The Agenda Load

Value: This is about understanding the type of value your stakeholders expect from you. This lies behind the actual products or services you provide. It is about recognising why these things are important to them, how they want to use them and the benefits they expect them to bring into their lives.

The reason understanding the genre of value you deal with is important is because how that value is delivered will change over time. It is influenced by changing standards, regulation, technology and recipient needs. For example, people need transport but over the years it has changed from walking only, to animal powered to machine powered. The expectations about comfort, reliability and safety have also changed. Understanding that what it is that people value will help you keep your organisation focued on meeting current and emergent needs.

This means a leader has to take time to keep researching, listening and comprehending what is important to people, now and into the future.

Design: Equipped with a reliable understanding of what people need, leaders can address the design issues around what they actually deliver. Design is a critical part of generating value. It is about matching what you do with how people can meet their needs.

Design goes deeply into what you and your organisation do. It affects the quality, experience, durability, suitability and accessibility issues that go with the products and services you provide. So leaders go beyond understanding the type of value they create. They invest in understanding the customer's experience. They have to keep checking that customers are satisfied by the products and services and whether they are meeting all the needs they are intended to address.

Design also takes leaders into the fields of continuous improvement and innovation. Doing the same thing over is important in the short term, as one goes through the phase of producing products and services once they are developed. But in the long term, doing the same thing over, in the same way, is a recipe for becoming redundant. Competitors will copy you, customer expectations will vary and you need to respond, improving quality, efficiency and relevance.

It also requires that you learn from the competitors and innovators in your field. Evidence indicates that the top ten percent of performers in a sector are often twice as productive as the bottom ten percent. The key issue is why haven't the leaders in the bottom 10% learned how to at least copy what the top 10% do, let alone learned how to generate their own innovation and successes. ¹

This means a leader has to help organisations to learn and develop as they also continue the day to day production of products and services. Stagnation doesn't help anyone.

1. For a study into this phenomenon see: Gibbons, R., & Henderson, R. (2012). 'What Do Managers Do? Exploring Persistent Performance Differences among Seemingly Similar Enterprises’. In R. Gibbons & J. Roberts (Eds.), The Handbook of Organizational Economics (pp. 680–731). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Engagement: Leaders need people and groups to invest in their organisation. This involves promoting it and making it relevant to them, through consultation, marketing and public relations, depending on the group. Likewise it involves the ability to get customers to treat your organisation as their preferred supplier for meeting their needs in the areas where you can provide them with value.

In retail this is as direct as serving over the counter customers. In business to business or professional services this requires more involved relationships, building up proposals, trust and a shared history. With not for profits and community service organisations this often involves delivering services to third parties on behalf of customers or investors. Sometimes, in the community services area, the distinction between who are investors and who are customers is often blurred, so leaders have to manage hybrid relationships and interests. And for government and public services, the complex nature of relationships means that sometimes it is as simple as a retail relationship and at other times the same person or group can combine elements of investor, customer and regulator!

Leaders identify the different groups and individuals their organisation and teams rely on and serve. Each one needs their own relationship strategy. Balancing and maintaining these relationships and their different interests, values and needs is a high priority for leaders.

Validation: An important part of involving people is building their confidence in your organisation and what it does for them. This true also for people internal to your organisation. A key part to building this confidence is validating their experience and reinforcing for them the belief that you and your organisation are providing their best avenue for meeting their needs.

Providing satisfaction is not enough to generate loyalty to your organisation. Loyalty is the desire of people to continue involving themselves in your organisation, giving it positive consideration and wanting to be a part of it. To achieve this you have to emotionally engage them. This can be done in many ways but at the core it is about meeting their needs in a way that is emotionally satisfying for them. For example, a low stress solution will be more attractive than a high stress solution. An easy to access, usable and affordable solution will be preferred to a remote, difficult and expensive solution. And the quality of customer service is critical. It is the relationship interface where people experience whether you respect and value them.

As key part to validating the value of your relationship, product and services is to understand how your stakeholders evaluate whether they are getting value. The obvious first step is whether your products and services actually provide the type of value they are after. Without that you simply have nothing to offer. That is often established in the marketing and sales part of the relationship. But after this you have to be aware of their priorities. The same customer, at different times, may shift from being focused at one time on quality with a willingness to pay a premium to get it to another time where cash flow is the issue and cost is the driving factor. The same applies internally, depending on the organisation's financial position and brand strategy. Of course, for community services, the definition of value can take on a whole new world of complexity as your try to understand the relationship between affordability and the public good outcomes stakeholders seek.

