Know your Business Aura | Strategic Factors Impacting Change

As a Leader you need to feel the aura of your organization in order to modify or acknowledge the type of atmosphere you are managing.

As we re-establish our businesses we have spoken and shared about the evolutionary steps everyone will endure as they reassemble their teams (Form, Storm, Norm, Perform), but now I also want you to get that sense of your aura as outlined in the right hand column of the diagram below. Got it?

Making change happen successfully requires the ability to understand the big picture while implementing small incremental attributes of change. So how do we take the big picture and make it easily understood by everyone in the organization? Before an enterprise can embark on a journey of change, it needs to do a cultural inventory to insure that the enterprise will be able to embrace change successfully. There are some strategic key factors to consider when embarking on a journey of change. These are important factors but do not necessarily need to reside within your enterprise as long as you have identified a resource that you can readily access for help. If one of the factors is either missing or not understood then the resulting attitude could invade your enterprise. The following chart indicates the inevitable result when a single factor is missed.

Let’s look at the factors in greater detail

Vision … every individual and enterprise has a vision. In some cases it has never been articulated so that everyone understands what it is, but without a clear vision, it is impossible to predict the end result.

Skills … do you have access to the skills required either internally or externally to insure that your vision will become reality.

Incentives … so why are we changing? It could be survival or to be the best in class. You may be a local enterprise but you need to think globally since your competitor is just a mouse click away. Each participant must understand and embrace the reasons why change is needed.

Resources … what resources are required to make sure that the vision will become a reality and where do we access them readily when needed?

Action Plan … where do we start, when do we start and how are we going to get it done. This roadmap is critical to implementing change.

Now let us go to the next level of managing change … they normally will revolve around one of the three following pillars

Let’s look at the factors in greater detail.

Vision … every individual and enterprise has a vision. In some cases it has never been articulated so that everyone understands what it is, but without a clear vision, it is impossible to predict the end result.

Skills … do you have access to the skills required either internally or externally to insure that your vision will become reality.

Incentives … so why are we changing? It could be survival or to be the best in class. You may be a local enterprise but you need to think globally since your competitor is just a mouse click away. Each participant must understand and embrace the reasons why change is needed.

Resources … what resources are required to make sure that the vision will become a reality and where do we access them readily when needed?

Action Plan … where do we start, when do we start and how are we going to get it done. This roadmap is critical to implementing change.

Now let us go to the next level of managing change … they normally will revolve around one of the three following pillars.

Inspired and Motivated People

Involved People deals with the socio-tech structure that creates the culture inside the Enterprise. The objective is to create an “adult-to-adult” relationship with the employees with a focus on Continuous Improvement. This means that the employees feel comfortable and involved in the business by having been provided the necessary tools to make effective decisions within their respective work areas. When everyone is involved and engaged, the requirement to seek approval or wait for direction is minimized. Roles of Team Members, Team Facilitators and Managers increase in the areas of providing coaching, mentoring and support instead of the traditional environment of command and control.

Empowerment cannot be assigned, but must be evolved into the organization over time. As the organization embraces increased responsibility through empowered decision making and problem solving, an expanded scope of responsibility can be granted to lower levels of the organization.

Robust Processes

Robust processes encompass the physical attributes associated with a process that will ensure consistent and predictable outputs. Beginning early in the Product or Service Realization Phase, the process is designed and evaluated for the ability to operate within specified tolerance(s).

Lean Operations

The procedural infrastructure of how our enterprise operates is contained within the category of Lean Operations. The reflection of the operating system shall be visible throughout the enterprise through the implementation of standardized methods. In order to insure that the optimum value add occurs through the process, employees are educated in being able to identify and eliminate the 9 wastes traditionally found in any process. Strategic tools on waste identification include Value Stream Mapping, Process Mapping and TOC while tactile tools such as SMED, Kanban and Standardized Work insure that waste once identified remains eliminated.