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TRANSFORM
The accelerating rate of change today has businesses
stretching to keep pace.
CEOs and managers of successful businesses are
increasingly aware that their organizational culture must be
forward-looking, continuously learning and improving, willing to question
its current standard, and actively tapping the full potential of its
talented workforce.
Organizational improvement can no longer be approached
only by acquiring a set of new skills and techniques. In reality, profound
change requires an organic transformation. New attitudes and perspectives
are needed as well as organization-wide commitment and a supportive
environment that will sustain the desired changes.
Transform is an approach designed by Management
Associates to help organizations achieve a preferred future about which
they care greatly. Transform establishes an on-going process of growth,
learning, and maturation. The process creates a self-correcting system,
enabling organizations to continue their own development and improvement
without permanent reliance on outside assistance.
Transform is not a rigid program but a flexible process
whose practical application is designed in collaboration with an
organization's own management team and internal development resources. The
elements of effective organizational development from which the Transform
process is generally designed are:
Executive
Focus - Creating the vision
At the start of the Transform process the Executive
Focus forges the unity and resolve of the top management team around a
crystallized vision of the organization's future.
The Executive Focus is an intensive 1-2 day process that
sets the stage for an organization to achieve its major targeted goals,
recognizing that top management ultimately shapes and determines how the
organization performs, including how effectively it manages change.
The first requirement for systematic, long-term
development is that the top people within an organization have a clear
sense of direction, knowing where they are going and what they want to
achieve. This unity of purpose - an orientation to a future to which they
are collectively committed - cannot be over stressed. Creating a
vision-driven context infuses an organization with a motivating vigor and
surrounds the difficult tasks of growth and change with meaning and
relevance.
Outcomes of the Executive Focus are:
- A clarity of direction among the top executives relating to the
organization's vision and the future growth of the organization
- A unified resolve among the group focused on achieving their vision
- A clear understanding of the impact of their management functioning
on achieving the organizational vision
- A commitment to reshaping their own management roles and functioning
as needed
- Clear plans, collectively developed, to achieve their objectives
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Assessment -
Identifying the starting point
Once the vision has been established, a brief
organizational assessment can provide an objective portrait of the
organization's current functioning in relation to its vision and goals.
The assessment surfaces obvious strengths as well as any inhibiting
factors that might, if not addressed, prevent the organization from
achieving its desired vision. It is not a problem-oriented assessment but
a future-oriented assessment whose objective is to facilitate change and
growth.
The assessment data is collected by Management
Associates' staff through informal meetings with a cross section of
individuals and small focus groups of employees at every level of the
company. The findings of the assessment are compiled, analyzed, and
reported back to management.
This type of assessment is not meant to be a
statistical analysis; it provides broad stroke information about the
existing organizational culture. Because this initial assessment is based
on conversations, it allows issues to emerge in a way that pre-selected
survey questions do not. This format also provides detail and fleshing out
of issues that allow a greater degree of understanding and planning for
improvement.
Outcomes of the assessment process are:
- Clarity about the organization in relation to where it wants to be
- A kick-off to the engagement of the whole organization in the change
process
- Strengths on which to build are identified
- Unseen roadblocks to success are also identified
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Leadership
development - Establishing shared knowledge
Once a shared vision is in place and the organization
has an accurate picture of the existing culture in relation to its desired
future, a leadership development process can be designed.
The content of the development process is based on the
findings of the assessment, making the training elements more specific and
applicable to the day to day realities of the organization. The content is designed to address the management group, both as individuals and as
an evolving team. Management Associates also works to make sure the
development process is seamlessly linked with any on-going training within
the organization.
The leadership development process establishes a unified
management knowledge base. Our experience shows that training is most
effective when delivered to the entire management group together. The
alignment of management's understanding and application of a common
knowledge base will create an increasingly unified and focused
organizational effort.
Although the content is specific to the organization,
certain elements of the development process enhance its effectiveness:
- The development effort must not only include new skills and
behaviors but also needs to address, challenge, and reframe the values
upon which those skills and behaviors are built.
- An initiative that consists of recurrent training experiences over a
period of time will have the most lasting impact, avoiding the
perception by participants of training as isolated, sporadic events
rather than an on-going process.
- The time between sessions is devoted to pursuing training
assignments and trying out new behaviors. In this way participants are
actively engaged in a period of training and development lasting
several months, not a few days.
- The development process needs to take place in a context of, and be
driven by, the vision.
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Survey -
Measuring improvements
Recognizing that the ability to measure progress is
essential to growth, Management Associates developed a powerful survey
process that applies metrics to issues that are normally considered
"soft" and therefore difficult to measure.
The strength of our particular survey process is that
each survey's specific content is designed by the organization using it. As part of
the development process, managers design the survey items themselves, with
our assistance. As a result of this approach, the survey is not based on
an external model of how things should be, but rather on the vision that
the organization is pursuing. It generates energy because managers are
involved in its design, understand its purpose, and have ownership in its
use. In addition it provides baseline data for targeting on-going growth
and development. The results:
- Are detailed, specific, and easily understood
- Provide data that clearly identifies areas of positive, healthy
performance as well as areas needing improvement
- Enable individual managers and supervisors to set leadership goals
and make plans based on clear, measurable data
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Action
planning - Ensuring follow-up
No matter how great the desire to improve, people also
need a plan for collaboratively implementing the changes and achieving new
organizational performance. It is vital that people translate their
collective vision, information, and knowledge into action.
Although action planning is an on-going part of the
Transform process itself, at the completion of the survey it is especially
important that management be engaged in a process of carefully analyzing
the data and defining action plans. This planning process can take place
in individual coaching sessions, interdepartmental meetings, or with the
management group as a whole.
This action planning process:
- Creates a collective clarity and understanding regarding the next
development steps to be taken
- Surrounds those steps with enthusiasm and support
- Contributes to the establishment of a self-sustaining, continuously
improving management team
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Whole system
engagement - Sustaining the culture
Transform begins with management because this group must
be aligned with the direction and values of the proposed changes, but
eventually the challenge of change must be shared and shouldered by
everybody within the system.
The methods of whole system engagement are varied. The
specific form this stage takes is worked out in collaboration with the
internal expertise and resources available.
Whole system engagement is the core of continuous
improvement. Once the whole system is engaged in its own development, a self-sustaining process
begins with 100% of the organization's people
taking ownership and interest in the values and dynamics of the culture as
well as in how the organization functions and performs.
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Investment
Investment in Transform is based on Management Associates' standard
on-site fee of $2500 per day plus expenses.
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