GTP21: Re-imagine your management system to cultivate resilience, innovation and growth
Sticky Knowledge®
This blog post has been produced for the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce as part of the 2021 Growth Through People campaign.
Growth Through People is the Chamber’s annual campaign aiming to help local firms boost productivity and grow through improved leadership and people management skills. In 2021 this involves 8 free online workshops taking place throughout March, and a virtual Growth Through People conference on 30th March. In addition, throughout the campaign the Chambers will be publishing thought leadership podcasts, videos and blog content such as this.
Thanks to our Headline Sponsors – Aston University, BMet College and the University of Birmingham’s Work Inclusivity Research Centre - all workshops are free to attend. Interested readers can find out more and register to attend Growth Through People workshops here, and the Growth Through People conference here.
Resilience: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.
Innovation: a new thing or a new method of doing something.
Growth…
… growth for me may mean one thing, which will be totally different to you. Growth, for some organisations will be keeping the doors open. For some, meeting debt re-payments. Some, increasing profits. Growth is uniquely required, exclusively different, yet necessary for all.
Most, if not all, organisations have already modified the way they operate, through sheer willpower, innovation, re-invention, change. This was done at speed, unprecedented becoming precedent. This showed resilience and an ability to survive, through the efforts of those employed within the organisation. Now you need a solution for the longer-term. But what?
Operational excellence, productivity, resilience, agility, whilst not new terms, are major influences for the survival of your organisation as you move through 2021. Economic growth and the wellbeing of society have taken a huge knock. Now, you need to also ensure the environment is saved, and suddenly, you have a burden seemingly so great it is hard to imagine how any of our organisations will survive without vast investment. Added to this, the need to consider ever changing legal and regulatory requirements within which your organisation operates; health and safety requirements, employment law, customs bureaucracy, the list goes on.
Yet, there are still competitors and continuously changing near industry trends to be tracked or countered. Very few organisations had sincerely considered the impact a businesses or organisation had on the economic prosperity of the region they are situated in, or the nation in which they reside. As for the socio-economic and environmental impacts, these were studied as regional or national concerns. Now they are part of everyday vocabulary. All the aforementioned are the CONTEXT of your organisation, the why of your existence. The context you currently find yourself in is from where you need to grow. But how?
Growth through people? Well… what is an organisation if not a hive of human brains interacting with one another toward a common goal, a purpose? This begs the question, if the sum of an organisation is the intellect it employs, is it not safe to say, to grow an organisation we need to grow the individuals within it? What if your Management System encompassed more than just the Quality, Environment, or Occupational Health teams?
What if EVERY Leader and Manager within your organisation understood their own personal business context combined with the organisation’s context? Each one would then know their accountabilities and responsibilities, create risk-based plans toward the organisations purpose, operate to the requirements of all stakeholders, act upon the results of their performance in order to further improve their output… if they did this, growth of the individual human being and organisation can be achieved in unison.
It is time to re-imagine every Leader and Manager having their own Management System, working in harmony with the organisations’ Senior Leadership Teams Organisational Management System, achieving growth together, as one team.
Mark Freiberga-Postle
Owner of start-up Sticky Knowledge®