By: KHA Consulting Team
The following is part eight of a multi-part series on The KHA Way, KHA Management Consulting’s Integrated Service Offering. This blog series includes the benefits of using KHA Management Consulting Services and the components included.
With clarified financial reporting, visibility into your organization’s operational performance, and tools to measure performance, your organization is already ahead of most other organizations. Having begun to define those key measures for the organization, the organizational chart and the organization’s team members need to also be aligned. The next big step relates to ensuring you have the right people in the right seats, with clarified role expectations, and defined success criteria.
Do you have the right team in the rights seats at the right time? Gino Wickman, author of Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, has a framework for evaluating your people. The framework requires that the person in each role gets it, wants it, and has it. ‘Gets it’ refers to the understanding of their role and environment. ‘Wants it’ refers to a desire for it, meaning motivated to obtain it, own it, and perfect it. ‘Has it’ refers to capacity, which relates to the aptitude, time, and flexibility required to be successful in the considered role.
Using the framework from Wickman and the Entrepreneurial Operating System, your leadership team should begin to be clear. First, let’s focus to get the right people in your leadership roles. The order to implementing the framework is critical. Once you have identified your leaders, they then can help you source their teams, while you obtain their buy-in and clarify your internal reporting structure.
At KHA, we always start with your leadership team. These are the team members in positions of stewardship, who have the ability to set expectations, monitor results, and make necessary changes. We work with owners to evaluate the right needs for their organization at that point in time and make pointed recommendations. Once your leadership team is well defined, the organizational chart is not far from being envisioned and drawn Roles, authority levels, and paths for success and/or change must all be clarified on your organizational chart. Once agreed upon with what the organization needs, it is time for to align or leave. At times, leaders leave here as they do not align with the agreed upon vision. That is okay and should be encouraged as it will avoid much confusion and future pain to see this clearly early and have the organization adapt accordingly.
The organizational chart should also align with market and be positioned to effectively meet those needs. When leaders or others sit in roles that are not for the betterment of the organization at large, the future is being sacrificed. One of the biggest mistakes we find working with business owners is that they will focus on the current people they have versus the roles they need. When KHA designs an organizational chart, we work with the end in mind, evaluating what the organization most needs and then identifying whether they have the right people for those roles.
With the leaders defined and the organization chart beginning to form, we next discuss lines of authority and organization-wide metrics.
At KHA Management Consultants, we work with mid-market industry leaders to identify what makes the organization, its stakeholders, and its’ employees tick. We facilitate the Personnel Positioning process with your organization’s key constituents to ensure buy-in, ownership, and a new way of thinking about the organization and its stakeholders amongst all levels. From a resource perspective, we primarily use our unmatched experience but also tap into the top-level resources such as those made available by Harvard Business Review, Relevant Strategic Management Authors, and MentorPlus. Some of those materials, frameworks, and lessons have been used in authoring this series.
KHA Management Consultants, the consulting department of KHA Accountants, PLLC, based in Flower Mound, Texas, is always looking for opportunities to work with key clients ready to take their organization to the next level. If you have a desire to improve, take the first step toward success with the strategic management experts, and contact us at 972-221-2500.