Leadership
Implementing the 5 Criteria for Customer-Focus
(Executive-level management consulting)
Customer-Focus is a strategic theme – not just an improvement initiative, and it affects almost every part of the management system. Any organization can improve Customer-Focus, but the best Customer-Focus results will always be realized by organizations that have developed superior management systems in the first place.
The 5 criteria for a customer-focused organization are 1) A Culture of Service, 2) Customer Centricity, 3) Customer Intimacy, 4) Focused Excellence and 5) Management Support. Brent helps executive teams implement these criteria into the every-day systems and processes of the organization so that they become factors in all decisions, as well as becoming automatic widespread behaviors. This typically includes:
- Business planning and S.I.O.P.
- Customer acquisition and onboarding processes.
- Employee onboarding and performance management processes.
- Coaching and continuous learning systems.
- Supplier management processes.
- Continuous improvement processes.
Creating a Culture of Collaboration
(Executive-level management consulting)
In a Collective Force environment, all departments and divisions in the organization:
- Establish a clear, shared sense of direction to which everyone can make a clear contribution and keep departmental goals in context at all times.
- Value collective achievement over individual or departmental achievement.
- Communicate frequently and effectively with each other, using common methods of collecting, organizing and communicating information.
- Invest time in creating a shared agenda, developing and implementing common strategies to achieve shared goals and serve one another at the highest levels.
- Adjust individual goals to minimize tensions between departments and use remaining tensions between as a way of growing together, in the same direction.
- Make key decisions and solve problems as a full partnership.
- Have common strategies to assess and reward shared progress toward their mutual goals.
Companies who achieve a collaboration culture report higher customer satisfaction due to faster, trouble-free service, increased revenues due to higher sales and higher capacity, and lower costs due to less rework, reduced scrap rates, fewer concessions and lower absenteeism.
Collaboration is a function of aggregate human interaction at the highest level. Creating a culture of collaboration requires deep changes in the values, systems and behaviors of everyone in the organization.
Realizing True Empowerment
(Executive-level management consulting)
Every executive understands the rewards of employee empowerment: Greater competitive advantage due to faster speed and responsiveness, increased employee commitment to objectives, higher individual productivity, increased employee engagement and satisfaction and management freed to perform other, more strategic tasks. But they also understand the risks: Decreased uniformity and consistency of individual decisions, decisions not in the best interest of the company, employees given too much or not enough authority and accountability, higher employee stress and fear of decision repercussions and managers seeing it as a threat, thereby withholding decision rights.
Brent works with executives to manage the risks and maximize the rewards of widespread empowerment by helping them develop strategies for each of the 4 areas of empowerment.
ARIA Model for True Empowerment
Authority – this includes authority over others and authority to decide. This is simplified into 3 categories: No authority, shared authority and full authority.
Resources – this includes actual resources (budgets, time, equipment) and access to resources.
Information – this includes direction, outcome goals, data and skills training.
Accountability – Accountability must be balanced with authority. No authority = no accountability. Shared authority = shared accountability. Full authority = full accountability.
Brent works with organizations to balance the 4 ARIA elements and to help gradually progress towards higher levels of empowerment at a rate that eases concerns, cultivates trust and minimizes the negative impact of inevitable mistakes.
Implementation of the 4 Behavioral Routines
(Executive-level management consulting)
Somewhere in the middle of an improvement initiative, the questions often begin to be asked: “Why has our improvement initiative suddenly seemed to stall?” “We’ve assessed, planned, involved and deployed. Everyone is on board and engaged – so why is progress so slow?”
The Answer: Because of all the small, seemingly inconsequential decisions and actions people are still taking on a daily basis that are not being addressed by your improvement initiative, and that cumulatively serve to slow down its progress.
Improvement initiatives are usually organized into a series of projects which are executed and then closed once completed. A process is added or changed, or new tools are implemented. In our work with clients we have determined, however, that certain important behavioral issues often remain unaddressed among employees and their managers. These unaddressed behavioral issues always create inertia against the improvement initiative.
