Business Transformation 101

Business Transformation 101

by William T Fejes Jr

Season 1

Strategy Creation with Phil Samuel

In last week’s podcast, we provided an overview of Long-Term or Strategic Planning and noted it was composed of two components, Strategy Creation and Strategy Execution. This week we will do a deeper dive on the Strategy Creation component with Dr. Phil Samuel of the Lean Methods Group.

Long-Term Planning

This week’s podcast is Long-Term Planning which typically takes the form of Strategic Planning. As we noted last week, short-term planning provides a road map for daily management and incremental improvement of the business to ensure maintaining a solid foundation. Long-term or Strategic Planning provides a path for the business to build upon the solid foundation by utilizing breakthrough thinking to drive strong, profitable growth.

Short-Term Planning

For the past seven weeks, we have discussed people and building talent in your business. Now that a great team of A-Players has been assembled, it is time to transform the business. The team’s first task is to develop plans, both short-term and long-term, to align the organization to a common direction and set expectations on performance. It is impossible for the team to hit the company goals if everyone does not know the goals. Short-term plans provide a road map for daily management and incremental improvement of the business to ensure maintaining a solid foundation. Long-term plans provide a path for the business to utilize breakthrough thinking to drive aggressive, profitable growth on top of the solid foundation. In this volume, the focus is on short-term planning. The short-term plan covers the next annual fiscal calendar period and sometimes is referred to as the Annual Operating Plan or AOP.

New Leader Assimilation

A new A-Player leader is starting in your organization. To ensure this leader hits the ground running and the team is highly productive immediately, I strongly recommend implementing a one-day New Leader Assimilation session within the first week of the new leader’s start date. The sooner the session is held the better. This session should be part of the “On-board Candidate” step of the Talent Acquisition Process that was outlined in the Vol. 4 podcast.

Retaining A-Players

You have done all the right things in your talent acquisition process and you have built a great team of A-Players. Now you must protect that investment and ensure the A-Players stay on board. What are the key retention factors that A-Players consider when determining whether to stay or move on? There has been a great deal of research done on this subject. I would recommend reviewing this topic with your team and your HR professionals to determine your specific approach to retaining your A-Players.

Talent Acquisition with Patrick Hopp

In prior postings, we discussed what makes an A-Player, how to interview for A-Players, and creating a robust talent acquisition process. For today’s podcast, we have with us Dr. Patrick Hopp who is a Partner with Leadership Development Worldwide, LLC. Patrick will provide his thoughts and insights on talent acquisition including: • Key elements necessary to identify and hire A-Players • Key things to avoid in your hiring processes • Pros and Cons of testing utilizing Predictive Index, Myers-Briggs, Wonderlic, etc.

A Robust Talent Acquisition Process

Interviewing, as we discussed in Vol. 3, is just one part of the Talent Acquisition Process. In this podcast, we will discuss a comprehensive process that can be used to ensure getting A-Players on board in an efficient and timely manner. Remember, robust processes provide sustainable, consistent performance.

How to Interview for A-Players

In this podcast, we will discuss How to hire A-Players. While the prior post focused on the People aspect of Talent, this post will focus on the Process aspect of Talent. As noted in the Vol. 1 posting, we need to deploy processes in all aspects of the business to ensure sustainable and improving performance. A robust interviewing process will ensure hiring A-Players.

Who to Select for Your Team

How do we ensure we are building a winning team? Are we getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus? As noted in the Volume 1 podcast, people are the key to a successful business. We want A-Players on our team so our first task is to define what constitutes an A-Player and then communicate this definition to your team. A-Players exhibit a set of required “hard” side traits i.e. performance attributes as well as a set of required “soft” side traits i.e. behavioral attributes. If the candidate for the position does not fit the required traits for both sides, they will not be the A-player you need in that position.

Introduction to Business Transformation 101

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Business Transformation 101. The objective of this weekly podcast series is to provide you with ideas, thoughts, best practices, and real-world examples of transformational actions that will help you achieve meaningful improvements and take your business to the next level. These actions represent building blocks that you can utilize to construct a unique, holistic business system that support the culture you and your team are working to create and fits the vision and strategy of your business. Alternately, use these building blocks to make incremental improvements to your existing business and strategy.

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