As with successful football teams, sustainable success comes from building an aligned, accountable and agile organisation. Gary Ashton explains how to build the right platform to successfully release the talent in your organization.

Why does the current England Football team, with its ‘golden generation’, perform so erratically - losing to Northern Ireland but winning against Argentina? What’s stopping all that talent from consistently fulfilling its enormous potential?

Like sport, business operates in a competitive arena, where success requires the harmonisation of complex and disparate people and processes.

Buying in the talent is not enough. A more powerful and sustainable solution is often to release the dormant talent that already exists. We all have our own view of the magic formula for England. But experience suggests that you have to build an organisation that’s aligned to its goals, has clarity of accountability, and is agile enough to adapt to environmental changes to enable your people to make a leap in performance.

Alignment releases energy and avoids unnecessary internal competition. Accountability provides the right degree of freedom for your key players to act. Agility ensures that managers can respond to environmental changes quicker. Get these right, and you create an environment that encourages hidden talent to come alive and take advantage of the space provided to deliver performance improvement and, ultimately, business success.

The traditional approach to organisation design is either to focus on the structures and move the boxes around the organogram, or to build an organisation entirely around key individuals. Such narrow approaches upset the balance of an organisation. So we take a more holistic view. We identify a few critical targeted interventions by assessing the organisation along the five dimensions of People, Process, Structure, Information and Work, and how they interconnect (see Diagram 1 below)

People – the management capability and style of the manager, coach and captain; the club culture

Leadership in-fighting between manager and captain runs the risk of disrupting any team. As well as being capable and motivated, leadership needs to align its vision and behaviour to deliver its goals. So we employ tailored management assessment tools to identify and then develop the required capability, motivation and management style. Paolo Moscuzza’s article, starting on page 10 where? Insert link refers to the more informal power aspects of an organisation.

Process – training, pre-match preparation and on-pitch tactics

Sporting success is built on rigorous training and practice. Business success is the same – requiring an interlocking set of processes and practices to support and facilitate the delivery of business goals. We check and build the right management processes necessary to deliver these goals.

Structure – how many formations do you need Sven?

England has multiple formations up its sleeve to counter each competitive threat. However, a team’s adaptability may be undermined by confusion amongst its own players. By defining the power relationships and the allocation of accountabilities and decision authorities across the business, we gain management understanding of how the organisation operates and inter-relates. This is explored further in our organisation effectiveness assessment approach (see page 5 link?? for details on how to receive a free copy).

Information – Beckham’s crosses require the team to understand both the competition, and the forward’s intended moves

Sporting performance is subject to intense scrutiny and measurement. In business, formal systems need to be in place to gather the metrics to enable managers to make appropriate decisions. And informally, people need to be appropriately networked to enable sufficient knowledge sharing, allowing the right information to be accessed by the right people at the right time. Miss the moment to act and the opportunity for success is squandered.

Work – the critical roles of goalkeeping, sweeping, midfielding and scoring

Identifying the critical roles that protect or deliver value within the business, and then nurturing, building and motivating them ensures a focused approach. Locating the clusters of jobs within the organisation that create the value, and then developing those skills across the organisation and rewarding them appropriately, helps keep the necessary capabilities within your business.

Connecting the five dimensions

All five dimensions have an impact on each other. Building a sophisticated matrix organisation without recognising the need to build in management experience and capability runs the risk of failure. Not providing the right timely management information for the new roles with new responsibilities leads to poor decision-making.

These are just two examples that highlight how every change to an organisation has a knock-on effect elsewhere. So it’s vital to make sure you know what they are likely to be before deciding to change. See outsourcing article on page 13 link??.

We have developed an approach that helps businesses transform their effectiveness by moving through a five-stage improvement process (see ER Consultants Five Step Process approach in Table 1 and Diagram 2 on the following pages where? Link).

Working through these steps with the management team generates solutions with ownership and commitment. Building the right platform by employing this approach releases the talent you have within the organisation.

By using this approach, one client generated 30% headcount savings whilst making the business more flexible. We helped another release the energy of its Sales and Marketing functions that made a step-change increase in its market-share. And with a third, we broke the deadlock of the management team by creating a new, innovative organisational model.

In short, not only does our approach help to unleash under-utilised potential, but it helps to achieve those valuable ‘goals’ that will ultimately help your organisation stay ahead of the game. And that’s a real competitive advantage.