Promote innovation and growth with virtual methods

In order to achieve profitable growth, we have to break the deadlock in the leadership," said a senior leader.

case study:

The leadership of Weyerhaeuser's building materials industry wants every company to have leadership: to drive innovation and growth quickly. But the complexity of leadership tasks is daunting. They have more than 70 branches in the US and Canada, and they have recently implemented a matrix structure that organizes geographically dispersed leadership into 12 regional markets.

Everyone clearly needs strategic leadership action. Their sales have grown little or no at all in the past three years, and while costs have continued to increase with inflation, gross margins have remained unchanged.

There are several challenges behind this need for strategic leadership actions:

The industrial business is highly fragmented and is served by thousands of different niche competitors.
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Although larger than many other competitors, Weyerhaeuser's competitive position is weak. Its "niche" is mainly a mixture of local markets.
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The company's core strategic leadership weakness is its uncoordinated innovation and growth strategy.

Each local leadership unit is targeted at its unique customers and products. Without proper leadership coordination, innovation and growth opportunities are missed, resources are wasted, costs are uncontrolled, and implementation is inconsistent.

The efforts of the previous two senior leadership failed to overcome this problem of the local drive strategy. Whenever the top leadership tries to advocate more centralized control over local decisions, the local leadership will refuse to give up control, especially to salespeople. This level of leadership resistance at the local level, combined with a lack of strategic leadership at the business level, has brought the company to a deadlock. It has neither a coordinated innovation and growth strategy nor the ability to form or implement a strategy.

"In order to achieve profitable growth, we have to break the deadlock in the leadership," said a senior leader. "Our problem is how to use a limited resource to achieve this quickly and at the lowest cost. The solution is to use an online collaboration center to bring participants together for regular weekly strategic thinking and planning meetings."

Virtual method

The goal of the virtual approach is to ensure that the knowledge and opinions of the full functionality of the entire company are reflected in planning and implementation.

The executive leadership team coordinates the entire work with the support of a senior strategic decision leadership team that monitors overall progress and makes strategic decisions in real time [and quickly allocate resources as needed].

"Usually, our executive leadership work will begin soon, but it will get into trouble as problems and concerns surface in many ways," said Phil Leupold, regional general manager and executive leadership team leader. "For this reason, members of the executive leadership team should maintain strategic leadership [rather than promoting narrow interests] and continue to actively participate in leadership throughout the planning and initial implementation phases.

"We recognize the importance of involving our leadership stakeholders in all regions. The challenge is not to determine who should be involved in the process," Leupold said. "The convening of so many leading players from geographically dispersed locations is a cost and logistical limitation. This is simply not feasible."

The solution uses a collaboration center to enable participants to conduct strategic planning and implementation meetings on a weekly basis. "Using web-based collaboration tools, we are able to quickly guide and organize attention. We can think and plan in real time, regardless of our geographic location, which allows us to maintain the speed and consistency needed for success," Leupold said.

During the two phases of the 90-day period, participants quickly developed and implemented a successful strategy for innovation and growth.

Phase 1: Executive Leadership Process

In the first phase, the executive leadership team holds an online planning meeting once a week, usually for 90 minutes. These meetings are strictly written. Before each meeting, participants previewed the materials to be reported [sent to them 48 hours in advance]. For the session, they dial into the audio conference line and log in to the collaboration center.

Participants provide feedback during and immediately after the conference call, so that everyone can challenge ideas in real time and see in real time whether consensus and ownership are taking shape.

Leupold said: "We often have more than 20 people providing simultaneous input, which greatly speeds up the whole process. For our most controversial topics, we use anonymous mode for feedback, which produces a lot of candid observations, these observations will not be On the surface - face to face meeting."

Three steps to establish ownership and agreement for each program deliverable are achieved through collaboration tools.

Step 1: Question input

During and after the initial online meeting, participants answered a series of questions online to capture their perception of a particular issue.

After the first meeting, the facilitator reviewed the participant's online input and then prepared a deliverable draft #1, which was emailed to the participants before the next week's meeting.

Step 2: Draft development

At the next week's meeting, the participants verbally discussed the Deliverable Draft #1 for a few minutes and then used the online collaboration tool to answer three questions about each part of the draft:

What is the overall agreement level for this part of the draft in the range of 1-10?

What is your rating?

What editorial or substantive content did you recommend for this section?

After the meeting, the coordinator reviewed the participant's new online input and then prepared a deliverable draft #2, which was emailed to the attendees prior to the next week's meeting.

Step 3: Confirm the consensus

Through the third week of iterative feedback sessions, an 85-90% consensus was reached on a well-thought-out deliverable, which was approved by senior leaders and published in an online library.

At the end of the first phase of the executive leadership process, the executive leadership team developed an overall strategy and strategic action plan for 17 consistent projects. At the end of the first phase, a two-day on-site meeting with senior leaders was completed to complete and approve 17 plans and prepare for implementation.

Phase 2: Executive Leadership Process

In the second phase, the cross-functional implementation leadership team was established and operated as a temporary "activity" organization.

Every other week, the GEO Group implements virtual guidance on how the leadership team can remove obstacles and accelerate action. During the "closed" week, the implementation team conducted their own team meeting.

The GEO Group also used the online version of the US Army's Post-Action Review [AAR] to provide monthly progress checks for the entire activity group [all 17 teams]. During the progress check, each implementation team answered four questions:

What are we going to do?

What happened?

Why is this happening?

What have we learned, what are we going to do next time?

Members of the Executive Leadership team learn about work and non-work in real time by participating in monthly post-action assessments.

Virtual method result

In view of the lack of previous strategies, Weyerhaeuser's senior leadership is clearly satisfied with the performance of Chief Financial Officer Ed Jones 12 months after the start of the program:

Sales increased by 10%, the highest sales growth rate ever recorded with a market growth rate of less than 3%.

Net profit increased by 58%.

Return on assets rose by 60%.

The number of employees has decreased by 10%.

Despite the increase, total business investment remains unchanged.

The main market segment share increased.

In addition, the business leadership has identified other significant benefits of virtual methods in planning and implementation.

"The cost-effective way we can quickly participate in the entire organization is impressive," says Phil Leupold. "We quickly capture and synthesize a wide range of perspectives, opinions and ideas and turn them into a winning strategy and action agenda that everyone understands and buys."

"This is the first time we have a coordinated innovation and growth strategy," Leupold added. "Over the entire organization, the leadership and commitment of strategic leadership and its implementation are highly recognized. Leaders at all levels are consistent and proactively collaborate."

"Our business not only benefits from this process; our personal leaders also benefit," said Chief Financial Officer Ed Jones. "There are a lot of insights into best practices in implementing leadership, especially ways to speed up thinking, planning, and acting."

Jones said that the virtual approach to developing and implementing innovation and growth strategies positions the business for future success in several ways:
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It addresses core issues such as leadership, customer choice, product mix, accountability, process and staffing.

Most importantly, leaders at all levels of the organization are involved in developing strategies and spreading them widely.

Realigning the operational structure allows the leadership to gain more control from the business level without compromising local initiatives.

Managers and sellers have clear customer and product responsibilities.

New reporting responsibilities were implemented and geographic barriers were removed.

In order to provide radical remanufacturing to large customers...

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