This blog post is the first in a series of posts that explores my work with MT Business Technologies during our second year of work. To learn more about the first year, please read the article published in Integral Leadership Review in January 2010.
I met the client at a leadership workshop on developing transformational leadership. During our first meeting at his office, I met several members of the team, and realized, like many organizations, they were not ecstatic about working with another consultant. The client is a successful mid-sized business that is focusing on making the changes necessary to maintain their legacy of success well into the future. This organization will undergo significant changes from a position of strength and success.
About a year ago we had our initial vision setting workshop. While this blog series is about the yearlong transformation process, this step actually happened prior to the workshop series during our first year of work together. I wanted to talk about it because it sets the tone for the decisions we made and the actions that guided our first year.
To compare and contrast, I worked with a client organization that did not have a vision, just good people working hard. What I learned over the short time I worked with this organization was that yes, they did have generally good people and yes they did work hard. What they also did was work for differing and often competing objectives. Some people believed their job was to provide basic service at the lowest cost. Others thought their job was to create a competitive advantage for their company. The result was a leadership team that did not work well together – no shock – that they thought the others were making poor decisions. Since they had different goals, everyone was making decisions based on their view of the world. When they took a 360 degree leadership assessment, they ranked each other very poorly. The composite score for the leaders on “achieves results” was below 10% on a scale of 1-100. The reason this is important is individually, each of these leaders could produce solid results. Together, they had differing views of the organization’s goals so they were at odds as a group.
To move beyond this misalignment, the first step is to create a clear picture of the future – to look out on the horizon and identify what the company aspires to be and how they will get there. The first questions we asked were:
1. What is our vision? What will we strive to become?
2. What is our mission? What is the clear goal we are trying to achieve by when – this is a stretch.
3. What are our guiding principles? What are the core beliefs and values of the organization that guide how we work together?
4. What are the impacts and outcomes we will deliver?
Once the leadership group agrees on these items the team can move forward. For this group, the CEO created his initial list and then worked with the company President to refine it and then worked with the leadership team to gain buy-in. One of the key initiatives was working towards team alignment as they are refining their direction as an organization in this changing environment. When they decided to change in vision and guiding principles, in some cases they were also committing to run their business differently.
An example for this group is a focus on standardization. In the past they functioned with unique processes by location. With the implementation of an enterprise software system designed to gain efficiencies, the group also recognized the need to standardize some processes. This type of change often means a shift in control from autonomous business leaders to a centralized corporate function. The team carefully weighed each guiding principle and will continue to experiment over the coming year with the implications of the decisions they made up front.
We look forward to sharing a monthly installment on the journey. While they have been working over the past year, they are now implementing the changes across the enterprise using a series of monthly workshops that include all senior leaders. These sessions are designed with an educational component and to generate specific deliverables required to run the business. Our goal is to make these sessions productive as well as build on the team alignment identified with the new vision, and with each session, placing another foundation stone in the organization renovation.

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