and Development at one of the top Organization Development masters programs in the United States.
The workbook was introduced in the spring as interactive, digital content and is now also available in softcover from Amazon or as an iBook from iTunes. It introduces a straightforward framework to describe and assess any organization and provides a structured approach to plan and implement next steps for an organization as it strives for long-term growth and performance.
Those searching for high-end leadership development curriculum content should consider placing Manage to Lead at the center of their program. Contact the author to request related teaching artifacts including: Continue reading Leadership development curriculum content for top executives, and those who aspire to become top executives, is now also available on Amazon.
Organizations that offer solutions to clients manage: Projects, Clients, and Offerings as suggested in Figure 1. Managing each requires different skills and seeks to achieve different goals as outlined below.
Project Managers, see Figure 2, deliver offering value to specific clients on time, on budget, and on target. Project Managers are also counted on to extend and expand engagements in order to deliver even greater value over a longer time frame. Continue reading How to think about and organize Project, Client, and Offering Managers.
Many intelliven.com blog posts are based on the slides and lecture notes from a masters class in Organization Development called Organization Analysis and Strategy offered at American University and taught by Peter DiGiammarino. These posts and other material from class, including:
are available from Amazon as a softcover workbook or from iTunes as an iBook titled Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World.
Whether one wants to change personal habits, implement a new information system, improve a business process, get team members to work together, increase a community’s appreciation for diversity, or even to topple a monarchy, taking seven actions driven by seven disarmingly simple truths will individually and collectively help achieve the goal.
Manage to Lead presents a framework to describe and assess any organization. It also provides a structured approach to plan and implement next steps for an organization as it strives for long-term growth and performance.
Readers are invited to select a familiar organization on which to apply the tools and templates introduced throughout the workbook. Exercises in each chapter produce essential elements for the organization’s annual strategic plan and lay the groundwork for implementing that plan.
Readers can package the key elements from Organization Exercises to form a strategic plan that communicates how the organization sees itself and where it is headed. At the end of the year leaders can compare actual results with what was described in the strategic plan to study what happened, why what happened was different than plan, what is to be learned from that, and what to do differently going forward as a result.
Repeat the process over several years and compare actual to planned results year-to-year to see the organization mature, perform, and grow to its full potential.
Imagine:
Such organizations exist and they are stuck. That is, their ability to perform and grow is severely constrained.
Organizations that experience sustained growth and high performance execute, create demand, and develop capacity in orderly, or systematic, ways. A system is a collection of resources working together to accomplish a common goal. The resources of an organization aggregate into three essential systems:
Anything an organization does other than Do, Sell, or Grow, and that makes sense to continue doing, should be to facilitate, improve, or otherwise efficiently support its ability to Do, Sell, and Grow.
An organization that has execution problems essentially has no other problems because there is no point to growing or to landing new customers if the organization cannot even Do what it does to reliably deliver to customers it already has. Without a way to capture, organize, and distribute its collective knowledge from serving customers, an organization may have just a collection of unconnected experiences such that every new customer may be a “whole new adventure”. An organization that does not know for certain how it will meet delivery obligations runs serious risks and will find it difficult, if not impossible, to maintain control over the quality of its products and services.
Once there is a reliable way to execute, there is confidence to generate demand. However, without a way to generate demand that is predictable, repeatable, replicable, documented, maintained, taught, and ever-evolving, the organization’s ability to Do and Grow is likely to be constrained by its ability to Sell.
When new sales cause demand to exceed delivery capacity, it must Grow capacity to deliver. When capacity to deliver exceeds demand, it must Grow sales capacity. A growing organization needs to be clear about how it will add capacity to Do and how it will add capacity to Sell. For many organizations, this means identifying and cultivating sources of people, recruiting, and professional development.
At any time an organization’s ability to perform and grow tends to be constrained by one of the three core systems. Leadership’s job is to decide which system needs to evolve next and how.
For example, if a product provider generates more demand than can be handled by existing operations, then more production capacity is required. Once production capacity is in place, sales capacity may need to expand in order to put the increased production capacity to work. However, the amount of sales capacity should likely need to increase at a much slower rate than the rate of delivery capacity because a little more selling capacity should drive the need for a lot more delivery capacity.
In this sense, then, the evolution of Do, Sell, and Grow systems is iterative and staggered with execution capacity out in front of demand creation which is out in front of capacity to grow.
The larger and more complex an organization is, the more important it is for it to Do, Sell, and Grow in ways that are characteristic of more mature systems(see prior post on How growing organizations should go about evolving systems and processes); that is they need to be more:
As summarized in Figure 1:
See also: ISO 9000 (https://www.iso.org/iso/iso_9000/), Baldridge award program (https://www.nist.gov/baldrige/), CMMi (https://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/), and other programs that encourage and help organization to improve the maturity of their systems and processes.
