Visionary to Practical
Bryan Whitefield
I empower leaders to cultivate high-performance teams making faster and better decisions | Recognised expert in strategy and risk | Expert facilitator and trainer and sought-after mentor | MAICD, MRMIA & CCRO
Your greatest fear could be this picture: An organisation of brilliant minds and innovative ideas. Yet, teams are working in silos, projects are misaligned, and the organisation's vision seems like a distant mirage.
In the words of Simon Sinek author of Start with Why “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it!”
Creating a shared vision is not as easy as creating the vision and highlighting it on a strategic plan-on-a-page. Implementation barriers loom large, and alignment can be elusive. People are often, most times unknowingly, resistant to change. If you are faced with these types of challenges, you are often left “herding cats”.
To bridge the gap between boardroom dreams and corporate reality, you and other leaders need to take practical, actionable steps. Here are the two that I have seen to be incredibly effective.
Creating a narrative
A huge step to overcoming resistance to change is creating a narrative where teams and individual staff can see that they are part of the story. The impact is more than motivation. When they can see themselves in the story, they can much more easily align their goals and actions to the vision via the narrative.
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Enterprise-wide risk management
It may come as a surprise to some, however, the most significant impact in practice of an appropriately implemented risk management program is the break-down of silos and the alignment of programs and projects to corporate objectives.
Programs and projects are aligned by asking questions concerning the uncertainty every leader has around the achievement of their objectives in relation to the key functions, programs and projects under their remit. The silos are busted by communicating the questions and answers within a leader’s team and to other teams via regular reporting.
Put simply, it is all about getting the best information to the brain for decision making, and back again. Just like our central nervous system does in the human body!
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Ensuring risk management adds value to your business
2 个月So projects are straightforward but by comparison silo integration is not only a much bigger problem but is a risk that is increasing. My experience with several banks over the last couple of years demonstrate this. When dealing with one silo there is often a need to obtain a ‘tick’ from a second silo. Processes are then applied by the second silo regardless of their relevance to the initial requirement. The inefficiency results in a huge waste of time and cost. The challenge here is to find a manager who sits atop of the silos with enough seniority to make common sense decisions and cut across unnecessary processes. I have not been very successful in finding that divine being!
Ensuring risk management adds value to your business
2 个月I concur (it’s certainly no surprise) that silos and programmes/projects are significant risks. The risk is that 'integration is inadequate'. Project integration is much easier to address as an individual (ie the project manager) is responsible for one key aspect of integration namely a project’s objectives. Project objectives should be aligned but subordinate to a programme’s objectives. These in turn should be aligned but subordinate to the organisation’s objectives. Objectives that apply to the specific management level (project/programme etc) enables the impact of a risk to be measured in terms of its effect on objectives and hence align with ISO 31000’s definition of a risk. Below is an example. This table is generic and could be applied across an organisation.