Despite huge efforts to improve operational processes over the past 20 years, critically important management processes are left at the discretion of individual managers, who are expected to define them themselves. Without consistent management practices, an organisation will evolve sub-optimal methods for making and executing decisions in operational processes like sales, finance and operations. Often, this results in an increased number of meetings that onerously consolidate information for upward consumption, with little useful direction or feedback in return.
 
Perversely, more meetings often weaken the speed and quality of decision-making, and therefore operational process performance. As more ad-hoc meetings are called in reaction to problems, decisions are no longer taken at the right level in the organisation. Executives call all-hands gatherings to understand the underlying issues and take quick action. In doing so, they are likely to instigate decisions for which they lack the required expertise. Conversely, people with the right expertise will feel demoted and will duck their responsibilities by systematically delegating decisions upward.
 
Ad-hoc meetings are also inefficient. Without proper structure, they produce decisions of inferior quality. Meeting notes are unlikely to be captured, causing a loss of the decisions’ rationale and eliminating a mean to hold people accountable for agreed actions in subsequent meetings.
 
Few firms or leaders anticipate emerging complexity and new management requirements, to put the right management control processes in place and avoid the upward delegation trap. This is precisely what a management control cycle (MCC) brings, through a precisely designed hierarchy of meetings with clearly understood frequencies, structured agendas and carefully selected attendees. During MCC meetings, issues are discussed by those closest to them, with the skills, competence and authority to make the right decisions. KPIs supporting the meetings allow participants to quickly spot issues, identify problem root causes, and timely implement fixes.
 
A Management Control Cycle is built on three principles. First, meetings have a scope such that attendees are accountable for all items discussed and resulting actions are logically allocated. Second, the MCC allows escalation of decisions only for justified exceptions, when remedial actions are not delivering the expected results. Third, the MCC’s rhythm of regular follow-up prevents issues from festering or going undetected. Meetings on operational issues are the most frequent. Quick feedback loops validate actions and demonstrate control on issues before they need to be escalated.
 
Management Control Cycles are often set-up with three distinct layers, each with a remit of increasing scope. In this way, the mid-level MCC acts as a buffer between operationally driven meetings involving front-line managers and strategically oriented meetings involving executives. Adding more layers slows down decision-making, while reducing to two levels risks micro-management and excessive escalation.
 
Putting efficient management processes in place is not easy. In the absence of established standards, managers will typically resist change. Yet, best practice management processes exist in each function, and they are best implemented with a bottom-up approach, combining agreed procedures, KPIs, templates and rituals to shift management behaviour. For those organisations ready to rise to the challenge, and transform their management processes, the MCC is a powerful lever to shift performance and anchor one of the last sustainable competitive advantages: the ability to collectively execute and move fast.

So, when you begin to have the sense that your business lacks traction in taking and implementing decisions, it might be worth asking yourself the following questions:

1. How many members of the management team are working under their paygrade?
2. How often are all-hands-on-deck meetings organised to address crises?
3. How many internal meetings do members of the management team attend?  What is the quality of these meetings’ outcome?

When an organisation faces difficult times, many wish to see sales pick up as a way to buy the organisation time to address its other problems.  While it cannot be done in isolation, an attempt to profitably lift sales figures is hard to sustain, as it means selling more and, more importantly, selling better.
 
Many businesses find themselves trapped in the delivery of long-term contracts with thinner and thinner margins as successive contract revisions have dented the profitability of the original agreement.  It can be partly explained by the change of actors around the table, with sales people being swapped for operational delivery managers on one hand, and the supplier relationship remaining with purchasing staff on the customer side.  As a consequence, there is no match of commercial capabilities between the two parties, and it becomes very easy to pick on itemised topics, restricting the discussion to unit cost and volumes.  A way to slow the margin erosion over the lifespan of a contract is to start from a higher point than what would be attained with a cost-plus model.  The trouble of value pricing is that it takes much more effort to sell, and it brings the fear of being outbid on price. 
 
Selling for value rests on a deep understanding of how your products are generating value for your potential customer.  The challenge is to identify the pain points of your potential customers and to quantify them.  Everyone will have a different narrative, and figuring it out has become easier with the wide range of data publicly available.  Beyond fact finding, a granular quantification of what is at stake requires a strong business acumen and an understanding of what the currency is for a specific client.
If you client has a high churn rate of its customers, and needs a strong marketing presence to even maintain market share, the value you can offer will be in your speed of service rather than in its real cost.  You will help your client to be more responsive to its customer base, which can become a competitive advantage and relax the need to spend as much in marketing.  If your client does not understand well enough your product and rely heavily on it to create its customer experience, you can offer services to bridge that capability gap. 
 
