Today’s CEO is wrestling with unique market challenges. These challenges have forced many leaders and employees to question current business models and are looking at change not as a threat but as a necessity. This openness to change provides an opportunity to inspire their team to a better destination. However, many changes are complex and can reach to the heart of the company culture. Therefore, strong executive leadership from the CEO is required to overcome these obstacles and fuel the company’s transformation. The CEO must first define that destination, and understand the characteristics the company must have in order to reach it. Those are the responsibilities unique to the CEO that cannot be replaced by consultants or even the most gifted employees. Strategic planning provides the framework to ensure the destination is defined and the path clearly mapped out. Strategic planning accomplishes this by providing essential focus that is needed regardless of the size or complexity of an organization. This focus allows companies to compete based on their strengths, and increases agility, empowering them to outmaneuver less focused competitors. The CEO must also reestablish the cultural foundation of the organization. Through establishing a vision, mission, and values that the CEO … Read More
The Strategy Focused Organization (Part 2)
Principle Three: Make Strategy Everyone’s Everyday Job Does this sound familiar? A company crafts a strategy. They develop a thorough presentation to communicate the strategy and motivate the team. They call a team meeting and present the strategy. Employees are excited about the new direction seeing a better future ahead. Then the excitement fades, old habits reemerge, and six months later the only thing that has changed is the marketing collateral extolling the virtues of capabilities never realized. Sales sell the same way, recruiting remains reactive, and management wonders where all the inspiration went. In order for your employee to adapt to the company strategy you must focus on three key areas. First, communication is not a onetime event. You must develop an ongoing communication plan that communicates the strategy in a variety of different ways over time. Second, performance goals must be aligned with the strategy, and reviewed regularly on an individual and a team basis. Third, your team’s compensation must be aligned with the strategy in order to drive the right behavior. Addressing those three areas takes a lot of time and planning, but will increase long-term buy in substantially. Principle Four: Make Strategy a Continual Process This … Read More
The Strategy Focused Organization (Part 1)
In 1991 Kaplan and Norton wrote the highly influential book called “The Strategy Focused Organization”. One of the first things they address is the key principles a company must hold in order to create a break through strategy that drives profitable growth. There are five principles overall, today I will write about the first two. Principle one: Translate the Strategy to Operational Terms Successful businesses understand that your operations define your strategy. In order to execute your strategy a company must understand how you must change your operations in order to support it. Many companies make the mistake thinking strategy stops at defining your market position. A company wants to add an offering so they change their collateral and website, tell their sales people to sell it and poof, they are done. Who are the targeted buyers? Can the sales force sell this type of offering? How do you deliver the offering? What are the key performance indicators? These are some of the operational questions that provide important insight on the feasibility of the strategy and what capabilities are required in order to successfully execute. Principle Two: Align the Organization How does a company effectively leverage its strengths? Identifying and … Read More
What role does Strategy have in Staffing?
Staffing at its roots is an entrepreneurial industry. Some of the most successful staffing companies can point to strong leadership, aggressive execution, and ambitious production personnel as keys to their success. It is an industry defined at many levels by its shear will to succeed, and through the nineties that seemed to be enough. Over the last decade, we have seen massive changes in the competitive forces that impact the industry. These changes have allowed buyers to become increasingly sophisticated on how they engage and manage their relationships with staffing vendors. Buyers are leveraging technology to enable programs that closely manage both processes and pricing, driving the staffing firm’s operational costs up while at the same time squeezing gross margin profitability. To preserve bottom line profits staffing firms responded with a focus on increasing the “productivity” of the recruiting and sales organizations to achieve activity metrics that were simply not possible even five years ago. Operational improvements are a continued necessity to survive in the staffing business, and can briefly give a company a competitive advantage. However, is it enough to outperform the competition long term? The short answer is no. A longer answer can be found by reading an … Read More
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