Month: January 2012

How you organise your business to delight your clients

How you organise your business to delight your clients, to optimise your resources and to release peoples’ potential.

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Highly evolved organisations have a low design imperative, spending their time on developing coping and workaround strategies rather than focusing on creating additional value add.

What You Need

Create a scalable and sustainable organisational design that will deliver the required strategic imperatives, whether that is growth, contraction, operational efficiencies or post merger integration.  More specifically we will examine, validate, modify and redesign:

  • Process: particularly the ones that drive competitive advantage such as service delivery,  quality, business development, succession planning and talent management. We avoid doing this from a functional perspective preferring to concentrate on the end-to-end perspective from inception to delighted client.
  • Structural design: Structures should be the servant of strategy and the enabler of effective process delivery.  We will design them with you to be just that.
  • The alignment of people and technology: The dynamic and creative use of technology needs to be connected to peoples’ appetite and ability to use it effectively. We can help organisations make that critical connection.
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How to Create Meaning at Work

How to create meaning through building a motivating context that gives direction and motivates people to perform.

Purpose is all about building a motivating organisational context which gives people a sense of meaningful direction at both the business and corporate level. Key to this strategic development is clear organisational goals.

What You need

Work with senior management or project teams to create:

  • a credible, energising vision that aligns with the strategy and future direction of the organisation
  • a set of clear organisation values
  • an integrated set of organisational goals that focus people on objectives and timescales
  • a method for linking these three factors together and implementing them throughout the organisation
  • a process for embedding the framework into the whole organisation. Living is much more important than launching the Purpose Framework.
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How to Build Capabilities that Increase Intellectual Capital and Thought Leadership

Capability building is critical to an organisation’s ongoing success. That can’t happen unless the organisation becomes learner and learning  focused, and that requires significant understanding of where the organisation is consciously and unconsciously competent.

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What You Need

A learning academy framework that will do the following:

  • establish what capabilities are required to deliver the strategy
  • develop the required learning and development plan with learner pathways
  • where relevant give access to Predaptive’s competence library to enable effective job role design
  • develop a learner contract framework
  • create a specific process for capturing and commercialising the organisation’s intellectual capital
  • use the above to take a thought leadership position in the relevant market places.
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How to Create Emotional Stakeholders

How to create emotional stakeholders by implementing new ways of managing, motivating, developing and coaching your people.

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Employees need a new psychological contract with their employer. The Boomers, Xers, Yers and Nexters all have different motivations, and they need to be engaged with to get the best from them.

What You Need

A new, tailor made psychological contract that will include the following:

  • effective and motivating performance management
  • a frame of reference for peoples’ behaviour
  • insight into how managers build credibility in flat, flexible networks
  • how to focus on building employability rather than job security
  • increasing receptiveness to change.
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Foursquare Leadership

Our 4SLeadership™ Framework underpins all of our leadership development work and seeks to:

  • Create and embed a Leadership vocabulary and focus in all critical people touch points: job descriptions, competence profiles, performance contracts, Balance Score Cards and Personal Development Plans
  • Create a Leadership imperative throughout the organisation
  • Train directors and managers in 4SLeadership™
  • Develop coaching capabilities to demonstrate leadership through doing.

4SLeadership™ brings together four behaviour sets to give people real insight into their potential for offering Leadership. It clearly demonstrates what people can do to inhabit a Leadership space and position their behaviour from a leadership perspective. Whether required for a senior management team, a layer of management or even for every manager in the organisation, 4SLeadership™ provides a practical and scalable approach to leadership.

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How to Lead Change

How to lead to new places your organisation and clients, defining new market spaces and new ways of working.

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Change is about leadership, leadership is about change. Increasing change management capabilities with an absence of visible leadership is a waste of time (and money). Leaders stimulate and embrace change, they use change techniques to support the taking of people to new places. This creates for the organisation market-leading agility, competitive advantage and innovative solutions to clients’ problems.

What Change Leadership Delivers

4SLeadership™  focuses on the four key aspects of effective leadership and can be adapted at any level in the organisation. Working with a group  of managers or key specialists  4SLeadership™ will:

  • give people a simple yet powerful way of understanding their own preferred leadership style and give them strategies for improving their approach
  • build a focus for leadership throughout the organisation
  • integrate leadership with appropriate change tools, enabling people managers to become effective change agents
  • increase coaching capabilities in the relevant population
  • build effective feedback loops for leaders to improve.

How Predaptive Engage With Their Clients

We can work with you on deploying the complete HPOD™ framework, or only part of it, or a blend of several Success Drivers, or a unique combination of elements, even with some specifically designed content for your organisation.

We always begin from our client’s perspective, designing a correctly scaled, transparently priced, value for money, output driven solution.

