A Critical Framework to Turn Goals into Results
Each year corporate leaders tout business strategy at kick-off meetings across the company. They eloquently communicate appreciation and inspire employees to work harder, smarter and with passion and creativity. However, the pep talk then takes a turn focusing on what the company aims to achieve. Goals geared around increasing revenue, gaining market share, growing or re-structuring the company, reducing operational costs, improving customer satisfaction are discussed. In the end, the lofty mandates are set, yet employees across all levels of the organization walk away wondering what the mandate actually means and how to go from elegant resume words to actionable results. Thus the great climb begins - turning company goals into actionable results.
George Dunn, the first mountaineer to summit Mt. Rainier 500 times, said “…that getting the numbers was never the goal; it was just the result of the fact that I loved climbing Mt. Rainier!” The secret to his great success lies in his passion to climb coupled with his focus on understanding and improving the journey to get to the summit and back.
Every company wants to achieve great results, yet so many find themselves doing the opposite of George. Placing great emphasis on hitting numbers while completely overlooking the critical mechanism needed to make the successful journey happen – the health of the company’s eco system.
What is this eco system we speak of? It is a holistic picture or landscape of how a company operates, made up of interacting cross-functional business processes and related components working in concert to deliver value to customers and drive results. By using this process-centric framework, workflows and meaningful success metrics can be defined within an organization, and from there solutions aligned to meet business needs can be developed.
Without clarity and insight into how your company operates, it is easy to make uniformed, localized decisions, which spin up costly, time consuming projects that either get cancelled over time or deploy solutions which materialize little benefit and cause unanticipated consequences or sometimes devastating results.
In our next blog in this series we will look at a process-centric framework in action. Further blogs will also examine key elements and best practices to define a framework as well as practical applications for its use.