research-based, and time-tested programmatic approaches to team building.
Tying It All Together
To execute these people-centric activities
in ways that make real sense, they’ve got
to be part of a comprehensive, sequenced
and prioritized, coherent track of efforts.
Doing them willy-nilly, or as time permits,
or as they occur to someone, is guaranteed to be ineffective on a good day,
calamitous on a bad one.
People—at all levels—don’t intuitively
know how to build and earn trust, how to
collaborate, how to set rules of engagement
for groups, what authenticity really means,
or how to communicate. They need training, coaching, practice, evaluation—and
repetition. All planned and deliberate, with
clear processes and objectives.
Additionally, some individuals will
inevitably be found to need specific and
personalized development. Plugging the
holes, filling the gaps, and shoring up the
weak spots will demand customized devel-
opmental programs for each one. And,
those efforts will need to be built into the
overall people component of the project.
How Important Is This, Really?
It’s big. Maybe that’s part of why it doesn’t
get tackled often enough or completely
enough. Take a look the brief outline
above one more time. Does not doing this
explain how so many major corporate
efforts—business transformation, supply
chain transformation, facility redesign,
new system implementation, whatever—
fail to meet expectations, stopping somewhere on the Yellow Brick Road before
reaching Emerald City?
Think back to your last disappointing
transformation experience. Would taking
care of the people issues in the way just
laid out have made a difference in accept-
ance and success? Think about an effort
in your own past that was apparently suc-
cessful, but which saw gains and benefits
erode over a few years’ time. Would
changing how people thought, felt, and
worked together have done a better job
of institutionalizing—baking in—the
qualities that support continuing
improvement from the new implementa-
tion’s initial performance?
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www.SupplyChainBrain.com.
