Change Management & Leadership

Is your approach to teamwork stuck in "fluffy" territory? Effective team-building isn't about group hugs; it’s about rigorous performance. To deliver real value, forget the bonding games and focus on these three guidelines.

First, hire for skill, not comfort. It's tempting to recruit in your own image, but success demands diversity. Ray Kroc built McDonald’s by hiring people whose skills were essential, even if their personalities clashed with his own.

Second, teams exist for results, not relationships. As Ford’s Alan Mulally demonstrated, the best bonding happens when everyone aligns on a relentless implementation plan. Teams are a means to an end—achieving goals—not an end in themselves.

Finally, a great team is a shock absorber. When crises hit, a robust team absorbs the impact and keeps delivering. Instead of a "rah-rah" session, try running a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) workshop. Identifying weak links together builds far stronger collaboration than any party game ever could. Build the foundation first; celebrate later.

Your federated network - be it regional offices, dealerships, or franchises - feels like it’s slipping from your grasp. Every unit operates in its own silo, and brand consistency and operational integrity are eroding.

Many leaders believe decentralisation automatically means a loss of control. This is a myth: the secret to effective central oversight isn’t tighter command; it’s a total redesign of how you exert influence.

Don’t try to dictate every action. Instead, shift from "command" to "governance." Define the crystal-clear, non-negotiable standards that protect your brand and customer experience. Specify expected outcomes clearly. This is your core framework. Test the customer-facing aspects using mystery shoppers, and have customer surveys returned to central office, rather than the regional office or dealership.

Next, empower your network to succeed within that framework. Provide centralised, best-in-class tools, training, and data analytics that make excellence the easiest path.

Finally, drive radical transparency. When every unit's performance against key standards is visible to all, a culture of peer-to-peer accountability and best-practice sharing emerges.

Don’t pull on rigid levers. True control in a federated world comes from building a system where everyone is aligned and empowered to uphold the standards that matter.

Size does not have to be a sentence of slowness. The greatest threat to a large organisation is often its own internal friction. To maintain responsiveness, complexity must be deliberately managed.

My prescription for agility focuses on empowering the edges of your organisation. Start by decentralising decision-making – pushing authority to the teams closest to the client or customer. Next, ensure processes are properly mapped and hand-offs between teams are clearly established.

Break down silos by forming small, temporary teams to deliver clear outcomes. Ensure strategic planning moves from annual blueprints to fast, iterative cycles with quarterly reviews. Finally, promote a culture of 'test and learn' to pilot new methods and surface risks.

Do this, and you will convert mass into momentum.

An ineffective organisational structure acts like quicksand, slowing every strategic move. To build a structure that accelerates performance, you must start from your strategic imperative: form follows function.

1. Define the Function: What is your core strategy? Identify the two to four critical, value-adding activities your structure must support.
2. Map the Flow: Detail the end-to-end process of delivering value. Where are the handoffs? These points are potential bottlenecks.
3. Establish Clear Ownership: Ensure every critical function has a single, accountable owner. Ambiguity breeds avoidance.
4. Optimise Communication: Design the structure to reduce silos. Shorten communication lines between interdependent functions (e.g. Sales and Operations).
5. Balance Power: Determine the optimal balance of centralisation (for standardisation) and decentralisation (for responsiveness/speed).
6. Right-Size Span of Control: Ensure managers have a manageable number of direct reports to enable effective oversight.
7. Stress Test for Agility: Does the proposed structure allow the organization to pivot quickly in response to market shifts? Design for adaptation, not just today's status quo.

A well-designed structure is an enabler, not a constraint. Get the function right, and shape the form to it.

The search for the single strategic objective is a common executive tendency, but it's fundamentally flawed. No organisation functions on a single axis: senior executives have a 360-degree responsibility, and priority-setting must reflect that.

As management author Peter Drucker correctly observed, goals need to be set across the following eight key areas: Marketing, Innovation, Human Resources, Financial Resources, Physical Resources, Productivity, Social Responsibility, and Profit Requirements.

Executives must move past the simplicity of a singular focus and embrace the full complexity of their role. An organisation is a connected system: a lag in one area will inevitably impact other areas. We can’t expect to succeed if we skimp on vital areas and do less than half the job.

True organisational strength and credibility are based on a strategically cohesive set of goals … and that means ensuring coverage across all key dimensions of performance.

A real trap for Project Management Offices (PMO) is to inhabit a world of meticulous nomenclature and endless reporting requests, adding to a project team's burden rather than lifting it. They become a bureaucratic layer, inadvertently slowing down the very delivery they're meant to facilitate. When was the last time a PMO clearly articulated its own quantified value to the organisation?

The path to redemption for PMOs is clear: become problem-solvers and value-drivers. Instead of demanding status updates, offer solutions that genuinely accelerate delivery. This means providing shared tools that simplify reporting, proactively identifying and mediating cross-project conflicts, and porting across best practices between teams that properly empower them. By shifting their focus from policing to enabling, and demonstrating their impact in concrete terms – like reduced project costs or faster delivery – PMOs can become partners rather than perceived obstacles.

So, PMOs, if you’re listening, here is your challenge: streamline, coordinate, share best practices, demonstrate your worth … and ensure you minimise overhead rather than adding to it

Although tangled and messy, the Redback Spider’s web functions in three dimensions rather than the two dimensions of the typical spider web.

Does your organisation’s or division’s strategy operate in two dimensions, or three? Are there mutually reinforcing facets: think of the way Walt Disney’s TV appearances in the 1950s fed awareness of and interest in the newly built Disneyland, which in turn prolonged and reinforced Disney characters and films. Or do they only operate only on a single plane? Are your operational and risk management systems multi-faceted enough to function three-dimensionally or are they merely ‘flat-file’?

Next time you see a spider web, let it prompt you (as you're reaching for the pest spray) to think about the depth and breadth of your strategy.

I’ve had clients ask me how to transmit a vision through the organisation: how do you establish a clear line of sight from high-level mission through to implementation and execution?

The truth is: there is no secret to this, no arcane management methodology is required. There is only:

1. collaborative clarity
2. a structure by which to hold people accountable for results and timeframes, and
3. relentless follow-up.

That’s pretty much it.

Here are my top four change management tips, culled from the literature and validated by years of work in the field:

1. Focus on real business problems (reducing operating costs, improving customer response times) rather than abstractions (‘participation’)
2. The single biggest cause of failure of any change effort is absence of senior management support
3. People support what they help to create
4. People don’t resist change; they resist ambiguity

Need to garner support for a corporate initiative? Here are my top three tips on how to do it.

1. Crystallise the benefits of your initiative for the major players: the key here is to make the benefits *tangible* (as distinct from *large*)
2. Meet the players face-to-face: get in front of them and give them a chance to have their say (and outline the benefits for them – see point above). There’s something compelling about being face-to-face with people which is not as strong with other forms of communication
3. Create a bandwagon that has such momentum that it’s a no-brainer that people would get behind it. Senior leaders have to bang the drum for an initiative loudly and constantly, publicising exemplars and providing plaudits for early followers: be loud and proud.

The first type of change metric is for the change effort itself; typical metrics here include:

• frequency of communication
• percentage of business units with change champions embedded
• actual versus scheduled timeline for change project.

The second is for business-as-usual KPIs which reflect a demonstrable difference in results as a result of the change effort. Examples might include:

• unit costs
• customer satisfaction
• defect rates.

The two types are shown in the graphic, using a change effort aimed at reducing average costs as an example.