Flesh out the challenge
When attacking a challenge, you and your people need to be clear about what it is you are trying to accomplish. At ADVANTAGE, Perry felt the best way to begin turning things around was to identify the company’s best practices and get everyone intently focused on them.
“As a small regional health plan, we don’t have a lot of what I call ‘reserve power,’” Perry says. “We don’t have the mass wealth that our competitors have. We don’t have a huge staff that we can draw on. So we just have had to turn to doing what we know best and work at doing it as best we can.”
When you identify the challenge that you’re trying to conquer, you need to present it as clearly as possible to your team.
“The challenge or the plan of attack needs to have clarity or purpose and it needs to be defined by organizational goals and then goals and milestones,” Perry says. “Give the management team the tools to drive the right activities within their functional areas to support and contribute to those goals. Once people on the team understand the importance of their own contribution, they are more apt to do the right activity the majority of the time to reach those goals. It’s all about execution to a point.”
It’s that point that you need to make sure everybody is clear on so that your company has the best shot to meets its objective. But before you get too far in your efforts, take the time to make sure you’re assessing the scope of the problem accurately.
“We look at a couple of things,” Perry says. “Is it a management problem or is it a systemic problem? If it’s a management problem, it’s a very different approach. If it’s a systemic problem or external threat, then it requires the full attention of the organizational leadership and that’s when we put it through the process.”
In working with project managers over the years, Perry has learned that there are key questions you need to ask yourself in regard to a potential project.
“Do you have the appetite to do it today?” Perry says. “Are there so many things on the plate right now that this becomes less of a priority than a more critical issue? Do we know when we have achieved some measure of success?”
If the answer to these questions is yes, Perry prefers to get away from the office with her team, hunker down and develop a plan of attack.
“We actually go through and we have a lot of mini strategic planning sessions,” Perry says. “We identify that there is a significant challenge that has broad organizational impact potentially. We define it as a team. We define the worst-case scenario, and we define what we think the goal should be.”
Perry brings the manager of whatever department the problem is centered in and gets in depth as to what is happening.
“They address the problem,” Perry says. “Maybe the problem is sales not outpacing expenses. From their perspective, define the problem for me. Why is this a problem? What can you do, if anything, to effect a change? Once they start to think about it from their perspective, they have to own it differently. We write those things down. We may have two walls on a four-wall room that have the problem from a lot of different perspectives. Then we take that and vet that into one or two problems that we all, with purpose, can communicate.”
Use a small team of people, including people that have a stake in the problem, but keep the group from getting too unwieldy.
“You’re never going to get consensus if your team is too large,” Perry says. “The other important point is that you have to be confident that you have the problem identified and that you have the right tools to execute the plan that you have developed. If you lack that confidence, you’re not going to be successful.”
As the plan begins to take shape, start to put together some metrics that will be used to guide the process.
“We vet that with the management team and they develop and draw upon our vision and develop their action plan,” Perry says. “That’s what they manage by. It becomes a very inclusive process, but what’s key is really getting clarity around the challenge and clarity around the plan.”