Direction: Leaders must help people see what it is the organisation or team is trying to achieve. This is not just what it will do but also what type of organisation it will become and what place in the market it will fill. This broad scale, whole of organisation picture has to be made relevant to local work units and individual people. Everyone's efforts align around a common purpose and direction.

A critical attribute of any vision or direction is that it must be tangible. If it cannot be witnessed, evaluated or measured then how are people to know whether they are making progress towards it or have achieved it? The mistake many groups make it to try and make the vision so noble that it becomes an unachievable, unconfirmable goal. If they are lucky they might have an aspiration statement but not a vision. Aspiration statements are important because they express the intention and values of a group but a vision statement has to express something the group can achieve.

This brings us to another key attribute of an organisation diretion. The vision or goals have to be something that people and the organisation can actually influence, decide and do. There is no point to a direction that is beyond the capacity of the organisation to influence. Such a goal would only set the organisation up for failure or a fatalistic dependence on the actions of others or chance.

By setting a clear direction with achievable goals, leaders can map out with people plans and goals. These can be layered from whole of organisation plans to branches, units and individual performance goals. The purpose it to align everyone's efforts around the organisation's priorities.

Production: Production is the cornerstone of organisations. It is where value is created and the organisation delivers on its commitments to people. Understandably it takes up most of the organisation's efforts.

Whether you are in the business of products or services there are a few key responsibilities you must focus on with your production. There are, of course, many technical matters that you and your people have to attend to. These vary depending on the content of your business. These technical matters will involve methods, resources, systems and process that fit their nature. But the technical issues are only a means to the end of production. The three key responsibilities are revenue, value and security.

• Revenue: It is important that production is focued on activities that will generate revenue. Yes, sometimes there are loss leaders or pro bono activities that organisations prioritise but if production is not generating revenue the organisation cannot pay its way.
  
  
• Value: Productive activity must increase the value of the organisation. It does this through efficiency, building experience, knowledge, patents and product lines. The quality of the products and services produced will affect the brand value of the organisation, as will the interactions of sales and customer service staff. Every action can affect the value of the organisation.
  
  
• Security: This is important on many levels, starting with the health and safety of the people involved with the organisation. But it is also about preventing crises through good information management, communication and decisions. It is about meeting regulatory and legal obligations as well as sound financial management. It is also about ensuring that products and services meet the expected quality standards.

People: People in teams have to build rapport, trust and confidence in each other. It is not enough to be technically excellent if the person creates so much abrasion that information flow, task coordination and customer service is disrupted because people want to avoid them. Every team member is responsible for helping the team succeed, which means treating colleagues well.

People are responsible for cooperating with the leaders and working with them to build effective relationships. It is not productive to let people dump all responsibilities on the leader or their peers. Initiative and problem solving are important qualities for everyone.

Leaders: People are complex so leaders need to take each person seriously if they are going to position everyone to do their best. This also means adapting their style to suit each relationship. A change in style does not mean acting inauthentically. You are still yourself. It means focusing your attention, communication processes, levels of direction and support and methods of feedback to suit the person and their situation.

The theory of leadership called contingency or situation leadership has generated models to help leaders do this. The simple factors you can consider to start with are how much direction does a person need to know what to do and how capable are they of acting independently. This varies from situation to situation, depending on their familiarity with the role, task or stakeholder. Another factor is how much emotional and social support do they need.

Culture: Everyone is responsible for setting up productive and healthy norms in the the organisation. Culture is the expression of what people think is normal and so conform to. This makes ongoing examination of those assumptions very important.

An important thing to recognise about culture is that assumptions can long out last their relevance or usefulness. Some assumptions were never useful to start with. Careful inquiries into the origin of workplace beliefs and practices can help to uncover why people do things the way they do. Be careful, because some cultural practices are born from past injustices or hurts.

The object is to build up sets of practices and beliefs that help people to perform well, maintain their wellbeing and encourage them in their work.

• Know the value the role is to create for the organisation.
• Understand the technical and professional value you bring to the role.
• Recognise the value priorities communicated in the organisation.

• Focus on the cost, reliability and usefulness of how things are done to get results.
• Adapt work practices to fit the customers’ and organisation’s needs.
• Produce efficiently and sustainably.
• Find and share new and better ways to get results.

