Ian Dodds Consulting’s (IDC) Monthly Best Practice: Aug 2017

By Ian Dodds – The Inclusion Builder

Developing Engaging Managers drives High Productivity

I have been a member of the Engage for Success Thought and Action Steering Group, previously called the Guru Steering Group, for 5 years. On this Group I have regularly presented the case that developing Engaging Managers is the key to delivering high productivity. In fact, I have recently published a toolkit ‘A Whole Systems Approach to Developing Engaging Managers’ on the Engage for Success website: http://engageforsuccess.org/whole-systems-approach-developing-engaging-managers. I have used this approach to build high levels of employee engagement to deliver:

• High performance;

• Great service to customers, clients or service users;

• Complex change.

Examples include engaging employees successfully to:

1. Save a factory of 4,500 employees which was in danger of closing. It became one of the best in ICI; then the largest chemicals company in the world.

2. Make a loss making international business, employing 11,000 people, profitable in 3 years.

3. Turn around, in 1 year, the largest office in the Inland Revenue from being one of the worst performers to the best. It was so successful it was the subject of a full page highly complementary article in the Sunday Telegraph business pages.

My first activity in helping an organisation to develop Engaging Managers is to help its leadership team develop a vision of success in, say, 3 years’ time. This is then communicated, via the management chain, across the organisation and each team is asked their views on what will help and what will hinder the delivery of the vision. This is fed back and collated and taken account of when the leadership team develop a strategy for delivering the vision of success. This is then communicated across the organisation and each team is asked to identify its contributions to the strategy. This is then fed back to a Change Steering Group. This has the task of monitoring progress with delivering the vision and ensuring that any blockages to implementation are identified and addressed. It also identifies any task groups that need to be set up to find solutions to any major hindering factors.

I then arrange for all the managers right down to the front line to be trained to:

1. Be interactively effective using my Interactive Effectiveness Tool.

2. Empower people.

3. Help their team members identify their talents and develop them.

Next, I work with the leadership team to enable them to identify the behaviours that they need to role model to drive the change strategy. We also agree a means of their receiving feedback and coaching on their practice of the behaviours.

We then look at changes which need to be made to any of the business processes or the design of the organisation to facilitate the delivery of the vision.

Finally, the Change Steering Group collects stories of success in implementing the new vision and ensures these are communicated across the organisation to reinforce and drive the implementation of the vision of future success

If you would like to know more about this hugely successful approach to developing Engaging Managers to deliver high productivity please do not hesitate to contact me.

iandodds@iandoddsconsulting.com,

www.iandoddsconsulting.com, 

29 July 2017

Related articles

Interactive Effectiveness is key to being a successful Inclusive Leader

How I became an Award Winning Lifetime Achiever in building Inclusive Cultures

How using actors can help drive the inclusion performance gain