The Product
The Leader's Mind (TEM) is a relationship management tool that ensures the type of leadership alignment that is required to support true organizational collaboration. Given that it is widly accepted that there are significant changes occuring in the very foundation of modern business philosophy, organizations must respond quickly and consistantly to market demands and opportunities.
One of the key areas of breakdown in organizational communication involves the consistent application of business strategy through the leadership group.
Often the understanding differes from department to department and within the different levels of the organization (C level VP level, director and employee). True collaboration and the resultant performance simply cannot happen unless leadership is aligned first.
Centred on the Culture Gap Index (CGI) methodology, you can think of TLM as your Leadership Alignment System where it's structure will enable you to benchmark current culture, monitor progress and engage the employees in the process of optimizing the culture and ultimately improve their own engagement.
The Science
The underlying 'Science' behind the Expectation Gap Index has been proven for over 25 years.
The system combines the metrics of the Culture Map (as researched by NY Times #1 Best Selling author John King) with the Future Strategies proven GAP technology to align Leaderhsip Effectivness.
The program is structured through categories of culture and leadership dimensions with each having specific metrics within. We then evaluate on how important each are to team members and then their view of the effectiveness (or performance). You will then see reports that are in real time indicating the type of culture overall, and culture within areas (either geographic, functional or perceptual). The data can then be segmented and compared in an almost unlimited number of ways.
The Leadership system allows you to easily monitor your current culture and ensure that leadership is aligned. The combination of these two tools, provides a dashboard to monitor and communicate in relevant ways to all team members.
The Strength is that the system combines engagement with culture and leadership to provide easy to access data on the organization that is imperative to operate, let along thrive in today's complex and transparent environment.
Any organization that seeks to ensure consistent understanding and application of their organizational strategy through leadership.
Who It's For:
What It Does:
Through various questionnaires, web interfaces and direct data downloads/ feeds, we integrate information from all of the various stakeholders into a consolidated data system which allows the company to truly understand just how all of these factors interrelate and align with the organization’s mission, vision, goals, objectives and the required activities.
Leadership Alignment Compass
The Process:
Stage One: Leadership Alignment: Designed to facilitate alignment amongst the leadership team whether that is the “C” Suite and/or VP level. Process is to ensure that all of the leadership group are properly aligned and engaged in the business process. This ensures that there is consistency in the message and that it is delivered and supported through all functional areas of the business. All of the leadership team answers a series of questions around priorities and views on performance as they relate to i) the brand promise itself; ii) the quality of interaction with clients in all areas of the business including loyalty factors, sales relationship, product quality, customer service, order process and delivery; iii) the process of innovation and improvement iv) communications and v) competitive positioning.
Stage Two: Management Alignment: Designed to facilitate alignment amongst the management team to ensure that there is consistency in the message that the employees receive from the organization and that the message is being supported in the activities through day to day management of the business and ensure that the functions are in harmony and applying the most efficient delivery to ensure both customer satisfaction and cost efficiency. All managers and supervisors answer a series of questions that are consistent with those answered by the leadership team (see i) through iv) above) although with more detail in many areas. This information will be rolled up and analyzed automatically through theMindSuiteTM System.
Stage Three: Stakeholder Alignment: Designed to facilitate alignment with the leadership and management principles, this stage engages the three main stakeholder groups including the customers, the employees and the vendors/suppliers in a dialogue that is consistent with the areas describe in items i) through iv) above.
Step 1; The Customers will be asked to participate in a dialogue to give and receive feedback on priorities and performance in the areas of the brand promise, loyalty, innovation, communications and competitive position. In addition, we will introduce a forecasting module to the customer component, which will help the organization understand spending plans and share of spend factors.
Step 2; The Employees will be asked to participate in a dialogue to give and receive feedback on priorities and performance in the areas of the brand promise, loyalty, innovation, communications and competitive position. The employees will be asked to think like a customer and answer many of the question areas “as if” they were a customer. In addition, we will introduce a component specifically for understanding how well the employees believe that the organization is supporting their efforts in taking care of the customer.
Step 3; If applicable, channel partners / distributors / resellers (etc.) will be asked to participate in a dialogue to give and receive feedback on priorities and performance in the areas of the brand promise, loyalty, innovation, communications and competitive position. In addition, we will introduce a component specifically for understanding how well the partners believe that the organization is supporting their efforts in taking care of the customer.
Step 4; The Vendors and Suppliers will be asked to participate in a dialogue to give and receive feedback on how they can help the organization to become a more efficient buyer and then examine ways to share in the savings. Rather than the traditional method of “beating up” the suppliers and demanding price reductions the organization invites the suppliers to work with them to find more efficient and cost effective ways of working together. Stage Four: Monitor and Adjust: In this stage we implement the most appropriate monitoring and work supporting tools to ensure that the most desired actions are achieving the most desired outcomes. This might include ongoing feedback systems for key customer interactions at “point of contact”, detailed descriptions of exceptional experiences to use as best practices, the support of ongoing employee improvement activities to increase engagement and the implementation of conversion tools to move the appropriate stakeholder to a different category using automated communications (i.e. unhappy customer to happy customer, disengaged employee to engaged employee, prospect to customer, small customer to larger customer etc.).