• Know who to work and deal with to get things done in the organisation.
• Work effectively with the key customers and suppliers to facilitate beneficial outcomes.
• Build efficient and reliable relationships with other people involved

• Use opportunities to demonstrate ability to contribute and get results.
• Show that personal processes and completed tasks are cost effective and add value.
• Generate data and evidence of outcomes and benefits produced for customers and the organisation.

• Work on personal role priorities and targets.
• Contribute to team / branch priorities.
• Build a foundation for career and future role responsibilities.

• Focus on tasks and responsibilities.
• Deliver on time, within cost to the agreed level of quality.
• Work reliably for those who depend on you. Engage in quality improvement processes.
• Represent the organisation and its value to customers.
• Engage in safe practices.
• Use resources well to reduce costs.
• Act quickly to address contingencies.

• Identify and comply with constructive team norms but challenge and encourage learning about unhelpful ones.
• Build helpful relationships with in the team, contributing to get team outcomes, not just personal ones.
• Develop a constructive way of working with the supervisor to get clear expectations and helpful feedback.

• Clarify with the manager the value the organisation wants from the team.
• Understand the team’s purpose as a contributor to the value the organisation creates.
• Identify value customers want from the team.
• Understand what suppliers and stakeholders value and how the organisation can work with them.
• Identify where the value the team’s performance and activities can increase.
• Focus on the value of the leadership team prioritises.
• Identify where management practices can maximise the value of existing resources.

• Work out effective ways to organise people and skills.
• Implement ways to make products / services customer friendly.
• Use processes and routines that maximise team effectiveness.
• Explore alternative sources for resources and skills to increase value.
• Identify, develop and acquire the skills, abilities and aptitude required in the team and organisation.
• Use data, benchmarks, trends and feedback to develop and improve team performance.

• Streamline processes with other teams, suppliers and customers.
• Build and cultivate effective communication with peers, boss and team members.
• Foster cooperation, win-win and problem solving relationships.
• Develop the performance of the team in collaboration with other teams in the organisation.

• Provide performance lifting feedback to team members.
• Identify, develop and implement effective measures and indicators to demonstrate results and benefits.
• Demonstrate to team members and manager the effectiveness and beneficial outcomes of plans and decisions.
• Test and measure performance effectiveness, addressing mismatches between expectations and results.
• Meet or exceed expectations for strategic and operational priorities.
• Help customers and stakeholders identify and experience the benefits you produce.

• Clearly state team priorities and procedures.
• Focus on the team's core revenue / value creation.
• Prioritise key relationships and customers to focus on.
• Set standards and performance goals.
• Use benchmarks to meet or exceed the product and service quality of competitors.
• Bring everything together into a clear operational plan.

• Set tasks, routines and scripts to enhance the value, quality and customer experience of products and services.
• Maximise effort that generates revenue.
• Conduct clear safety and reliability processes.
• Ensure back room support and supply of resources.
• Set targets, monitor results, manage variation.
• Work with innovators and the team to solve problems and implement improvements.

• Use an effective leadership style that works with your team.
• Set norms and expectations for how things are done.
• Ensure team members understand and can meet their responsibilities.
• Use plans and feedback to develop people’s capability.
• Build a cooperative network with boss and peers to get improvements and results.

• Work with peers and senior managers to identify and understand where the organisation can create value.
• Break down silos by linking own areas of responsibility with other areas in the organisation to maximise effectiveness creating value.
• Gather and analyse customer feedback and enquire to understand what value they are seeking.
• Nominate the value their reporting supervisors and teams are to focus on creating.

• Establish arrangements so reporting supervisors will build the reliability, cost effectiveness and performance levels of their teams, products and services.
• Develop ways of bringing together related parts of the organisation to devise and implement ways to increase the value of what they do.
• Implement frameworks to understand, interrogate and develop the way work flows so effort is sustainable, meets a clear need and minimises effort and cost.

• Empower and delegate authority to supervisors so they can act to build productivity.
• Work with senior management to understand the direction, priorities and performance goals of the organisation.
• Build rapport and common purpose with other leaders along the production chain, from investors and suppliers to distributors and customers, establishing relationships that can mobilise around issues and opportunities.
• Monitor and cultivate respectful and cooperative relationships with neighbours, that is people and organisations that live or work in the facility or district, so everyone can go about their business without disruption.

• Provide evidence that strategies improve financial and quality outcomes, reduce operating costs and improve processes and results.
• Use results to reinforce the benefits of cooperative peer relationships and silo busting.
• Show that supervisors are developing, increasing their capacity to manage, exercise delegated authority and get results in priority areas.
• Show that oversight of systems balances a disciplined approach to getting results with experimentation and innovation.
• Use a performance system to set expectations, track progress, give feedback and give recognition.