Behavioral routines are a small number of “seed” behaviors that leadership cultivates in the organization. They become routines that ripple through the organization into every other process and, in time, become cultural norms that transform the organization. Instead of trying to get everything right, leaders can focus on just a few key behaviors that become levers for everything else.
The 4 Behavioral Routines:
The issue: Narrow Focus. The solution: Always consider and discuss impact on X at every decision point in every meeting.
The issue: Action Gaps. The solution: Take personal initiative every month to identify and take a personal action that improves X.
The issue: Myopic View. The solution: Every two months, find a “red flag” that signals a potential problem and take actions to eliminate, reduce or contain it before it reaches customers.
The issue: Collective Cancellation. The solution: Every two months, assess, reinforce and recommit to collaboration – within your department and with other departments.
The 4 Behavioral Routines can help to improve and sustain any initiative’s results – improving customer experience, improving health & safety, cost reduction, increasing sales revenue, improving product quality, employee satisfaction, supplier performance, etc.
Leading Behavior Change & Sustaining Training Results
The Problem: In almost all companies, managers already own team performance. They work with employees to set performance goals and expectations and they provide accountability, feedback and support to help employees achieve their goals. Yet when interpersonal skills training initiatives are undertaken (such as customer service, sales or negotiation), it is often assumed that employees:
a) Automatically see the value of the training and want it.
b) Know to set learning objectives and know how to set learning objectives before training.
c) Will easily and naturally incorporate the new behaviors into their daily work.
But research shows that even when skills training is rated by participants as very high in quality only 40% of them make adequate efforts to change their old behaviors; and of those 40%, half of them return to old habits within six months (this is in contrast with software, equipment or procedural training, where new behaviors will be visible and mandatory).
The Solution: Given the importance of training transfer to the job, a great deal of research has emerged examining the factors that enhance or inhibit it – and this is where managers stand out. Of the many factors analyzed in this area, supervisor support of subordinates’ use of training emerged as one of the most influential factors for ensuring transfer. Since managers are often the deciding factor in whether new learning is used back on the job, a robust process is needed to ensure their effectiveness in this role. This process include five steps:
1) Assessment of the management team for readiness to support behavior change.
2) Consensus on managers’ role in the intervention.
3) Pre-conditioning of employees prior to training.
4) Post-training follow-up with employees.
5) Sustainment activities.
Brent helps companies implement these new managerial routines that ensure training investments last for years to come.
Sales Team Performance Management
For more than two decades Brent has helped sales leaders optimize the performance of their teams to enable higher sales revenues and higher revenues per salesperson. Depending on the needs and goals of the sales leader, Brent helps with any or all of the following:
- Aligning your sales strategy with the higher organizational strategy. Adjusting goals, strategies, skill-sets and incentives.
- Organizing and managing your salesforce by Top Performers, Average Performers and Lagging Performers. Each group is motivated differently and needs to be coached and rewarded differently.
- Creating or improving your formal sales process to ensure predictable, consistent results. Balancing the two tensions of 1) need for process and 2) need for freedom.
- Thriving in the new world of virtual selling – adjusting strategies and skill-sets to reflect the lack of in-person dynamics.
- Facilitating collaboration to support enterprise-wide solution development in decentralized organizations.
- Reducing proposal-building time to improve competitiveness.
- Improving the sales department’s contribution to SIOP (sales, inventory and operations planning)
- Helping your sales team find more time for selling and spend less time on administrative activities.
- Helping your sales team leverage their customer service role into new sales opportunities.
Process-Centered Management Workshop
“If you cannot define what you are doing as a process, you do not understand what you are doing.” – W. Edwards Deming
Is your company growing faster than your processes can handle? Are you a manager in a process-oriented company but struggling to work in a process-centered culture? Is your company simply in need of becoming more process-centered? If any of these things are true, the Process-Centered Management Workshop can help. Although highly customized, the workshop typically involves the following:
The Fundamentals of Process
- What is a process? Does every single piece of work need to be a process?
