Know where you want to go
After the numbers had been crunched and the reasoning had been laid out, Roeder had his team in a better frame of mind to consider change. But to really get them to believe, he had to provide a plan of how it would be done and specifics as to what it would accomplish.
“You need some mechanism, some methodology, some process by which you manage your change and you manage the evolution of your organization,” Roeder says. “Whatever kind of company you are today, you better think in five years you’re going to be a very different organization. To do that evolution in a planned, managed format is far better than trying to react to market changes, competitor pressure, customers’ demands and financial climate.”
“We come up with a desired future state. Based on that desired future state, what’s the value proposition? What will that change do for us? You go through doing a little bit of [return on investment]. If you do it correctly, it becomes a process. You have to have a process to manage change.”
A process involves developing initiatives with action items that have names and dates attached to them.
“Maybe you have five to 15 action items to complete the initiative,” Roeder says. “Or it requires a project. This is an initiative that has multiple phases to it. Action items get a completion date put on them and they get a person’s name put on them. We know what it is that has to get done, who’s doing it and when they are supposed to have it done by. Now we have the necessary tools.
“We meet as a management group every other week and that’s one of the things we review. What were the action items for the last two weeks that were supposed to be completed? Were there any action items that weren’t completed? It gives us a way to put it into a process by which you manage that change. You have to take it from, ‘We know what we want to do’ to, ‘OK, now how are we going to do it?’”
Roeder used this process to make a software change within the company’s international group to improve performance.
“We had names associated with that,” Roeder says. “Who is doing testing? When do we go live? That entire process of identifying the software we wanted, then rolling it out because it has operational implications and it has accounting implications, that’s what I’m talking about. Within that whole process, there were different things that had to be accomplished.”
It’s that ability to enact a workable action plan that makes the difference between successful leaders and ones who just talk a good game with tired clichés and empty promises. Roeder believes this is making a difference at ProTrans and will put the company in a much better position to handle future turbulence in the market.
“There’s a lot of people who have good ideas,” Roeder says. “There’s a much smaller subset of that group of individuals that actually implement them. Those who know how to take it from an idea to an implemented process, that goes a long way.”
How to reach: ProTrans International Inc., (888) 744-7669 or www.protrans.com
