Operational Leadership

Andrew Spanyi

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781606491126
• eBook ISBN: 9781606491133
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Customers are increasingly demanding higher levels of speed and quality, yet leaders often focus mainly on reducing the costs of operations. This book outlines the needed evolution in leadership attitudes and behaviors in the key operational areas such as new product development, sales, operations, customer service, human resources, finance, and information technology.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Effective leadership has long been recognized as one of the elusive critical factors in organizational success, especially when it comes to improving operational performance. Customers are increasingly demanding higher levels of speed and quality, yet leaders often focus mainly on reducing the costs of operations. Yes, organizations do pay lip service to the slogan “the customer is king,” but it certainly doesn’t always feel that way from a customer’s perspective. The data on customer satisfaction continues to disappoint. Customers were only marginally more satisfied in 2007 than in 1994, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which hovered around 75% in 2007, barely above the 1994 benchmark of 74.75%. While this index did improve in 2008, the scope of improvement was marginal. If similar aggregate data on customer satisfaction was available for the business-to-business (B2B) sector, it’s not likely to paint a much better picture. Nor are customer expectations likely to subside any time soon. The impact of the World Wide Web is one of the major culprits. We now demand instant information, anytime and practically anywhere. Maybe we’re not quite there yet, but it probably won’t be long before customers can get practically any information they want, in any form they need, at any time and place, and at zero or minimal cost.¹ In order to meet current and anticipated future challenges, what is needed is a new operational leadership mindset and paradigm that enables both breakthrough change and the discipline of continuous improvement in operations.

There’s no shortage of advice on improving operational performance. Academics and researchers have advised leaders to view the business end-to-end from the customer’s perspective. “Staple yourself to an order”² and become “easy to do business with”³ are just two of the many recipes for success in improving operations. Consultants have provided a number of well-documented improvement methods as they urge organizations to become “lean,” strive for nearly zero defects with “Six Sigma,” or radically reengineer business processes through the application of information technology.

In spite of the abundance of advice and the plethora of improvement methods, the actual success rate in driving and sustaining change is dismal. Research on leading change in 1996 reported that only about 30% of change programs succeed.⁴ In the 1990s, the critics of reengineering emphasized that only about a third of reengineering efforts succeed. More recently, in 2008, a broad-based survey of 3,199 executives around the world found that only one transformation in three succeeds.⁵ The Standish Group’s 2009 report on information technology (IT) project success indicated that only 32% of the surveyed projects were delivered on time, on budget, and with the required features and functions. A recent article also suggested that nearly 60% of all corporate Six Sigma initiatives failed to yield desired results.⁶ Other studies over the past decade reveal very similar outcomes. It appears that in spite of the abundant body of knowledge on leadership and change management, companies have not had widespread success in implementing change programs.

Leadership, in general, remains problematic for most major change programs such as downsizing, rightsizing, restructuring, turnarounds, and perhaps most so with respect to transforming operations. Change programs such as downsizing, rightsizing, and restructuring are complex and do require focused leadership, if only on the short term. Operational transformation differs from many of these other major change programs insomuch as it requires not only a focused effort short term change but also an ongoing program of continuous improvement. It calls for operational leadership, which is the multifaceted combination of leadership and management behaviors and attitudes needed to fundamentally improve how businesses get products and services developed, sold, delivered, and serviced.

What you will gain from this book is a new way of thinking about operational leadership. It will challenge you to think differently in several ways. First, this book argues in favor of an umbrella approach to improving operational performance, which encompasses key tools from various improvement methods such as Lean, Six Sigma, Reengineering, and Process Management, yet without the quasi-religious zeal associated with several of these individual methods. Next, the book presents a set of thought-provoking principles, practices, and pitfalls of operational leadership. Finally, examples of both success and failure are presented, on the premise that people are motivated by success stories but actually learn more from mistakes that others make.

What’s the Problem?

Lack of committed leadership typically surfaces among the top few barriers in practically every survey on the obstacles in successfully transforming operational performance. Why do leaders continue to struggle in this regard? There are at least three possible reasons: leaders don’t care, leaders can’t focus, and leaders don’t know how.

The view that senior executives don’t really care about operations is based on the proposition that the general business culture holds operations in low priority. Executives tend to focus on making acquisitions, planning mergers, and selling divisions. Isn’t that what gets a Chief Executive Officer’s (CEO) or Chief Financial Officer’s (CFO) picture in the paper? Operations simply aren’t sufficiently glamorous.⁷ What’s more, once the executive team gets busy working on strategic planning, budgeting, capital allocation, and other major issues, it’s all too easy for operations to be out of sight. Traditional attitudes compound the problem with deeply held, albeit mistaken, beliefs such as “we’re smarter than our customers and we know what they really need” and “our over-riding responsibility is to produce near term shareholder returns.”⁸ Frequent reorganizations tend to exacerbate this situation, as middle managers realign their focus from taking care of day-to-day operations to relationship building with new bosses and new peers.

