Corporate Office - Facilitator or Inhibitor?

Corporate office functions are highly misunderstood and misused in organisations. The corporate functions should ideally focus on building a collaborative culture and work ethos. This could be done by creating organisational uniformity and performance focus - benchmarked process design, standard implementation and impersonal monitoring & control. Very often corporate offices, in both growing organisations as well as established organisations, get mired into becoming centres for organisational power politics. Inter-Functional rivalry to interpersonal combative competitiveness starts driving initiatives and social energy.

Recently I did some intervention for a french multinational for corporate function of one of their businesses. It opened up interesting insights for the whole team. It included all middle and senior level managers. While most of them knew and were conscious of results expected from their individual roles and functions, the element of creating collaborative culture and appreciation of interface with other roles and functions was missing. Most of the senior managers were also surprised to note this absence of mutual connect at functional interface level. The 2-day workshop created tremendous energy and brought them back to drawing board in terms of designing more efficient processes and performance monitoring systems.

Every senior manager in a corporate office needs to create a transparent and documented acknowledgement of importance of functional interface as well as organisational collaboration. The results this kind of collaborative culture and interface management could generate must be acknowledged and affirmed clearly for everyone to understand and focus on it. The second step is then to define measurement system around these two critical elements - how will you know if your department in the corporate office is facilitating collaborative culture in the organisation or not? Once this measurement is articulated and then regularly monitored, you may find that performance jumps a few notches without much effort.

I have shared an outline of this workshop for reference. You may feel free to connect if you want any further details on this. Explore this on your own and see tremendous positive energy unleashed in your corporate teams.