• Produce a management plan with a long term context for the operational plans of supervisors and teams.
• Develop processes to explore, plan and implement strategies for improvement in own area and in cooperation with others.
• Set performance priorities with targets and goals for reporting teams to meet.

• Implement strategies to build the capability of supervisors to make decisions, prioritise, get results and build the performance of their teams. Clarify milestones for delivery and improvement strategies.
• Implement a disciplined regimen for ensuring the best results with suppliers, partners, resources and customers.
• Work with boss and peers to continually develop the strategic context for the area and how it integrates with other areas.

• Enable supervisors to exercise their authority. Build collegiality with other managers.
• Select and develop supervisors that get results and build the effectiveness of their teams.
• Set clear expectations for teams to work and cooperate with each other and other stakeholders.
• Establish active feedback and information processes to track, support and build effective performance.

• Maintain current knowledge of the value others in the sector are creating and its relevance to the value created by own functional area and to the organisation as a whole.
• Initiate and sponsor projects in the organisation based on a clear evaluation of the value they will generate.
• Understand and apply how organisations in the sector establish their value as a place for talent, productivity and employee retention.

• Work out how leading edge technology and practice can be applied to increase value. Set up ways to attract, develop and retain people who can perform effectively.
• Map a future direction for the functional area that can be used by leaders to plan and make decisions.
• Establish ways to integrate with other functional areas to maximise value and effectiveness.

• Participate in industry activities to build links with leaders, researchers and emerging innovators so their efforts can feed into the organisation.
• Understand and learn about distributors so they can promote your products or services and share what they learn from customers.
• Enable suppliers to offer new options that could help raise performance.
• Build strong collegial relations with peers who lead other functional areas, looking at how the areas impact on each other and building cooperation and integrated systems.
• Work with managers to build rapport and confidence with staff and others and identify issues, create solutions and build a healthy, effective work force.

• Provide a clear strategy and plan for ways to make the functional area more effective, mapping out short and long term actions for innovation and improvement that are based on clear sector drivers and will produce results and benefits for the organisation.
• Map clearly how the functional area integrates with other areas in the organisation, working together to break silos, remove road blocks and foster cooperation that strengthens performance across the organisation.
• Build a pool of talent at all levels of the functional area to achieve current expectations, adapt, learn and grow with changing conditions and cultivate promotable people who can adapt and move into new leadership positions.

• Set the direction and future goals of the functional area, including how it fits and contributes to the organisation’s goals.
• Establish targets to integrate and support innovation, development and improvement.
• Establish leadership priorities to guide leaders from supervisors up. Set people priorities that cultivate and retain leaders and technical talent.
• Clarify partnership expectations with other functional areas to ensure smooth systems and improvements across the organisation.

• Sponsor strategies, programs and systems to implement improvements and innovation within the function and partnering others.
• Establish processes to build and maintain a balanced understanding of how all operational and support activities contribute and interact.
• Set clear performance and results goals for managers to meet. Ensure managers prioritise and reinforce revenue producing activities, build the value and reputation of the organisation and address issues that affect the security of the organisation.
• Implement processes to generate promotable leaders and innovators. Access external experts, innovators and industry knowledge to plan and build the functional area’s capability.

• Build a cooperative culture across all areas within the function, outlining the managers’ responsibility to contribute to the whole.
• Lead to build competence in leaders and staff so they take responsibility, build innovation, cooperate and get results where they count.
• Establish clear expectations with healthy, respectful and productive norms for how people conduct themselves.
• Invest in and encourage managers and supervisors to build the technical and leadership capabilities of people.

• Build a value proposition that matches what customers need.
• Scan the environment and track strategic changes and threats, analysing them to clarify what decisions must be made.

• Manage impacts of own area on other parts of the organisation as part of responsibility for the whole organisation.
• Identify and initiate new ventures to support future business.
• Implement strategies to cultivate increased value and performance across the organisation.

• Build strong working relationships with CEO, board members, customers and peers, understanding their priorities and working constructively with them.
• Cultivate the full array of critical relationships across government, customers, industry, partnerships, peers, CEO and the board.
• Champion the goals of the whole organisation, participating in the leadership team to support all organisational activities.

