Everyone talks about and blames culture when the performance or experience of a service or organisation isn’t great or what it could be. It's also important to have solid foundations with a realistic and actionable plan if you want to grow the business.
Growing services and changing or developing an organisation is like creating or adding higher levels to a tower of building blocks with lots of pieces that need to be purposefully moved around. Teams can either climb high and take the win, or wobble and fall before rebuilding or focusing their effort elsewhere.
Due to an overpromotion of leadership development programs and ‘soft skills’ to develop teams and improve performance, few people understand the key domains that determine whether an organisation is healthy and adaptive to changing needs. Even fewer proactively improve the underlying components that drive and sustain high-value products and services.
Because of this, all too often executives and managers are blamed for largely inherited systemic issues that require a comprehensive assessment and solution-focused approach with employees to prioritise what is needed and how to change things for the best possible outcomes.
For a business and organisation to thrive, proactive and ongoing investment is needed to measure and monitor what is working, examine service pain points from an employee perspective, and determine how to sustainably adapt and optimise performance.
The most successful organisations and teams are those that manage uncertainty and are adaptive to change. People want and need to be part of organisations and teams that perform well across three key domains: leadership, intelligence, and services.
Leadership at all levels – Feeling and being empowered. It means that everyone is responsible and works to proactively improve services to achieve the organisational vision.
Business intelligence – Access to meaningful measures and information to make evidence-based decisions efficiently and effectively. For example, timely reporting that is easy to understand and use.
Service flow – People, processes, policies, and technologies work together for the best possible service delivery, management, and customer experiences.
It's easy to be overwhelmed by the thought of doing more on top of what you and your team do now, particularly if you're unlikely to get more resources to enable and sustain a change from the current state. You need to optimise what you have before seeking more.
Global research shared by The Oxford Review UK, and the Harvard Business Review shows that if you don't, any success through hard work alone will be unsustainable, people will burn out, service quality will decline, and organisational efforts to innovate and grow will fail.
Culture does not eat strategy for breakfast if you have a solid business operating model that is integrated by well-designed and developed:
If you're ready to take your business to the next level, let's chat about your goals, and where things are now to determine if I can be of value.
Developing and sustaining adaptive services involves strategic and operational systems thinking, service evaluation and governance, business engineering, organisational change facilitation, and extensive people and service management skills.
If you need deeply focused and personalised support to create, improve, and deliver sustainable, high-quality services for optimal return on investment I can help you:
I directly partner with a maximum of 3-4 organisations per year under a retainer arrangement.
This enables a comprehensive understanding of your organisation's strategic and operational needs with one-on-one coaching and advisory for you as the executive sponsor, dedicated focus for managers and areas in most need, and in-depth partnership for direct skills transfer.
These arrangements are for committed leaders and teams who value deep and outcome-driven work that is 'hard fun' and ridiculously rewarding.
Partnerships typically range from 1-3 years in duration or longer, depending on the scale and complexity of the work we need to do for sustainable success.
Let's see if we'll be great partners and determine if my services are a fit for you and the team.
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