Spring into Action: Three Actions Your Organization Must Implement to Avoid the Penalty for Waiting-out Uncertainty

By: Gunter Wessels and Sam O’Rear

Now that you’ve laid the foundation for Federal Fiscal Year 2013 preparation, what’s next? How should you act on your decisions, in an uncertain time?

Current results are perhaps not meeting expectations and doing more of what you did to get here will only make things worse. The time to engage in focused action is now.

Following are three actions you must take to secure your organization’s future:

1.  Invigorate your operations

With a clear mission based on a core competence the task shifts to a focus on execution. It becomes important now to look at the people, processes, and technology you deploy to implement your mission.

The talent resources of your organization are the first and most consequential area to invigorate. Searching for ideas and effort to implement the vision and mission is the next step. This step is concerned with processes and process refinement. With talented people charged with an outcome to deliver, the organizational design determines how you acquire, process, and disperse information, as well as generate action.

The enterprise of invigorating operations is concerned with affecting the very culture of the organization.  Culture, and driving cultural change is the best tool managers have to implement a clear mission and strategy.

2. Dig into Your Metrics

You get what you measure, and actions have consequences which feed back to the organization through measures and metrics. The best way to drive organizational change is through the metrics-based reward systems, and incentive compensation.

Adjusting measures should be done with care and planning, but it is virtually impossible to gain sustainable change without adjusting the performance measures.

Best practices focus on a well designed set of measures, that conform with the mission objectives. Well designed measures consider the roles of the personnel, to which they apply.

For example, if transaction volume needs to speed up the legal department may need to be brought into accountability. But the function of legal is to protect the organization against myriad contingent liabilities. Therefore a performance metric that seeks to speed transaction volume could measure the average review time, and solicit the input of legal on the ways that could be done without defeating the purpose of legal review.

3.  Develop your people

Achieving flexibility and driving organizational culture cannot be done without empowering employees. Personnel development is a staged process, beginning with leadership, proceeding to middle management, and then extending to the entire organization.

During periods of uncertainty and risk amplification, the best investment business managers can make is in developing principled leadership. The next best investment is to develop the business acumen of management, and exposing the organization to tools and techniques required to assess and implement prudent action.

Sadly, one of the first budget items to be sacrificed during periods of uncertainty and under-performance is personnel development. This is unfortunate, because training, and business acumen development have possibly the greatest positive return during these periods.

If managers wait for the return of certainty to invest in the organization, the positive return is diminished, and opportunities are confounded by a more crowded field of competitors.

We are blessed to live in the largest, most vibrant, and best developed economy the world have ever seen. Using uncertainty to create opportunity, and capitalize on it, is your renewed purpose today.

As the cloud of uncertainty hangs over this year, those organizations that can clarify the picture for themselves and create opportunity will thrive. The purpose of business management is to act, with due care and prudence in advancing the mission and generating returns for stakeholders.