As part of our Shaping the Future programme, we are exploring what capabilities are critical in knowledge and service-intensive businesses where success is dependent on providing a consistent customer experience. Our working model contains four broad capability areas:
- customer focus
- speed of delivery but balanced with effective governance
- capacity for change and learning
- distributed/collective leadership.
The glue that binds these together is having a sense of shared purpose.
Our research over the next three months will explore the cultural capabilities needed to build change-able and resilient organisations. One of our underpinning hunches about what enables organisations to be high-performing, particularly in a fast-changing context, is the ability and will to build certain cultural organisational capabilities. We think that having the ‘right’ mix of cultural capabilities will equip organisation to adapt and thrive over the longer term.
We have already begun testing out our working model with our long-term case study organisations so that we can build a better understanding o f the underpinning characteristics relating to these broad capabilities e.g. innovation, cross-boundary team working, as well as processes to ensure shared learning.
Over the coming months, with help from different members of the Shaping the Future community, we aim to test out our working model further as well as develop some good case examples of how organisations are building these capabilities in practice. We will them be able to incorporate all of this rich knowledge in our Organisational Capabilities Practitioner Guide, which will be published in June 2009.
We would like to hear from you
Case study update
Our second exclusive event for seniors in case study organisations took place this month; one of the business benefits of being a participating organization. The event was held at ?What If! – a very energising learning environment!
Despite the diverse business sectors represented - financial services, pharmaceuticals, business services, energy and public services – a number of common themes about the business and HR practices needed to ensure high performance emerged, as well as what are the areas that that get in the way of achieving high performance. The importance of individuals exercising discretionary behaviour was a common theme that emerged, but creating appropriate boundaries is something that mangers struggle with.
There was an initial debate about some of the differences between high performance and sustainable high performance. This generated some thoughts about some inherent paradoxes in achieving sustainable high performance:
Achieving a step change but in a way that the organisation’s reputation is not damaged.
Encouraging discretionary behaviour but in a way that ensures that risk is clearly managed. Sense that whoever defines performance criteria is by definition determining the boundaries of discretionary behaviour.
Encouraging innovation, key to performance improvements, but in a way that ensures risk is appropriately managed.
Balancing values-based management with regulation management
Some interesting insights into the leadership behaviours needed to encourage innovation were identified from watching a short clip from the movie ‘Big’ starring Tom Hanks: giving employee’s permission to be innovative, acting as a role model, asking questions to draw out ideas, as well as creating the structures and pace for innovation. The idea of thinking of leadership as a demand, as opposed to a supply, issue was something that the group also debated. In innovative organisations the issue of who do innovative employees want to work for is a crucial area to monitor. In the wrong leadership hands – innovation will be stifled. One final reflection from the day was the importance of leaders keeping themselves engaged, especially during times of change – if leaders are not engaged, then how can they possibly create a climate for engaged employees?