Yearly Archives: 2009
How to Scale Your Organization for Growth!
This is another article to continue my case study on leadership and team development in a small business of about 50 employees.
After the initial workshops on leadership and team development, I met with the business owner to continue the process towards creating an organization that is scalable to meet the business opportunities in the marketplace.
This next phase of the mandate is about implementing a win-win agreement process that commits each manager to achieving certain organizational outcomes by applying good leadership behaviors of participative management that they learned in the leadership workshops.The first meeting I held with the business owner was to establish a win-win agreement between him and I for the mandate itself. This is to assure that we stay on track towards agreed upon objectives and to hold each other accountable through a clearly written document and evaluation process.
It also was to help the business owner fully understand the win-win agreement process so he would know how what is required from him and his managers in terms of time and resources.
The first meeting was so that I could interview him about his concerns and to have him articulate what he wanted out of the mandate and win-win agreement process.
After the interview I drafted an agreement using our template form for this purpose. Since it is a two-way agreement I also drafted the support commitment form for us to discuss and complete at the second meeting. The support commitments from me are what he feels he requires as support for him to achieve his objectives.
Each form includes the key goal that each person is working on related to the negative tendency of his type. This tendency is really what holds us back from fully using our qualities in what we do and in interacting with others.
We always keep the key goal of one’s type as part of the agreement because we never fully overcome our tendencies and they can always surface to make us ineffective. It also forces us to keep working on ourselves and develop the habit of continuous personal improvement of our behavior related to leadership and teamwork.
We had a second meeting where we reviewed the first document of his objectives for the mandate and the performance commitments required by him to achieve what he envisioned. Though some discussion we came to agreement on the leadership behaviors required by him to meet his objectives.
We then discussed the support commitments he would need from me to reach his objectives. These were comprised mainly of holding him accountable through confronting him when he was off track or neglecting certain commitments etc.
I was quite pleased with the commitment of this business owner to this process and to wanting to put forth the effort to modify his own behavior to achieve his objectives. He is confident and willing to be transparent with his team, to commit the time to coach them and to be held accountable.
As part of the agreement we worked out how to track our progress towards the objectives and even discussed rewards and penalties.
The next meeting will be to finalize the support commitment document and discuss how to begin implementing the same agreements with his direct reports. This will enable us to figure out the time required by me to coach him and his managers and thus formulate a budget that makes sense to him.
I will post an update after the next meeting.
Stephen Goldberg
New Case Study on Leadership & Team Development
I just completed delivering a six week leadership workshop on Styles of Leadership and Team Development with a new client in the telecom industry. There were six half-day sessions spread over the six weeks.
I met the owner earlier this year to discuss opportunities to improve the people side of business rather than the processes or systems. Most small business owners are caught up in keeping their sales funnel full and on managing the processes to deliver the goods.
This company is small with about 50 employees in total and most of them working out of the home office in Montreal. There is a sales office in Western Canada and in Europe.
The organization is quite flat in structure with only six people in management roles including the president/owner. Most of the managers had never had any formal training in leadership and had been promoted to these positions as the company grew.
I curently use only one approach to leadership development, the Styles of Leadership & Team Development program developed by Fritz Glaus. I do this because it has contributed to producing the best results for my clients. It is part of a complete approach to help the business owner or CEO free himself from the day to day decisions regarding how the company of organization operates. This allow him to act on new opportunities and use his talents to solidify the organization in whatever way he sees best.
It takes a leader or business owner that is at the point of realizing that greatness is about bringing out the best in people and helping them fully understand and use their qualities to the benefit of all. This then required the leader to start by understanding himself and his direct reports.
The Styles of Leadership and Team Development program incorporates the types of people approach that Fritz Glaus has applied to the training workshops. The program also lay the framework for people to be open to change and continuous personal development. They learn that we all have strengths and weaknesses and this is normal and not to be feared.
During each session over the last six weeks I could see the managers opening up a little more and making attempts to apply what they were learning. Before the third session one of the direct reports of one of the managers participating in the workshops came to me with a big smile and said that she could already see some change from the managers, especially the person she reported to. She said that they were making a distinct attempt to communicate more often and recognize people’s efforts and contributions.
The program integrates the types of people approach to self-knowledge and understanding of others with the principles of participative management and continuous improvement. Each person identified a key restrainer that interfered with fully using their qualities and set a goal to lessen the impact of this restrainer on their performance.
I met with president a week after the last session and he said that he could see the managers making an effort to apply what they learned. He could see them holding more effective meetings and using the problem solving techniques that were taught.
The next phase of the mandate is to establish win-win performance agreements between the managers and the president. The system we developed has the manager, with our help, formulate a win-win performance commitment with his boss along with support commitments from his boss.
I had the first meeting with the president to begin this process and will submit a new post about that soon.
Stephen
America’s Most Productive Companies
Profiles International Research Institute announced the results of its first-ever Profiles International America’s Most Productive Companies study, a nationwide look at the companies that get the most from their people relative to their peers. “We are seeing trends among the most productive companies in the country. They have performance-driven cultures, effective managers, and utilize their employees by placing them in the proper positions,” says Profiles International Co-Founder and CEO Jim Sirbasku. “They also encourage innovation and the exchange of ideas, which engages employees and ultimately leads to higher productivity.” Cummins tops the list followed by Lexmark, Dow, Caterpillar, and Samuel Adams.