This issue includes news on the Employee Engagement model, the
origins of Get to Great™, a recent project in Sao Paulo, and a profile of John
Phillips, the man behind the Employee Engagement model.
Get to Great™ News includes the recent launch of the Get to Great™
Employee Engagement model in early September (see below), and the success of
our ongoing Breakfast Briefings, which have consistently achieved our objective
letting small, intimate groups of interested parties experience the power of
Get to Great™ firsthand. Details of
forthcoming events can be found elsewhere under Forthcoming Events, naturally!
Get to Great™ Employee Engagement
Earlier this year the Department for Business Information
and Skills commissioned a study by David MacLeod and Nita Clark. The aim was to
examine whether a wider take up of engagement approaches could impact
positively on UK competitiveness and performance, and meet the challenges of
increased global competition. Their
findings were published in July, and to quote the Rt Hon Lord Mandelson
Secretary of State for Business Information
and Skill:
| “This timely report sets out for the first time the evidence that underpins what we all know intuitively, which is that only organisations that truly engage and inspire their employees produce world class levels of innovation, productivity and performance." |
So why did the UK Government spend so much time and money
commissioning a report into something that we all knew anyway? I guess you could say that we all know that
fire is very hot, and yet still people burn themselves! In this lies the real problem, in that
business leaders intuitively know having an engaged workforce will deliver
superior results, it’s just that they don’t know what to do about it or don’t
make the connection between this and the bottom line!
The report recommends a national awareness campaign over the
next 8 months to highlight the benefits of engagement with leaders; so that the
UK economy comes out of the current economic difficulties ready to meet the
challenges of increasing global competition.
With
this in mind, Mentor is pleased to announce the arrival
of the latest addition to the Get to Great™ family - Employee
Engagement. Based on our research and experience of working on employee
engagement within organisations of all sizes, we have created an
internal
benchmarking tool which will help your organisation assess where it is
against
the known key drivers of engagement, agree a desired state against
each, and
most importantly, take action to improve them. With multiple options,
the
approach taken by your organisation will depend on many variables
(size,
complexity, variety of locations and roles etc). Benchmarking can be carried out just by a
senior team, or alternatively you might wish to include separate focus groups
of managers and employees from across the business in order to establish the
drivers that are really important to different groups.
The outputs will help your organisation to create its own
strategy and approach to continuously improving the work experience for your
people, including whether or not to invest money and effort in conducting
engagement surveys. After all, if we
know intuitively, why do we ask first and only then act?
The man behind the model!
John Phillips has worked in a variety of organisations, most
recently as the Learning & Development Director at Experian, where he was
constantly adapting and modifying best practice to fit with the unique needs of
each sector. This has included the
development of performance appraisal processes, talent and succession
management, the development of organisational and specialist competency
frameworks. Most recently he has been focussing on measuring employee
engagement, with subsequent global analysis and action planning. He has operated as a board director responsible
for the operation of a vocational training business arm with P&L and
business development responsibility.
Stop Press! We are working on delivering Get to Great™ virtually in
2010, using WebEx or a similar platform; more to follow.
The origins of Get to Great™
Get to Great™ can be traced back to
2001, when Chris Whyatt, its
creator, was leading a project for Lotus / IBM to improve their bid win ratio. Chris realised Lotus needed to understand their
current capabilities and define their aspirations before he could start to
close the agreed gaps. Taking
inspiration from the Capability Maturity Model, Chris built a five-level capability
model covering the 12 critical success factors in improving bid capability. The subsequent project delivered a step change in bid win ratio from around
10% to circa 90%!
Chris subsequently used the same
approach on similar projects for organisations as diverse as SAP, BNFL, Castle
Care, HP, Getronics, Adobe, and Davis Langdon, all of which delivered
significant step change in bid win ratios.
Upon successful completion of a project
for Microsoft in late 2006, Jon Hughes (now with Integralis) suggested that a
Sales Readiness model would be the next logical step; this was duly created
with input from Jon and his team. All
that was needed was an ‘umbrella’ name to cover the methodology; Chris
chose and trademarked Get to Great™ to reflect the nature of the desired
outcome of a customer engagement.
Chris and Get to Great™ became part
of Mentor Group in late 2008, heralding the creation of several new Business
Development and Leadership & Management models, the most recent being
Employee Engagement.
Get to Great™ in South America with NEC
NEC in Brazil has traditionally
been a hardware led business, so their move into reselling VeriSign Managed
Security Services (MSS) required a change in approach. Jack Delmonte, Global
Channel Director for Enterprise Security Services at VeriSign asked us to help
facilitate that change, using Get to Great™ as the catalyst.
|
“I saw Get to Great™ as a great vehicle for helping us to work with
NEC to take MSS to market in this important region for us, and the two days
we spent together proved me right.” |
The Mentor team of Chris Norton and
Chris Whyatt spent the first half day getting to know the NEC stakeholders, led
by Pedro Mouradian, gathering background information on their business and
their market. The second day was a Get
to Great™ workshop with Pedro and his 10 man team, looking at everything from
how well they understood their market, through the sales process, to how well
‘success’ was defined, communicated, measured and understood. The final day was spent developing action
plans to close the high priority gaps and debriefing the main stakeholders. Perhaps the most interesting dynamic was
language, which included slides and discussions in Portuguese!
In terms of outcomes, back to Jack
Delmonte:
|
“Due
to the self assessment nature of Get to Great™ and the independent
facilitation, we were able to get to the heart of the matter with virtually
no pain, working through actions to resolve issues quickly and
effectively. We immediately noticed an
improvement in all aspects of our relationship with NEC, as well as an upturn
in results, which is always good news.” |
Pedro Mouradian, NEC Services
Solutions Business Unit Manager, commented:
|
“Jack
had given me an outline of what Get to Great™ was about, but the
experience of holding the workshop has given us greater pipeline
integrity and won business, so I am happy with the outcomes and hope
that we can continue to benefit as we execute on the agreed actions. The two Chris’s adapted well to our culture
and our business, adding a lot of value over 2 days.” |
Pedro
Mouradian and Chris Norton with a copy of Bare Knuckle Customer Service, co-authored
by Chris Norton and Simon Hazeldine, a Senior Consultant at Mentor Group.
The book itself, available from any
good bookshop or Amazon, naturally!
Forthcoming Events include a number of Leadership and Sales
Readiness Breakfast Briefings:
-
19th November and 25th November in London (08.45 to
10.15)
-
20th November, 8th December and
19th January in Bracknell (08.15 to 10.00)
Each delegate will experience the power of Get to Great™ by benchmarking their organisations against 3 elements of each model. If you would like to join us please call 01582 842007 or email gettogreat@mentorgroup.co.uk.
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