Current hot project –  Driving local accountability

Here’s the picture: A global multinational oil company (one of the big four) sells its Africa-wide downstream assets to a London-based investment company. The new owners have an ambitious agenda – double the operating income in the business over the next five years.

After the entity changed hands and was now under new ownership, something had to be done to deliver on the agenda. ‘If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got.’

A new CEO and his management team define a new way of working, characterized by a focus on the customer, a sales orientation, a bias for action, pushing decision-making down into the local organization, and a more-commercial mindset (as opposed to the one-darned-thing-after-another and business-as-usual approach of the past 50 years.) Very cool! But how do you get that embedded?

We designed a business process based on a sporting metaphor and aligned with modern ways of thinking about organizational change and implementing strategy.

The process is based on the notion that focus is everything (hint: identify the key levers for growth), that ‘chunking’ the work into projects provides natural starting points, ending points, accountability, clear definition of the work, stakeholder management, communication protocols. And then we get down a level, to beautiful simplicity: What are their winning actions that must be delivered on in the next 30 to 60 days to ensure that these projects stay on track, how do we measure progress in a way that is predictive of success, and how do we create micro-manifestations of accountability on a weekly basis, by showing managers how to help their team to ‘stand up and be counted.’

Supporting this process by a modern coaching methodology that is light and nondirective gives us an opportunity to have at least some influence over the sustainability of the project.

This whole project was run using our Radical Clarity™ accountability methodology.

For more information on this project, or to engage us to help you with something similar, shoot us an email.