A question came up recently on a client visit that a lot of executives have been asking lately. When trying to accelerate a new business strategy among all your different teams, how can your teams collaborate better? Executives are focused on expediting their vision with clarity and speed. They need to get their teams aligned and moving forward. We encountered this recently with a client that has been using our 3-Step Knowledge Transfer Process. Our point person at this Fortune 500 insurance and financial company had recently been promoted to president of her division. At a strategy session with her peers and her boss, her teams developed three new business strategies. The next logical question was how best to execute this? Well, it’s a simple practical process. At The Steve Trautman Company, we call it talent risk management.
In order to execute the strategies as quickly and efficiently as possible, there are basically three phases:
1. Assess the data
The firm had already started our knowledge transfer process and had Knowledge Silo Matrices (KSMs) done for many of the 12 teams that would provide resources to execute this strategy. Once identified, the rest of the teams could be quickly included in the ecosystem for this strategy. We call this a KSMx.
2. Get aligned
Which teams are going to have a hard time working on the strategy because their people are already overloaded? How can their priorities be shifted to all for this new effort? Which teams that have to collaborate the most to execute the new strategy? What exactly does that mean in terms of roles, ownership and priorities? Which teams have silos that are empty (no workers assigned)? Where do we have multiple experts that conflict? Where do we have redundancies? That’s all part of the alignment conversation. Once we identify the risks and agree on ownership and priorities, we are aligned. Now we can solve the risks in phase three.
3. Mitigate the risk
Whether that’s hiring, borrowing, renting or growing that capacity, the team can make decisions and set a path forward. If the solution is growing the capacity in house without hiring new people that is an example of where knowledge transfer is a great solution.
The bones of this solution can be laid out very quickly once the strategic initiative is clear. For the idea in question, I mapped the solution on a white board in less than an hour. From there we agreed on a way forward that was a combination of using in-house resources and my team. It’s quick. It’s easy. It can be done. If you want to accelerate your new business strategy and get various teams to collaborate better around that strategy, talent risk management using the talent risk data is the answer.