• Demonstrate actions to support effectiveness across the organisation.
• Implement systems and communication processes to produce clear, accurate knowledge about the status of each business area.
• Establish processes and metrics for ongoing reviews of how leaders and business areas perform.
• Demonstrate the current return on investment from each business area or validate projections for future returns.

• Align the organisation around a clear strategy for current effectiveness and build its capability for the next decade.
• Allocate resources effectively, balancing competing needs to maximise profitability.
• Develop the capability of the business including where to expand or contract resource commitments and defining what to deliver.

• Implement business practices that enable a steady flow of integrated business activities at all levels.
• Work with managers to balance control mechanisms with the necessary business risks, keeping risks within reasonable bounds and balanced across the organisation.
• Ensure development, delivery and promotion of products and services, building the reputation and security of the organisation and its brands.
• Balance sales, production and development to ensure ongoing connection with customers and demand for products and services.

• Lead the organisation, preparing it for its future while supporting current effectiveness and moving beyond its past.
• Build managers who can perform at high levels and become executive candidates.
• Promote a culture where improving on current performance is normal.

• Identify, describe, clarify and explain the value the organisation creates, who for and in what sectors.

• Identify the contextual challenges to address so relevant products and services are produced.
• Establish clear standards that products, services and brands must meet.
• Define clear expectations for achieving innovation.
• Ensure the organisational structure drives innovation and development.

• Build high level relationships with key customers and stakeholders to facilitate good business.
• Establish and maintain the confidence of the board.
• Continually engage executives with effective feedback and communication.
• Identify current critical activities and build constructive relationships with the people responsible for them.
• Generally build people’s trust and confidence in the organisation.

• Implement and maintain responsive governance mechanisms that can address issues quickly at all levels.
• Identify variations to the strategic direction and address the conditions that cause them.
• Define and establish the standards for measuring and evaluating progress and performance.
• Establish reliable data systems to produce accurate and timely information.
• Design and maintain a system of regular review processes across the organisation.
• Use performance measures to trigger rewards and recognition.

• Develop and uphold a vision for where the organisation is heading, its mission focus to get there and the values it is built on.
• Establish a strategic direction with plans and budgets cascading through the organisation from strategic to operational.

• Invest and allocate resources in areas and activities that support the vision.
• Provide decisions and delegations that generate approvals as needed and confirm the authority for people to act.
• Set the required outcomes for business processes and a culture of disciplined performance.
• Establish a framework that ensures all work and responsibility is accounted for across the organisation.

• Build and cultivate a leadership team that supports effective whole of organisation decision making processes.
• Develop people to fill leadership roles, especially potential future senior executives and CEOs.
• Set standards for recruiting and staffing arrangements to engage and keep talent and high performance.
• Develop a culture where supporting people and problem solving is normal.

• Ensure investor and stakeholder investment is protected, maintained and rewarded.

• Determine suitable compensation for CEO.
• Evaluate and determine returns to investors.
• Oversee how ownership and the value of the organisation is divided and distributed.
• Recommend for or against acquisitions, mergers and changes to the value of the organisation.

• Work collaboratively with other board members to best represent the interests of owners and investors.
• Enable informed participation of investors and stakeholders through effective reporting, statements and annual general meetings.
• Build a respectful, honest and diligent relationship with the CEO and executive that enables effective decision making and resolution of issues.
• Participate in industry, sector, government and community activities to keep up to date with issues and opportunities that affect the organisation.

• Establish and maintain effective audit, compensation and other committees to ensure key responsibilities and risks are managed effectively.
• Appoint suitable third parties to conduct audits.
• Ensure procedures to enable the commission and review of reports to ensure legal and social responsibilities are met.
• Identify and declare conflicts of interest so steps are taken to ensure decisions are not influenced by the conflict.
• Ensure sufficient diversity of board membership to reflect investor, stakeholder and customer diversity and the skills and knowledge needed to address decisions and issues.

• Establish a clear vision and mission in collaboration with the CEO for the future of the organisation and how it will get there.

• Review reports and audit results to ensure the organisation operates legally and responsibly to maintain and improve revenue, value and security.
• Maintain a big picture context for evaluating the progress and strategy of the organisation.
• Ensure regulatory compliance obligations are met and crisis management processes are in place.

• Review and evaluate investment in staff to protect their interests as stakeholders.
• Protect the value of the organisation by ensuring reliable and best quality skills, knowledge and leadership capacity now and into the future.
• Model and oversee a culture that builds up responsible leadership, people capability, customer experience, brand reputation and the investment attractiveness of the organisation.
• Provide support and guidance to the CEO.