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Leading a Virtual Organization: Conclusions

Leading a Virtual Organization: Conclusions Program Transcript

CRAIG MARSH, PHD: Right. So what I'm going to do in this final section, is talk about some of the effects, or impacts, of those changes that I've described in the case, so far, and then talk a bit about were I to have my time again, what I would have done differently. Because of course, nothing is a complete success. And there are some things I think that didn't go so well as I originally intended, or had different consequences. So I'll talk a little bit about those. And then you can reflect on them yourself, and what you would have done in my situation.

So one of the things we did, as I mentioned, was we measured our performance in a number of different ways. And I had some key indicators on my dashboard that I was looking at to see that things were moving in the right direction. So we measured the engagement of our customers. And we measured them through something that you may be familiar with, a Net Promoter Score. And that simply means, when you ask them the question, would you promote us as an organization, and our product, outside to others, or not? The difference between those who say they would promote you, and those who wouldn't, can be expressed as a score.

And of course, by and large, a positive score means that more people are prepared to promote you than those who aren't. And our Net Promoter Score increased from a negative score, to a score of plus 33, over the 18 months that this project was being implemented. So that was really, for me, a critical measure of our success, that things were moving in the right direction, and one I was very pleased with.

Now what may be called somewhat more input measures, I think also moved in the right direction. So one is productivity of the staff that I was managing. Now one measure of productivity was, how many service interventions. Remember, they were contracted staff. So how many service interventions were they making over an annual period, over a year, at the beginning of this process, versus 18 months into this process? Now at the beginning of this process, actually, in this case, two years.

At the beginning of this process, they were making on average, something like 1.2 service interventions per year. So it was a very dispersed, very sparsely organized, and actually relatively disconnected organization. By the end of two years, that number had gone up to 5.2. So we had a far more engaged workforce than we had at the start of the process. So that for me, was also very satisfying, and a very large increase, and a very great success, I think, in that case.

And the third thing that I measured, was one that I'm sure everyone will be familiar with, which is length of service. Now length of service is normally talked about in employee terms. These were not employees. But I was measuring how

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Leading a Virtual Organization: Conclusions

long they were staying with us, as an example of their loyalty, and their engagement with us as an organization.

So the length of service of these employees went up from, in the region of 1 and 1/2 years on average, at the start of this process. And over two years, that increased dramatically. Now over two years, it increased to 2.7 years length of service. When I left this organization, the end of last year, had it increased to over 4 years average length of service. So that was a dramatic increase.

So those were three indicators that showed that on the whole, things were moving very much in the direction that I had intended What I will now do is talk about some of the things that perhaps went less well, or that I would want to do slightly differently, were I to go through the whole process again. Because there were elements that didn't work as well as I expected them.

So the first element was, I mentioned my idea of having a vision or a galvanizing idea as a really critical part of the way we engage with our frontline service professionals. That, I think, proved very difficult. I had the idea. It was, I think, quite clearly communicated at the outset. I worked hard with my leadership structure to make sure they bought into the idea.

We put it into our discussions. We talked a lot about how we would implement it, practically. Because having an idea is one thing. But actually doing it is something else. We had a lot of discussions when we first came up with the idea.

And I think what happened, we didn't revisit it enough. It wasn't really at the forefront of everything that we did, in all of our communications. It really didn't operate as the galvanizing idea for all of our work, and all of our interactions with our service professionals.

So I think what I would have preferred to have done, is to spend more time thinking, not just about the idea itself and how we communicated it, but how we sustained that vision, or that idea, over a much longer period, such that it affected everything that we did. So that's the first thing I think that I would have reconsidered, if I had my time over again.

I think the second thing that I would have reconsidered over that period, was the training and development of my front line leaders. I already mentioned to you that I felt that was a really critical component of the leadership challenge that I was faced. But I think there were some elements where people didn't quite get that coaching idea that I've referred to already. So I think I would have probably put more time and resources, and perhaps more measures in place, to make sure that those coaching ideals in my frontline staff, which I really believed in at the time, and still firmly believe in, were really integral created, and really translated into the behavior of those front line leaders.

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Leading a Virtual Organization: Conclusions

I had some examples, where I think people were still being a little too directive, and a little too authoritarian, at the front end of the organization. And that's something that I would have liked to have corrected sooner.

And the third thing is, I think touches on a really interesting principle, as a leader, about how you go about implementing and developing these things. And really, there are two slightly different aspects to it. So the first aspect of this, is when you're putting in place, particularly structures, almost by definition, they're very static, now particularly performance management structures or key performance indicators.

What I would prefer to have done, is rather than building what I thought was an effective, but nevertheless static structure, is to build in a process of continuous improvement of that performance management structure, and of those KPIs. Such that, we were effectively doing what, in research terms, would be called AB testing.

So we would try something. We would put it in place. We would get the feedback of our frontline staff. And then we would adjust and improve those indicators based on that feedback. So I didn't build in that process of continuous improvements and feedback, into the structures that I had created.

And that meant that there were occasions when they became out of date. And I was seeing indicators that really were less useful, because of the fact that the organization had moved on. But the structure itself had stayed the same.

And the other aspect of that third part, in terms of the performance indicators, is the involvement, to the extent possible, of the people who will be affected by them. And that is your frontline service professionals, and your employees. And I think the extent to which you can have those people build, work with you, to build create develop and manage those structures, the better they are in actually doing what you want them to do, which is to managing their performance. So to essentially own them, much more than if you simply impose them on.

Now I did that to some extent, but I think I could have worked harder to make sure that my people and my customers were involved in the very structures that I was putting in place themselves. That was I think something else that I learned from, and is also, if you like, a theory in use, which I had at the time. But I reflect on probably I didn't work on as much as I should have done.

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