Services

Implementing Best Practice Principles

The role of management is to provide the environment and resources to support ongoing organisational improvement. The key aspects of this role, identified through the experience of many organisations, include but are not limited to ensuring that:

leadership creates and deploys a clear vision and values throughout the organisation;
a level of community and environmental responsibility appropriate to the organisation’s activities;
a planned and structured approach to setting, aligning and achieving goals and objectives;
an understanding of variation and management by appropriate facts and data;
the full involvement, empowerment and development of the organisation’s people;
customers play the central role in the definition of product and service quality;
the organisation, its suppliers and its customers all working in partnership;
quality derived from well-planned and managed processes;
standardisation is part of process management;
continual improvement is part of the management of all processes;
innovation is recognised as an essential driver of continual improvement;
management emphasis is on prevention and improvement rather than reaction.

Strategy and Planning

Strategies are what you do. Your strategic plan shouldn't gather dust on the shelf - it is nothing if it is not built into the fabric of your organisation. Strategic Plans need to consider not only operational effectiveness and tactics but also strategy - creating future markets, products and services.

The Strategic Leadership Consulting Group goes beyond the development and facilitation of values and vision to identifying what your business needs to do in:

Managing stakeholder relationships;
Being successful in your chosen markets;
Identifying the strategic ‘Elephants’;
Mobilising and enabling employees ;
Setting sensible performance measures;
Aligning your organisation to achieve strategic goals;
Setting targets over a strategic time horizon.

Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is a philosophy that is a cornerstone of business excellence. Moving beyond the philosophy to the point of building a management system that drives improvement is important if real results are to be obtained over the long term.

The Strategic Leadership Group has a simple management framework that integrates, aligns and reinforces your existing management practices.

It focuses management on strategically important issues and directs the change efforts throughout the organisation to improve performance in those areas.

It re-enforces manager and supervisor accountability for achieving critical results and implementing best practice processes.

Change Management and Facilitation

Those pushing for organisational improvement, whether they are external members of the board, major investors, or top executives, must deal with cultural and behavioural obstacles to change.

Specifically, attempts at organisational change must consider key features of organisational life: the firm’s current culture, the need for change, the leadership of the change effort, the reform agenda and future vision, how change is communicated, empowering the workforce, creating short term wins and consolidating the gains made, the fit between strategy and strong corporate cultures, the existing network of power and the anchoring of the change.

The Strategic Leadership Consulting Group offers many years of experience in cultural change interventions, specifically;

attitudinal change strategies;
communication strategies;
cultural intervention strategy;
leadership strategies;
implementation of autonomous teams;
Safety strategies;
recognition strategies;
identifying the case for action.

Strategic Performance Measurement

In managing strategic change and strategic results, the internal infrastructure for performance measurement often requires substantial change.

Organisations now actively manage strategic dimensions of their businesses rather than routine operations.

Executives require the most critical information, and they require ‘early warning’ - the elusive ‘lead’ indicators.

The Strategic Leadership Group provides a methodology that digs deep into the business to identify the key strategic performance drivers and produce simple, graphical reports - seeking to identify the cause-and-effect relationship to performance.

This is a team-based exercise and rapidly accelerates organisational learning.

Be warned: this process tests the strength of your strategic planning and will often result in substantial plan revisions.

Leadership Development and Mentoring

Developing leaders and developing a leadership system is critical to organisational success. With this in mind, Senior Executive Leaders need to examine their collective and personal commitment, involvement and visibility in developing and maintaining an environment to meet the organisation's strategic intent.

That is, they need to;

determine the approaches taken in creating and promoting an environment that will deliver the objectives set, e.g. policy development, allocating resources, promoting innovation, linking of management systems, planning for improvement, reviewing the progress of improvement plans, goal setting, encouraging and being involved in team activities, providing and participating in education and training, recognising employee contributions, learning about domestic and international competitors, and meeting with customers and suppliers.
determine how the unity of purpose is being achieved, and departmental barriers are being eliminated within the organisation to encourage a common aim in achieving organisational goals.
Evaluate the effectiveness of its leadership system in developing and maintaining an environment for the outcomes observed, learn from the experience with leadership, and seek to improve the way it develops and maintains an appropriate environment delivering strategic objectives.

Customer Focus and Value-Adding

Excellent organisations determine current and future customers’ needs and expectations, they also understand the relative importance of these needs and expectations.

Overall, good customer management requires the following:

The nature and method of collection of customer information.
The frequency, duration and objectivity of the data collection processes.
How customer requirements are disseminated, understood and used throughout the organisation.
Developing an organisational approach to manage customer relations.
The steps taken to ensure customers have easy access to the appropriate persons in the organisation for comment and assistance, and the types of contact used.
How customer contact employees are empowered to resolve problems including any special employment selection criteria used or training provided.
Customer journey mapping.
The process for handling complaints and similar expressions of customer dissatisfaction, including information on the steps taken to encourage customers to provide such feedback.
How measures of customer satisfaction are developed and used by the organisation, including comparisons against competitors.
How the organisation adds value to the customer.

Strategic Leadership Consulting helps organisations develop a comprehensive customer approach.

We also conduct:

CEO and Senior Management Performance Reviews.
Performance evaluations for the leaders of the organisation in support of a performance-based culture.
Conduct business excellence evaluations against international frameworks and support self-assessment teams in determining the strengths and opportunities for your organisation - we have over 25 years of experience in this area.

Training in organisational self-assessments.
Training in business excellence and quality tools and techniques.
Benchmarking.
ISO system implementation, assessments and improvements.
Information Technology system development and support services.

Business Advisory Services

The Strategic Leadership Group provides an advisory service on specific issues, especially as the complexity and dynamics of our business environments have increased dramatically, as well as, the expectations of stakeholders, especially customers, have also risen at the same time.

Modern structures require hierarchies of accountability, the Strategic Leadership Consulting Group helps leaders in a confidential way and supports them during difficult times. We aim to achieve strategic results by developing people, giving professional advice, organisational evaluations/audits and looking at how the business processes are aligned. Achieving a better alignment between structure and process yields both flexibility and control, plus centralisation and de-decentralisation, accountability and autonomy.