Career transition coaching, business productivity, innovation consulting, experiential learning consulting

 

What if …

…your staff and associates were engaged in achieving the corporate strategic vision with enthusiasm every day, and excited about how their contribution makes a difference? It’s possible! It happens in companies where the values and vision are so clear to all staff that they begin to participate in a way that brings the vision to life.

And when it doesn’t, too often it’s because the company’s leaders have a clear vision for where the company should be—they can talk about it, give presentations, and conduct meeting after meeting—yet somehow never manage to communicate it in a way that engages others. Most organizations have employees who have little idea of how their roles and responsibilities are supposed to be linked to the corporate strategy. There is no accountability, because they think it doesn’t matter whether or not they commit to strategic plan, which to them is just an abstract document that gets revisited and updated periodically and then sits on a shelf.

The situation

Living the Potential’s client was a major commercial construction company with regional offices throughout the U.S. There were nine divisions within the corporation. Each had its own group of project managers that bid on and ran their own projects. Company-wide profit margins had been consistent throughout its 20-year history until the most recent two years, when profitability began a steady decline. Many projects were plagued by delays and change orders, driving up project costs and eroding the company’s profit margin. What was the problem? Most managers and employees believed that their clients no longer wanted to "pay for quality," and so were nickel-and-diming projects. Many became discouraged that the company would ever return to profitability.

Yet the clients were paying, in some cases more than ever, and not getting higher quality for their investment. The real answer lay inside the company. As LTP evaluated the culture of the organization it became clear that the key challenges came from:

Internal competition for resources
Lack of vision/strategy alignment between the nine departments
Incorrect assumptions related to customer needs and requirements
Lack of teamwork with the organization
Wrong behaviors rewarded
Lack of urgency
Solution emerges

LTP helped the organization understand the interdependency between external and internal client relationships. Once everyone clearly understood their roles in light of their internal customers’ needs, they could start looking for ways to meet them. Cross-departmental functional teams designed initiatives to clarify internal customer relationships, and leverage the organization’s strengths to meet the needs. As gaps would appear between "what is" and "what it could be", roadmaps were developed to bridge the gap in a way that was measured and rewarded for achievement. Amazingly, the "soft skills" of developing relationships inside the company through collaborating to solve problems had a positive impact on the culture—and the bottom line.

LTP facilitated these solutions by focusing attention on the quality of internal relationships, which were enhanced with better communication tools. We didn’t develop the solution and hand it over to the staff; we co-developed it with them. We listened, we provided feedback on what we heard, and then generated paths to solve problems. Every step of the way, we worked to make sure we had "buy-in" from the people who needed to make change happen. We facilitated the transfer of the vision into strategies that were incorporated into day-to-day actions. We helped the staff stay true to the road map they developed, giving them plenty of benchmarks to identify when they were on track and when they were not. As the knowledge base of how to work in alignment with the corporate vision grew, synergy developed and people began learning from each other.

Specific elements of our service included:

Vision implementation
Spires of excellence
Core competency enhancement
Career planning
Team building
Executive development
Leveraging resources
Innovation

This new spirit of "we" rather than the "us vs them" became visible to customers who began to see the integrity of the organization, and to experience a higher level of service and workmanship in their projects.