Aware of these pain points, the art of selling for value is to craft a solution together with the customer.   It takes the ability to drive the conversation in order to mutually agree what the real problem is, how this could be addressed, and why a commonly defined solution would fit with your delivery capabilities.  At some point during the conversation, the framing of the solution and its matching with your delivery capabilities will be owned by your customer, and then – but only then – time is on your side.  Strengthened by the belief that its specific issue can be addressed, the customer will be ready to buy from you a solution that is uniquely crafted and therefore cannot be replicated.
 
So, when you begin to moan the low profitability your current sales practices are generating, it might be worth asking yourself the following questions:

1. Do sales mostly happen through tenders or are there instances when you do not face competition?
2. What depth of understanding have your sales reps of the business challenges faced by their prospects?  How is it documented?
3. How commercially minded are your sales reps when framing the discussion about your offering?
   

The struggle to see an implementation through is a daunting task.  Attempts to change how people work and interact call for much more than a refresh of their operating procedures, or even the definition of a new rationale for their connectedness to the rest of the organisation.  Pretty much all implementation projects look like a failure midway through, as what they have achieved is too incremental and not transformational enough.

This implementation black hole is fuelled by a shortage of transformation capabilities in many organisations.  It is hard to strike a right balance between the executive sponsorship and the transactional content that will make a transformation look credible in the eyes of the majority of players.  Legislating from the top has little mileage lower in the ranks if it is not anchored in meaningful activities for all people involved, expressed in ways that resonate with their view of their world.  It is not enough to tell an organisation what it needs to change.  Staff have to be told exactly how their daily activities will be impacted.  Too much high profile support without in-depth coherence of activities and interfaces will raise cynicism like a wildfire.  Alternatively, too many specifics about particular functions will disqualify the change in the eyes of other parts of the organisation and limit the power of its executive sponsorship.

A lot of success can be achieved by testing new ways of working, under the auspices of good sponsorship.  Call it sandpits, trials or pilots, as long as they bring a protected environment of restricted scale, where methods can be adjusted fast, and where hiccups is accepted as long as it quickly leads to significant step changes in output.  The sponsor must acknowledge that obstacles and difficulties are the reward, as much as the final outcome.  After a few iterations, the organisation will find itself with completely different ways of doing things.  As they are proof of concept, these pilots rely on low-cost solutions and manual management; looking at scalability will come later.  Staff involved in these trials can then act as trainers for an enterprise-wide roll-out, something that can happen very quickly, with lower risks for the going concern than with a big bang approach.

Such an approach can only work if the pilots demonstrably address the problem they were set up to solve.  The issue had to be serious enough, and the step change in performance indisputable.  As pilots are asking for staff to transform their ways of working on top of keeping delivering their contribution, they clearly bring an additional workload.  Only very motivated and very apt staff should therefore be considered for such an approach, and their contribution should be acknowledged in front of the entire organisation when time comes to celebrate success.

So, when the time comes to address issues in your ways of working, it might be worth asking yourself the following questions:

1. What track record do we have in successfully implementing change in our organisation?
2. How comfortable are we with failure as a way to learn and develop better working solutions?
3. Have we got movers and shakers spread across the organisation to support a piloting approach?

When a business needs to change its ways of working, what often delays the decision to do so is the inability of the executive to drive that transformation.  Reaching the top of the pyramid, how flat it might be, requires sound functional excellence.  The trouble is that becoming an accomplished administrator and being a change leader are at opposite ends of the managerial spectrum.  When a well-oiled organisation is confronted with step-changes in its activities, genuine leadership qualities to motivate and win hearts and minds are a real gap.

Enters external help stage left.  There is an array of external solutions to pick from, which focus on the different elements of the transformation, from its case for action, to its plan of execution and finally to its implementation.  The first two steps are relatively easy to get from external support, their timeframe depending on the level of ambiguity with which the executive is ready to acknowledge the need to change and give the implementation a green light. 

All it takes then is a safe pair of hands to drive the implementation and get the change nested.  This is where consulting support is likely to fail, as the transformation is left to client’s staff with little experience of operating at an enterprise level.  Interims have an edge as they can use their past transformation experience throughout the implementation.  Working as a chief-of-staff with the executive, a freelance can nurse the transformation with the management team from beginning to end, acting as a beacon for the change, coaching the executive to keep the right mindset, and bringing meaningful content to all interventions across the organisation.  By adding a change professional to the management team for the duration of the transformation, the skillset is moved slightly towards the change end of the spectrum.  When the transformation has truly happened, the chief-of-staff can take a bow and leave the business behind in better shape, with a management team energised for having gone through the change together.

So, when you begin to have the sense that your business reaches a crossroad, it might be worth asking yourself the following questions:

1. How much time has the organisation on its hands before its current ways of working start impairing its success?
2. Has the executive team the cohesion and the bandwidth to drive the transformation that looms?
3. Is it possible to free a member of staff capable of framing and implementing this initiative?