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High Performance Organisational Development

Great solutions are based around our High Performance Organisational Development™(HPOD™) Framework. HPOD brings together the key organisational components that help create and sustain competitive advantage, which is the route to becoming a world class organisation:

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  • Purpose – how to create meaning
  • Change – how to lead
  • Shape – how to organise your business
  • Engagement – how to create emotional stakeholders
  • Know-How – how to build capabilities

Over our five year history, we have undertaken in excess of 150 significant assignments and as part of our obsession with learning from what we do we have constantly refined our capabilities and looked for patterns in the success outcomes of our work. We have then distilled our findings into what has become our  HPOD™ Framework.

The HPOD™ Framework is made up of Five Success Drivers, each one focusing on a key aspect of what creates and sustains real competitive advantage:

  1. Purpose

    How to create meaning through building a motivating context that gives direction and motivates people to perform.

  2. Change

    How to lead to new places your organisation and customers, defining new market spaces and new ways of working.

  3. Shape

    How you organise your business to delight your customers, to optimise your resources, and to release peoples’ potential.

  4. Engagement

    How to create emotional stakeholders by implementing new ways of managing motivating, developing and coaching your people.

  5. Know-How

    How to build capabilities that increase intellectual capital and thought leadership.

By focusing on the right organisational requirements in a structured and joined-up way, you can create the architecture to effectively build a world-class organisation. Our HPOD™ Framework can help you do just that.

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Where Are The Cassandras In Your Organisation?

If you thought Cassandra was a Greek myth long ago consigned to classical history with little to teach us about today you’d be wrong.

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Simply told, Cassandra, because of her beauty, was granted the gift of prophecy by Apollo. But because she didn’t return his love he placed a curse on her so that no one would believe her predictions.

This combination of real insight and powerlessness is one of the most frustrating positions someone can be in.

Every organisations has their Cassandras, we find they fall into two types:

Reductive Cassandra
These Cassandras focus on explaining why the world will fail, why things don’t work and why new ideas are dangerous.

These people in influential positions can be very damaging. Their power of argument can be highly developed, the problem is they don’t put it to constructive use.

Passive people give up the fight of taking their arguments on so an atmosphere of negativity and helplessness takes hold.

Constructive Cassandra
These Cassandras foresight needs to be given an outlet. Some of what they say will be genuinely visionary, some will be wrong. Often the most common mistake is one of timing. They turn out to be correct but get the year or the speed wrong. Remember Apple’s 1990s Newton PDA, a visionary product without the technology to deliver it. iPad is the Newton realised.

These are exciting people to be around, they are full of ideas, some that can be heretical, challenging the orthodoxies of the day. We call this process of evaluating these ideas, risk calibration, allowing enough of the creative flow to turn into something worthwhile.

Organisations that find a way of giving the best of these ideas traction are the ones that control their futures.

Can you indentify your Cassandras?

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7 Core Organisational Development Capabilities

How effective is your organisational capability? Below we list the current top 7 taken from our recent work with clients. Organisations and people that can add-value in these areas seem to make a real difference.

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  1. Can you change the behaviour of your people?
    It starts and finishes here. A behavioural change will lead to different activities which will deliver better results.
  2. Engaging people through giving them meaning and direction in their work
    Employers can no longer guarantee job security. What they can guarantee is a place where people feel valued and their contribution can be shown to make a real difference.
  3. Placing leadership at the centre of your management approach
    Too many organisations are still over-managed and under-led. These turbulent business times require people at all levels of be able to motivate their teams and deliver effective change. Good management practice is still critical but it needs to become a servant to strategic leadership.
  4. Improving the design and effectiveness of your people related processes
    Today people are more demanding, more expensive and more complicated to employ and manage than ever before. Legal compliance is only part of it. All people processes (appraisals, induction, succession, performance management etc.) need to be audited for the value add they should bring. If they don’t make a difference, reinvent or scrap them.
  5. Increasing and building new performance capabilities
    The recession looks like being L shaped. OD needs to be help people transcend tough trading conditions and believe they can grow the business and their own performance. This isn’t a time for explaining (again) why the market is difficult, but for doing something about it.
  6. Energising and changing your culture
    Culture is expressed values. Its though values you can a change the culture. Indentify the behavioural indicators that make the values explicit and you will move the culture. Connect to point one.
  7. Creating high ownership and accountability throughout the organisation
    Our litmus test for whether teams are fully engaged depends on if they have management imposed activity targets. If somebody is only doing something because they are being told to (and wouldn’t do it otherwise), you find a low ownership culture. High performers own their activity, they set their own quality and quantity targets to achieve the outcome they require.

How did you score?

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