Purepost Organizational Functional Life Cycle of People and Things Within a Complex System.
Strategic Intent and Business Strategy Selection
Strategic intent is the company's obsession with winning at all levels of the organization. Strategic intent must be able to stand the test of time. The organization's "target for personal effort and commitment" is the most critical element to both short-term and long-term competitive success. Successful organizational leaders often use scenario planning to identify, explore, and study several competitive success alternatives before selecting and formulating the organization's strategic intent. Scenario planning is a crucial management process designed to bring order and discipline and minimize the risk of the critical strategy formulation activity. Scenarios are tools for helping leaders take a long view in a world of great uncertainty. The scenario process provides a context for thinking clearly about complex decision factors. It gives leaders a common language for talking about these factors, starting with a series of "What-If" stories, each with a different name. Scenarios are tools for ordering leaders' perceptions about alternative future environments. Alternatively, it creates an organizational "Vision" or strategic intent about the distant future. If scenarios are the building blocks that lead to creating organizational strategic intent, then strategic intent leads to selecting an accurate and competitive business strategy.
Work System/Core Competency Design and Development (People & Things)
Once strategic intent is established through the scenario process and leaders have settled on a competitive business strategy, creating "a guide to strategic positioning," the organization can select an appropriate work system design. The work system design must be capable of driving the organization to achieve higher performance levels in increasingly challenging environments. The work system design must address the five essential parts of organizational design, the Amplified Galbraith Star Model. The Amplified Star components consist of (a) task and technology, (b) structure, (c) people, (d) processes, and (e) rewards. These design components must fit the strategy and support one another to perform effectively. Understanding that organizational design is more than simply defining structure and composition is essential. Organizational design also includes identifying the organization's core competencies. As we know them today, core competencies create unique value for the organization and differentiate it from any competitor. Core competencies also assist leaders in determining what functions the organization should control internally and what functions should be outsourced.
Selection and Deployment (People and Things)
Once work system design and core competency selection are complete, leaders can turn their attention and examine the organization's people, equipment, and infrastructure needs and, more importantly, plan for their selection and deployment. The organization's design is critical for it will facilitate or raise barriers to future people's performance. A robust design clearly lays out resource requirements and enables the organization to forecast its future needs accurately in terms of people and things. We know today that value-based skill hiring practices, people-focused developmental activities, accurate and complete information systems, fair and equitable work processes, and the right kind of managers motivate employees and improve performance. Moreover, connecting performance to rewards helps create a work system design that facilitates people selection and retention. In addition, an effective design also enables the organization to meet company-wide commitments and accomplish its mission. The drivers of a smooth selection and deployment process are an integrated people and things acquisition and support system. During periods of rapid business growth and equipment/technology modernization, the understanding and execution of these systems are critical.
Orientation and Training (People and Things)
After leadership has cycled through the initial selection and deployment function, people and things must align with business strategy execution. This step in the process is where leaders understand that they must manage on three levels: people, information, and action. People must know where they will be assigned, what they will be doing, and what will be expected. Leaders can facilitate this by providing an orientation that sets the context for individual and team performance. This context is essential to business execution. Moreover, studies tell us leaders must lead by clarifying the organization's context (vision, purpose, mission, and values). The context should lay out the organization's ideology and direction regarding vision, purpose, operating principles, and performance standards. People's attitudes and behaviors will be shaped enormously by the quality of the company's first impression of interest and concern. Also, during orientation, people should be briefed on their appropriate career paths and work opportunities to get a clear picture of how they can develop and grow. People must be trained to perform entry-level work, be taught the organization's formal and informal practices, and be provided sufficient knowledge to achieve company and individual goals. Finally, people must be allowed to learn the skills to operate existing or new equipment and technology.
Growth and Re-Deployment (People and Things)
As people grow and the organization grows and matures, the re-deployment of both people and things happens more often and becomes routine. Furthermore, as the company explores and plays out new scenarios, growth will become more rapid. The organization's movement into new markets, regions, and even new countries brings with it the requirement to recycle through previously visited functions of the "Organizational Functional Life Cycle." A leader's solid understanding of the interrelatedness of the "Life Cycle's" first four elements: 1) Scenario Development, Strategic Intent, and Competitive Strategy Selection; 2) Organizational/Core Competency Design and Development; 3) Selection and Deployment; and 4) Orientation and Training is essential for a speedy, nimble, and flexible response to growth. Additionally, today, many companies rely on self-directed work teams, which are multi-skilled and competent in forward thinking and critical thinking capabilities. These highly skilled teams and individuals spin up quickly and transition to new requirements, even relocating if necessary. These capabilities are a “must” in effectively managing expansion demands.
Sustainment, Renewal, and Development (People and Things)
No matter how big and successful the organization becomes, learning and renewal will always be the “Power” behind the company’s growth and success. If people individually and the organization do not learn and renew, people and things will not survive. What matters most in today's competitive world is how leaders deal with the intellectual capital inside the organization. The knowledge, insights, and skills of the organization's workforce will determine how quickly it responds to growth, change, and challenges from the outside environment. Leaders at all organizational levels face challenges in figuring out how to engage people to improve performance. Learning is behind actual development, change, and transformation within every successful company. To learn and, more importantly, to renew, leaders must again come to grips with the phenomenon of context, which is so crucial in the "Life Cycle" functions of orientation and training. Context is "the human environment that determines the limitations of people's actions and the scope of results those actions can produce." Leaders must constantly create new contexts to renew and not hold onto the old. In today’s world, the leader's new work is to create tension, and their new roles are designer, teacher, and steward.
Change and Transformation (People and Things)
Rapid change and transformation require the organization to have highly integrated re-training, re-deployment, and separation systems. Once people have reinvented themselves, they will want to take action to make what was previously impossible possible. Leaders must learn to act, lead, and relate to people in new ways. This new behavior may require re-training and the re-deployment of people and things within the company. This re-training and re-deployment applies to both leaders and their followers. The organization must constantly use the power of rapid learning in its daily mode of operation, which is most likely a form of significant change or transformation in today's environment. Studies tell us that this type of learning must be more generative than adaptive because major changes and significant transformations in today's business world come from portfolio restructuring or re-engineering processes instead of tweaking structure and simple continuous improvement. Minor change goes after making something better, different, or more. On the other hand, transformation deals with reinventing people and things, which means creating something impossible in the organization's current reality. Said differently, transformation is about altering one's being, the human context.
Final Separation (People and Things)
Finally, whether as a result of a transformation process, an individual reinvention experience, or the simple passage of time, there comes a point when the organization must also voluntarily or involuntarily separate people and things from the work environment. Regardless of the reason, separations must always be conducted with great dignity and respect. The cycle starts again when this function is complete and new people and things are assimilated.
A Final Word
Our Vision, Purpose, and Mission make clear our Strategic Intent. Purepost Product Development and Sales are robust. We now exist to level the playing field for ALL job seekers and talent acquisition professionals by providing services that match talents and help individuals realize their complete skills, competencies, and Human Capital Value. Purepost effects personalized job matching in a Fast, Easy, and Effective manner. Industry experts and behavioral scientists built our proprietary competency database with 45+ years of experience. Purepost maps individual experiences to transferable skills in minutes and instantly matches them with job postings of partner organizations. We possess the world's most extensive collection of skills and competencies mapped to roles. We instantly identify skills based on individual work experience and education decoded with data and human sciences. We are indeed a "One-of-a-Kind Company."
