The Center for Organizational Design knows how to make collaboration a long-term core competency in your organization. Whether yours is a corporation, a not-for-profit entity, or a government agency, we can help you close the performance gap using our proven Collaborative Management Performance Acceleration System (COMPAS):
The 5 Disciplines
Using the principles and the practices of COMPAS, the Center for Organizational Design equips business leaders with the tools they need to succeed in today’s faster paced markets.
COMPAS is an innovative management system that transforms your workplace into highly collaborative network by designing your leadership practices around the set of principles used by successful businesses such as Google, Linux, W.L. Gore & Associates, Whole Foods, and Zappos. We call these principles The 5 Disciplines of Collaborative Leaders:
- Understand What’s Most Important to Customers. The best companies are customer-centric; they build their strategies around what matters most to customers and design their processes to give delighting customers priority over pleasing bosses.
- Build Shared Understanding by Bringing Everyone Together in Open Conversations. Companies that successfully manage at the pace of accelerating change have innovative processes that enable them to effectively integrate diverse points of view and reach agreements on their disagreements.
- Aggregate and Leverage Collective Knowledge. In a knowledge economy, organizations are fundamentally intelligence systems. Today’s most intelligent organizations no longer leverage individual intelligence by constructing bureaucratic hierarchies; they build collaborative networks to leverage their collective intelligence because they understand that nobody is smarter and faster than everybody.
- Focus on the Critical Few Performance Drivers. The most effective leaders know that management is about creating the future. And when they are good at creating the future, they never have to explain the past. That’s why smart leaders don’t focus on outcome measures; they focus on the leading indicators that drive the outcomes.
- Hold People Accountable to Their Peers. The secret to mastering the unprecedented combination of accelerating change and escalating complexity is to make sure that no one in the organization has the authority to kill a good idea or keep a bad idea alive. In the best businesses, leaders aren’t bosses; they’re catalysts and facilitators orchestrating collaborative networks. These networks are far smarter and faster than hierarchies because holding people accountable to their peers is the great enabler of the collaboration necessary for speed and innovation.
The Tools
The practical components of COMPAS are the Collaboration Tools that the Center for Organizational Design provides to help business leaders close the performance gap: the Balanced Scorecard, the Collaboration Work-Thru, and Cross-Team Metrics. Whether you chose to focus on selected individual applications or to adopt the complete system, these tools will help your company to dramatically increase its performance by leveraging the power of the collaborative advantage.
To learn more about these tools and how to bring them in-house, call the Center at 303-730-0018 or email us at solutions@centerod.com.
Balanced Scorecard
The Balanced Scorecard is a proven measurement tool that identifies the most important measures of business success. These key indicators provide a common focus to align business activities with the vision and strategy of the organization.
Our unique and innovative approach helps business leaders create better strategy by harnessing the collective intelligence within your organization to build your most powerful set of key measures. And with our approach you don’t need to invest in additional software because COMPAS is compatible with most existing project management applications.
What sets us apart is that, in addition to the providing you with the standard Balanced Scorecard, we also work with you to identify the Four Critical Performance Drivers and the One Most Important Number for your business. These powerful metrics provide a framework for collaboration by:
- Providing a holistic picture of the business strategy that allows all employees to see how they can contribute to the organization’s success
- Integrating learning metrics with performance measures to promote shared understanding about how the business is changing
- Incorporating key cross-company goals that everyone shares in common
- Tracking progress on the most important indicators of business results
Collaboration Work-Thrus
A Collaboration Work-Thru is a facilitated meeting process that empowers a diverse group of individuals to quickly co-create a shared understanding and a clear consensus about the core elements of strategy and the key drivers of execution. This shared understanding assures that everyone is on the right page and the same page at the start of a critical business initiative or a major IT project.
By providing companies with quick access to the most untapped resource in almost every company – the collective knowledge of its own people – Work-Thrus enable a highly unusual level of collaboration and productivity that sets companies apart from their competition by:
- Gaining clarity about what’s most important to customers
- Aligning key business processes with customer values.
- Identifying the most important measures that drive cross-group collaboration.
- Building the company-wide shared understanding that is the secret to successfully managing complex change.
The Center for Organizational Design offers three types of Collaboration Work-Thrus:
- Balanced Scorecard Work-Thrus: These sessions leverage your organization’s collective intelligence to provide you with the measurement tools you need to successfully navigate the turbulent waters of accelerating change and complexity. Our innovative approach to constructing your Balanced Scorecard helps you build a company-wide shared understanding about what’s most important to your business success.
- Strategic Leadership Work-Thrus: These sessions provide a unique opportunity for leadership teams to leverage their collective knowledge and deeply understand new market realities, changing customer values, and evolving business models. The resulting strategic intelligence enables a level of insight and collaboration that sets your leadership team apart from your competition by aligning strategy and execution with what’s most important to your customers.
- Project Management Work-Thrus: These sessions are ideal tools for catapulting the integration of the work of two merging organizations or for jump-starting a fledgling project that’s eating dollars and moving nowhere. This powerful tool gets to the heart of complex business issues and seemingly unsolvable problems by using the group’s collective wisdom to identify innovative solutions and move to a clear consensus on action in a very short period of time.
Cross-Team Metrics
Collaboration requires shared goals so that all employees are invested in each other’s success. Our business consultants will guide your team through the basic steps for constructing a customized set of key Cross-Team Metrics that assures that your people are working together, supporting each other, and accountable to each other. These goals are typically built into an organization’s performance evaluation system to:
- Make sure that everyone working on the same project is working towards the same results.
- Provide an incentive for people to be focused on the company’s success rather than their individual accomplishments.
- Create a line of sight between the interconnected activities of different parts of the organization that need to come together to drive business success.
- Align rewards with collaborative behavior.