Then there’s the argument that executives are aware of the importance of improving operational performance and providing customers with value, but there’s just too much going on to maintain the needed focus. Not only is corporate attention a zero-sum game, but executives also have a severe case of attention deficit disorder.⁹ Many organizations have dozens of initiatives competing for executive attention such that project portfolio management has become a management science. Focusing on operational performance is simply yet another initiative added to the list. There’s more than a grain of truth to this.

Yet another view is that leaders simply don’t know how to do it. They view the business in functional or departmental terms and have a traditional bias. There are so many popular improvement methods—such as TQM, Lean, Six Sigma, Reengineering, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)—that each takes on the flavor of the year. The growing complexity of business in general, due to factors such as globalization, regulation, and the pace of change of technology, adds yet another element into the mix such that leaders may not know how to transform operational performance in a sustainable way.

Even though business is arguably the most demanding of team sports, leadership teams typically don’t practice. That is, they don’t practice or role-play, as a senior management team, on how the organization performs for customers. They don’t fully understand how the flow of value-added activity creates value for customers. If they knew how, wouldn’t they measure what’s important to customers in a disciplined way? Wouldn’t they assign accountability for the performance of key capabilities in the company’s value chain instead of opting to assign accountability purely in terms of functional or business unit lines? Would they not want to deploy enabling technology with a view on the degree of its positive impact on operational performance? Wouldn’t they plan and implement recognition and reward systems to acknowledge the teams of people who do the most to improve operational performance? If they knew how, then they would probably attempt to do much of this.

In a nutshell, a big part of the problem is that executives continue to view the performance of the organization mainly in a departmental context. They have an ad hoc approach toward improving operations. When they launch improvements in operational performance, these initiatives are often of small scope and defined within departmental boundaries. These improvement projects may yield some benefits, but they surely leave money on the table. Traditional thinkers rarely measure what matters to customers. They go from one initiative to the next with insufficient focus on sustaining gains. They do not sufficiently appreciate that wholesale changes in organization structure and shifting priorities can disrupt the sustainment of major change.

What’s Needed?

There’s no magic involved in operational improvement and even in transformation. But this type of change does require a leadership and management mindset and behavior that are different from the norm. It requires that executives be fully prepared to provide customers with what they have come to expect and will increasingly demand. It also involves a fundamental shift in conventional wisdom, working collaboratively in a new way, and a higher level of competence in operational leadership. What is operational leadership? Operational leadership is defined as the comprehensive set of leadership and management behaviors needed to fundamentally improve and manage how their businesses get products and services developed, sold, delivered, and serviced. It relies on the following fundamental beliefs:

• The performance of shareholders is best served when an organization performs to fully satisfy the needs of its customers. This requires that leaders view the business from the “outside-in,” that is, from the customer’s perspective.¹⁰

• A company can only outperform its competitors if it can establish a difference that can be preserved by delivering greater value to customers, by creating comparable value at a lower cost, or by doing both.¹¹

• An end-to-end view of operational performance invariably requires an approach that marries radical innovation and the discipline of continuous, incremental improvement. “Piecemeal approaches that are assumed to be the answer are as dangerous as no response at all.”¹²

Basic service delivery isn’t enough to differentiate an organization in today’s market environment. Propelling a company beyond simple customer satisfaction to the type of relationships that can drive business growth demands a more profound understanding of the services that customers value, as well as employees who are empowered and motivated to interact with those customers the way the customers would like. That calls for viewing the business from the customer’s point of view—or from the “outside-in.” Drucker, considered to be the intellectual father of viewing the business from the customer’s perspective, wrote of the “thick and distorting glasses” of managers, driven by too great an emphasis on an internal perspective.¹³ Other authors (Tichy and Charan, Bund, and Spanyi, among others) and respected business leaders (Welch and Gerstner) have reinforced this perspective.¹⁴ Yet the majority of today’s corporations fall prey to a largely internal focus, leading to, among other things, the continued predominance of functional silos and fiefdoms.

