Restoring organizational focus through symphonic coordination and shared vision

Symphonic Cooperation

Organizations begin to crumble when they lose their vision and the passion for serving customers, and in process, lose the sense of urgency surrounding the development of products and services. Often when an organizational structure begins to disconnect the root cause can be tied back to a loss of purpose and focus on serving others. When organizations lose this focus they become myopic and inward-centered, often becoming complacent in the process. This complacency coupled with a myopic vision of just doing what matters internally and either relying just on service contracts with larger customers to survive or gradually selling off core intellectual property results in the gradual decline of the organization. Evidence abounds of companies this has happened to, and the mile markers along the way include outdated and fragmented product strategies, increasingly hostile relationships between departments, and significant increases in-fighting and political battles for corporate funding of projects. The bottom line is that in the absence of a collective or shared vision and an urgency to accomplish it, organizations splinter apart as each department pursues its own vision and objectives. Because of this, organizations fail and are overtaken by more agile, more needs-focused ones that can overcome the challenges of staying focused and growing. That is the essence of the symphonic coordination necessary to turn a company around and the subject of this paper.

Symphonic Coordination Starts with a Passionately Shared Vision

As the CEO of a company suffering from a fragmented and embattled culture, the first steps I would take would be to find what the true passion of the organization is. I would travel to each and every department, division, location, and office and make my first priority the discovery of what strengths the organization has. I would next visit with every major customer and ask them the same question. From this exercise I would find a vision and set of objectives I felt would make the organization passionately engaged. My goal would be to first ignite the passion in the organization to serve customers, and I would live and breathe that vision. I would be the leading cheerleader of the vision and its chief evangelist, and I would commit myself totally and utterly to it so the rest of the organization could see it was real to me and I felt it was valuable and attainable.

Process Redefinition

Next, instead of merely re-shuffling boxes on an organization chart I would thoroughly review all processes that either directly or indirectly impacted or influenced customer demand and customer service. If any processes got in the way of serving customers, I would discontinue it and get rid of the distraction within the organization. Departments would be organized to make customer-facing processes work first and the traditional organizational structure would abandoned in favor of a more agile, more market-sensing and customer-responsive organizational strategy. In fact any organizational process that did not add value to the steps of attracting, selling or serving customers would be gone after the review I would complete. In addition, new processes that would increase the agility and speed of the entire value chain of the company would be included. Underscoring all these changes would be the passionate vision I would be the chief evangelist of. If there were disputes between departments, the focus on what delivers the most value to the customer as a strategy would be undertaken. The organization would no doubt be much thinner, yet it would be full of people energized with a common vision they truly believed in, and the organizational structure would be more process than functionally-driven.

Summary

In summary, I would take the following key steps:

Determine what the core strengths of the organization are and build a strong vision and a passionate message around it to serve as the foundation for true change. As the CEO it would be imperative for me to be the foremost evangelist of the vision to make it real for the employees.

Focus on the value chain and making supply chain management and customer fulfillment, sales and service world-class. Incent cooperation from both ends of the value chain to ensure excellent performance and give generous bonuses of quantifiable evidence of this cooperation.

Delete and abandon all functional boxes and re-structure the organization to be agile and quick to respond on specific customer- and supplier-facing processes to ensure the greatest agility possible.

Always re-evaluate the processes used to serve customers and suppliers and re-define the structure of the company to stay agile and focused. Work to get roadblocks out of the way for each process-centric group to achieve their stated objectives of serving customers and growing customer loyalty and customer lifetime value.

Incent and recognize cross-company collaboration across the entire value chain within the company.