- What are the different types and what makes them different?
- What are the key outcomes of processes and how do you measure and manage them?
- How are processes described and explained to others?
- What are the documents and tools I need to manage a process effectively?
Managing Processes
- Determining which processes are key to the current strategy.
- Aligning processes with strategic objectives.
- Improvement traps to avoid when making changes to a process.
- Organizing process families into Strategic Themes.
- Creating process operating plans.
- Creating process improvement plans.
The Essential Toolkit for Managers
The essential toolkit of people skills and management techniques to help new and experienced managers lead their teams and their organization to higher commitment and performance.
Part 1 – The Manager’s Roles & Responsibilities.
– The 3-Ps: Processes and people achieve purpose.
– The 5 criteria for successful managers.
– Leadership psychology – The Golden 8.
Part 2 – Developing Self-Awareness.
– The 5 leadership styles.
– Your personality traits and leveraging them.
– Mastering your emotions.
Part 3 – Performance Management.
– The Plan-Monitor-Feedback Model
– Behavioral feedback – Praising and reprimanding
Part 4 – Motivating Your Employees.
– 9 fundamental motivation techniques
– Motivation drainers
– The Q-12 for retaining talent
– Building relationships
Part 5 – Delegation.
– Delegation evaluation
– The D.E.L.E.G.A.T.E. Model
– Decision rights.
The P.E.A.K. Coaching System
A 4-Step Behavior-Based Process for Supporting and Guiding Individual Employee Performance. The P.E.A.K. Coaching System enables managers to address individual performance issues with employees and support them in making critical changes to their work – whether learning new behaviors or changing old ones.
- The seven conditions for individual performance.
- Common coaching myths.
- Formal vs. informal coaching.
- When to formally coach.
- The PEAK Coaching System:
P – pinpoint. Pinpoint the behavior.
1. Identify the behavior(s).
2. Clarify the performance impact of the behavior.
3. Clarify the desired behavior.
E – explore. Explore the causes.
1. Determine if the cause is attitude, ability or both.
2. Determine which of the 5 types of performers you have.
2. Determine the corresponding coaching role(s) needed.
A – agree.
Agree on a plan of action.
1. Identify the Activators and Consequences creating the Behavior (ABCs Model).
2. Create a plan of action to adjust the As and Cs.
3. Agree on the plan with coachee.
K – kaizen.
Follow through for continuous improvement.
1. Monitor performance at decreasing intervals.
2. Provide helpful feedback.
- How to approach an employee with coaching.
- The reluctant coach.
- The reluctant coachee.
- Building a plan of action.
Leading Change with the 3-I’s
This insightful workshop teaches key managers the psychological principles and The 3-Is Model for leading change, winning engagement and driving business results.
Leveraging the 3-Is Model – Identify-Immerse-Improve (GAP-PLAN-DO)
IDENTIFY (GAP) – What and why?
Identifying the gap/opportunity.
Drafting a business case for change (BCC).
Leveraging the Beckard-Harris Equation: DxVxF>R.
Creating a sense of urgency.
IMMERSE (PLAN) – Who and how?
Stakeholder Mapping
Analyzing the impact, scope and magnitude of the change (Documents? Behaviors? Processes? Structure?)
Determining completion criteria/stop conditions
Consensus building
Gaining agreement, engagement and support
Managing expectations
Leading Output-Based Meetings
Building high performing teams
Building highly reliable plans of action (T.E.A.M.S. Model)
Empowering others with A.R.I.A.
Aligning the project with systems and culture
Analyzing business readiness for change (desire, time and resources)
IMPROVE (DO)
Building your communication plan.
Building your behavior change plan (if applicable).
Building your training plan (if applicable).
Understanding the sources of resistance
Overcoming resistance to the change
Institutionalizing and sustaining the change
AFTER-ACTION-REVIEW (AAR)
What worked? Why?
What did not work? Why?
Developing your continuous improvement plan for next change project.