The principal skills most frequently lacking in managers are the means for developing a view of the business in terms of the cross-functional activities that constitute the company’s value chain and the means for creating value for customers. Such a viewpoint is an essential ingredient in shifting the leadership perspective from a traditional functional paradigm to more of a customer-centric perspective. This is what a firm’s leaders need in order to develop a shared understanding of the company’s performance in terms of its value chain, or if you will, its capabilities and business processes. Yet, to this day, when an executive is asked to draw a picture of his or her business, they sketch what looks like a traditional organization chart, with boxes and labels depicting vertical reporting relationships. But this type of schematic fails to show how the business serves its customers, the products and services offered, and the value-creating flow of work. The organization chart, by itself, cannot be measured. Accordingly, if the traditional vertical organization view is the only view that exists, then that impedes an organization’s ability to plan, execute, and sustain significant improvement to operations.¹⁵

The traditional vertical view of business is the primary obstacle to success in improving operational performance. It leads to frequent reorganizations, an unprecedented level of complexity, the suboptimal deployment of IT, and contributes to poor decision making. The traditional view of business leads to an obsession with organization structure and results in frequent reorganizations, which tend to divert attention from the key operational activities that add value to the business and create value for customers. It contributes to a continuing concern around the age-old business-IT divide, due in part to an abdication of responsibility by operational business leaders for defining and actively participating in the implementation of essential, enabling information technology, on the grounds that it is the job of the IT department. Accordingly, the business value of IT systems is seldom fully realized, as the leaders of other functional areas do not develop a shared view on how much to spend on IT, where to spend the funds, and whom to blame if it doesn’t work out.¹⁶ Yet, significant improvements in operational performance increasingly rely on enabling IT.

The traditional vertical view of business also complicates decision making. As executives are primarily concerned with the performance of their departments, insufficient attention is devoted to the set of metrics that define operational performance from both the customer’s and the company’s perspective. The needed data sets are seldom collected, and, in the absence of operational analytics, executives resort to making key business decisions based primarily on their “gut feel,” instinct, and prior experience.¹⁷

There are several influential reasons for the prevailing traditional view of business. First, at the time that most of today’s leaders attended business school, the curriculum still reinforced a traditional, functional view of business. Next, most firms are still organized along traditional functional lines. Then, most firms still develop plans, budgets, and even recognition and reward systems along departmental lines. However, planning, executing, and sustaining significant improvement in operations requires that leaders view the business from the perspective of the customer, in terms of the performance of end-to-end workflows and in the context of a company’s value chain. This view of the business can be learned and is based on a set of key skills and attitudes relating to three key areas: crafting a compelling case for change, taking action, and sustaining gains.

On the other hand, a number of factors stand in the way of learning the needed skills, not the least of which are several misleading either-or propositions, popularized in recent management literature. What’s more important—strategy or execution? What is more effective—radical or incremental change? What’s more essential—leadership or management? While these either-or propositions may stimulate some intellectual discussion for the management teams of large, global conglomerates at a headquarters level, the answer at the operational level is clearly that both are necessary and neither is sufficient. It’s not OR—it’s AND. An understanding of strategy is essential in order to plan needed improvement in operations, and execution is essential to success. Radical change is often needed to execute significant operational improvement, and incremental continuous improvement is needed to optimize and sustain changes. Leadership is indispensable in launching and taking action to improve operational performance, and management is essential in sustaining operational improvements.

Planning, executing, and sustaining significant improvements in operational performance do indeed require a new brand of leadership—operational leadership—in order to craft a compelling case for change, to lead in taking action, and to lead in sustaining gains. The essence of operational leadership is when a leader has willing follows who are inspired to wholeheartedly commit to a common course of action.¹⁸ That’s what this book explores.

Mapping the Chapters of This Book

Chapter 1 has introduced you to some of the key issues and challenges in improving operations and the role of leadership. It began to make the case for the importance of operational leadership, outlined some of the challenges in leading operational improvements, and proposed a set of beliefs that are fundamental to success in this respect.

Chapter 2 provides you with an overview of the principles, practices, and pitfalls of operational leadership. Here, some of the essential literature on leading change is identified. Then, selected core principles are examined, such as viewing the business from the customer’s point of view or the “outside-in” and emphasizing broad cross-departmental collaboration at several levels. Next, the key aspects of practices involved in operational leadership are addressed, such as creating a compelling case for change, taking action, and installing accountability for continuous improvement. An overview of major pitfalls in operational leadership is also presented, including topics such as putting methods before outcomes and placing structure before process.

Chapter 3 examines in more detail the practice of crafting and communicating a compelling case for change. Topics examined in this chapter include stra...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Abstract
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Principles, Practices, and Pitfalls
• Chapter 3: A Compelling Case for Change
• Chapter 4: Leading Operational Improvement
• Chapter 5: Sustaining Improvements
• Chapter 6: The Future
• Notes
• References