Where is My Office? by Chris Kane

Author:Chris Kane
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472978691
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Effecting Organizational Change the Waters Way

When the board of an enterprise sets out a change programme for the CEO to champion, it is presumed that the intent will be delivered. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will be put in place to measure results and the best project/change management strategies will be applied. This is followed by an appropriate announcement of the transformation initiative to great fanfare, by way of encouraging everyone’s enthusiasm to adopt it. Yet so many of these programmes run out of steam and I often wonder why and what happens since they seem to be set up in ‘textbook’ fashion and yet something goes awry…

The answer to this conundrum came from my friend Caroline Waters, former director of People and Policy at British Telecom, who introduced me to her solution for ‘operationalising strategy’ – the development of a project’s functional strategies and the establishment of its objectives. Her approach – which I call the ‘Waters Model’ – is based on her experience at BT and came from the enormous challenges faced by the organization in the late 1990s. This required the root-and-branch transformation of the ailing telecommunications giant, while reducing its workforce from 265,000 down to around 80,000, while expanding to into 176 countries as it globalized its business.

On his arrival as the CEO in 2002, Ben Verwaayen set the company on course for nothing short of a total transformation. Ben’s aspiration was to break the command and control labour-intensive siloed patterns and build an increasingly collaborative operating model with increased flexibility and responsiveness factored in, by improving communication skills, external awareness and knowledge sharing.

Caroline’s method considers the complexities of a large enterprise and is based on securing traction for a particular initiative among its multi-layered ranks. It centres on the principle that, aside from the usual delegation routes through the existing organizational hierarchy, there needs to be additional oversight from the person at the helm. They should be responsible for skippering their team on precisely what each member is required to do, to maintain control of the project.

In this way management needs to apply leadership to drive context down into the operating divisions and in one way it is an extension of the long-established practice of ‘Management By Walking About’ (MBWA) so it involves direct participation and a high level of familiarity with organizational practices and the enterprise’s employees, but with an additional dimension.

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