By Dr. Miles Overholt, Founder & CEO, Strategia Analytics™
Jessi Purdy, SVP Business Administration, Strategia Analytics™
Dr. Michael Seitchik
Their Strengths
- Their people were trying to work together.
- The company had a strong focus on efficiency.
- The company had a strong core of action-oriented leaders.
- The company’s culture.
The Blockages
- People were trying to work together
BUT the old power struggles were making it difficult.
- The company had a strong focus on efficiency
BUT people were trying to operate the old model.
- The company had a strong core of action-oriented leaders
BUT they would only do as they were told.
- The company’s culture had led to the majority being committed employees
BUT they were looking for direction and waiting to be engaged and directed.
The Challenges
- Improve coordination across units as the company makes major changes.
- Clarify the uncertainty over the company’s direction and focus.
- Resolve the tensions between staff who were looking for new opportunities and those defending the old operational model.
- Redirect the action-oriented culture to be more externally focused and more open to change.
The data and highlights from the diagnostic summary struck a chord with the executive team. Up until now they had only seen the pieces of the puzzle. The results of the diagnostic fit the pieces into a clear image of who Devcn was. The executive team saw a company with a lot of strengths in need of a new direction.
Related:
A Story of a Market Leader Left Behind: From Market Leader to Market Loss
A Story of a Market Leader Left Behind: Something’s Wrong, Fix it Quick
A Story of a Market Leader Left Behind: Right Solution, Wrong Problem
A story of a Market Leader Left Behind: Discovering Reality
More specifically the results showed the executives how the blockages prevented successfully leveraging Devon strengths. With all the pieces finally in place they could see themselves and their challenges clearly for the first time. They were pleased to learn that despite recent set-backs, their history of success had left them with a strong culture and motivated employees. They now knew that Devcn was more than strong enough to survive the challenges and once again return to prominence in their market. They need only navigate the blockages.
However, the executive team had lots of work to do. The blockages identified by the data from the diagnostics presented Devcn with four major challenges. However, when discussing the results, the team once again became deadlocked. Taking charge, one of the corporate VPs pointed to the results on the screen, nodded his head, and said that he agreed, these were the issues and they needed to be fixed.
These four challenges directly identified the core issues that prevented Devcn from leveraging their strengths successfully. Identifying the core issues was the missing piece. What they had been unable to see before the diagnostic fit the pieces together came into focus. The divided executive team and the competing loyalties to different factions within the company were preventing any meaningful advancement of initiatives meant to reinvigorate Devcn and return them to success.
Now that all the pieces were fitted together and the issues clearly identified, the puzzle was solved. They knew exactly where to focus their efforts and how to leverage their strengths.
The Story of a Market Leader Left Behind continues next month: Unlearning Past Success by Building on Current Strengths. 