'But what do I do Monday morning?'

By Lin Kroeger, Kenneth W. Witt and Joseph P. Castellano
PWD Consulting, Inc.

There are practical, immediate steps a financial group can take in response to change, whether the change is a result of a spin off, merger, downsizing, rapid growth, market demands, talent shortages, or internal organization shifts of strategy or priorities. The financial professionals who enlist the strengths and talents of their entire organization and respond strategically with action steps have an opportunity to lead the organization to a successful future.

Most people realize that every organization needs to define and understand its vision, mission, values, strategy, and goals. All too often, though, they spend enormous amounts of time and money defining them, and neither the leaders nor the players know exactly what to do when they arrive at work. If you’re going to invest in laying the foundation for organization success long term, you must also invest in ensuring every individual involved knows what to do “Monday morning.”

What are the high priorities? What action steps will lead to achieving the goals? How do I as an individual and as a team member ensure that the goals, if achieved, are clearly based on the values and support the vision and mission of the organization? Of equal importance, do the desired results tie directly to the strategy?

Consider the experience of a large firm in the consumer products industry. It was recently spun off from its parent organization and is striving to re-position itself in the market. Its financial professionals fully support the recently developed and launched vision, mission, and values statements. The challenge for managers is to translate the vision, mission, and values statements into a strategy they can and will implement. They have posed a series of questions:

Should we continue working on existing projects as planned?
Should we have a departmental meeting and review the statements and give "marching orders?"
Should we re-think our team structure and departmental strategy? If so, who contributes? Or do we make decisions now, as leaders, and announce the results when we have them?

Chances are they won’t respond to these questions. They will simply continue working on existing projects as planned. They will postpone making decisions about strategy and new directions until asked. They won’t try to translate the mission, vision, values, and corporate strategy into decisions affecting the functioning of the department. Why would they? There’s no reason or urgency to introduce new approaches with the ambiguity and discomfort new practices almost inevitably bring.

Yet the department loses a significant opportunity to harness the resources of its people and to allow them to contribute to the organization’s thinking about how to be successful in its new environment. It loses the opportunity to act practically on a new strategic direction.

The approach they must adopt is to identify and work on short term priorities, while concurrently devoting some time to helping the group understand the mission, vision, values, and the corporate strategy and build from their input to develop appropriate business plans. As a group, they can:

define the metrics by which success will be measured;
develop a full picture of what people must do and how they will do it to achieve the corporation’s stated goals;
identify the barriers that currently exist: why are people not doing things that way today;
build and implement action plans to eliminate the barriers and develop new ways of working to produce the results, in alignment with the corporate mission, vision, and values;
follow up to ensure action plans are implemented effectively.

Successful implementation of any strategy in today’s rapidly changing world requires the energy, ideas, and enthusiastic commitment of everyone in the organization. While identification with the ideals of the organization is one essential element, to inspire productive commitment, employees must also have a sense of ownership and responsibility, and these come from participation in the process that determines what they will do “Monday morning.”

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