Effectively Organizing Your People Processes and Technology Around Your Organizational Strategy
Delta Associates, a firm that truly understands organizational performance, would like to partner with you to design an organization that functions in all the ways that accomplish your strategy. Call Jack Speer, 512-498-9780 or email jspeer@delta-associates.com.
You Get What You Organize for
Organizations get the results they organize for–for better or for worse.
As someone involved in building an organization, you know that organizational performance dynamics are so complex and intricate that few professionals inside or outside the organization really understand them. Yet no organization succeeds without developing a strategy around a carefully configured group of people within your organization who work in extremely diverse roles from different vantage points. People, processes, and technology must effectively come together in order to fulfill the mission of the organization at the regional, national, or global level.
Delta Associates works with both young and mature organizations, from mid-size to large to develop an effective organization from both a systems and process perspective and from the perspective of human performance. Delta Associates has developed a unique combination of tools to enable organizations to succeed through systems, processes, and people.
Some of these organizational tools are the following:
Senior management may be brilliant decision makers, but you need more than ad hoc, in the moment fixes. What if purchasing makes it impossible for product development to happen because purchasing procedures reflect risk aversion more than opportunity? What do you do if accounting is controlled by entrenched power that reflects the slow speed of the 20th Century? If there is a huge body of intractable problems, you need a broad organizational audit to surface the critical organization-killing issues and fix them.
Organizational Systems and Culture Audits. You must have an audit process specifically for the organization to understand the complex processes of what’s working and what’s not. If you only audit your finances, the lack of an organizational audit will still sink you as fast as a cash flow crisis.
Few organizations understand that their organization works or doesn’t work based on the way it is designed. Executives often look at individual problems as they come up in the moment and deal with single issues. Customers get lost and are never found, but nobody connects this to processes. Emails are sent to employees worldwide about procedures, but nothing changes. Someone within or without the organization understands the problem and could fix it quickly, but there is as little likelihood they’ll be heard as someone trapped under an avalanche in an unknown location has the chance of being rescued.
“If you only audit your finances, the lack of an organizational audit will still sink you as fast as a cash flow crisis.”
Senior management may be brilliant decision makers, but you need more than ad hoc, in the moment fixes. What if purchasing makes it impossible for product development to happen because purchasing procedures reflect risk aversion more than opportunity? What do you do if accounting is controlled by entrenched power that reflects the slow speed of the 20th Century? If there is a huge body of intractable problems, you need a broad organizational audit to surface the critical organization-killing issues and fix them.
360-degree Organizational Assessments/ Organizational Alignment Strategies Delta Associates has expertise in 360-degree assessments for organizations and initiatives for organizational alignment. 360-degree assessments are no longer a novelty for senior management; they have become an essential tool.
At the senior management level, a 360-degree assessment provides deep insight into how the leadership is doing. A 360-degree organizational assessment assesses how departments and teams work in relationship to each other. It answers questions such as, “Where are the bottlenecks between departments and functions and why?” “What assumptions do we have about the way things work, and are the assumptions valid?” “Why is a department a silo or world to itself, and how can we make it work as part of the whole?”
Executive Team Alignment. Delta Associates has the uncommon ability to enable senior management to align so that the organization succeeds. An organization usually doesn’t succeed “in spite of” an executive team. If an organization succeeds, it’s usually because of an executive team that is in alignment on the key issues that will enable it to lead the organization. Studies of senior management tell us that the influence of the CEO on an organization is enormous–a key to its success. They also tell us that the influence of the senior management team is often even greater than that of the CEO.
That a senior management team should be aligned as a team should be common sense. Yet more often than not, it lacks the degree of true alignment it needs. Members of the executive team are strong leaders and are often more used to dictating than collaborating.
Employee Engagement. In order to develop employees, we need to understand to what extent they are bringing their interests, passions, mind and heart to work–not just their bodies. Armed with the true knowledge of who your employees really are and what engages or disengages them, you will have a fundamental tool for developing an organization and a strategy around people. Delta Associates helps you find out what keeps your best employees in place and what will make them begin to look for other opportunities. An employee engagement survey, like no other tool, is a guide to building a better organizational environment.
At the senior management level, a 360-degree assessment provides deep insight into how the leadership is doing. A 360-degree organizational assessment assesses how departments and teams work in relationship to each other. It answers questions such as, “Where are the bottlenecks between departments and functions and why?” “What assumptions do we have about the way things work, and are the assumptions valid?” “Why is a department a silo or world to itself, and how can we make it work as part of the whole?”
Building, Changing and Sustaining Organizational Culture. Delta Associates engages in the critically important process of building, changing and sustaining organizational culture. Success or failure in this area can mean whether the organization will succeed long-term, or go the way of the 8-track cassette.
What we mean by organizational culture is embedded in this question: “What is the style of an organization, the ways in which people are expected to behave, who is normally is seen as having clout and who is powerless, what’s cool to do and what is embarrassing–apart from what is written or verbally dictated by formal authority in an organization.?” Culture is the set of behaviors and norms that tend to hold a powerful sway no matter what leader comes or goes.
Culture change can be absolutely necessary to the introduction of new technologies, new ways that people on teams must react to dynamic and chaotic scenarios often seen in times of rapid change. Yet these changes can run counter to organizational culture and be met with frontal and behind-the-scenes resistance.
Cultural change is difficult to the point of impossible unless it is skillfully communicated and is properly rewarded. New behaviors must be reinterpreted in ways that are acceptable in times of cultural transition. Few firms have the skills and abilities to manage cultural change and Delta Associates is one of these organizations.
Succession Planning. Delta Associates works effectively with organizations to ensure that they make effective transitions in periods of retirement, employee buy-outs, mergers, and reductions in force. We help you make sure that when the ground is moving under the feet of the organization, critical tasks are performed by people who have the institutional knowledge to perform them, that there is someone ready, willing, and capable to perform in the long and the short term no matter what is happening in the organization. We help you build a bench that gives the organization depth and agility.