Supply Chain Coaching Shapes Winning Careers.
While we were slaving away, optimising our supply chain widget world, a few financial wizards created yet another recipe for fool’s gold, now commonly known as toxic assets. As a result, we are forced to face some harsh realities as the world heads deeper into a recession and global leaders struggle to estimate where the bottom is, or even how to find it.
So, what does this mean for supply chain management?
The simple truth is that traditional supply chain optimisation methods still apply, and should have prepared us for the downturn in the economy. Do any of the terms “agile”, “responsive”, and “resilient” supply chains ring a bell? They Should!
Unfortunately, though, a poor understanding and slow adoption of supply chain optimisation principles has led to failures that requires critical evaluation to find a new approach to rectify this. The focus must be on skills development and retention. The constant need to change and innovate to stay ahead of the game - combined with global economic pressures - make good executives hard to find and even harder to keep.
A recent industry survey indicates that most companies are poor at developing their own executives. This is often due to the belief that talent will either rise by itself, or that required skills are easy to buy in the job market. But, with current pressures on the South African skills pool, leaving executive development to chance is just too risky.
In today’s competitive environment companies need to focus even more on the development and retention of internal talent. To do this, organisations need to include executive development as part of their organisational design with the major emphasis placed on, not only individual employee development, but also developing high-performance teams to make sure of corporate success.
Three factors are core to developing a winning organisation - identifying key talent, creating a culture of learning and sharing of knowledge.
Developing and retaining talent is a key constraint that limits the growth and competitiveness of South African Supply Chain companies. This is attributed to the limited number of skilled supply chain practitioners that graduate from formal tertiary institutions.
Another influencing factor is the ever-increasing gap between the education that tertiary institutions offer, what the industry requires; and what global best practice prescribes.
What is Supply Chain Coaching?
Supply Chain coaching is a practical approach to bridge the educational divide and help develop talent in an ever-changing supply chain environment. Unlike consulting, Supply Chain coaching provides a sound skills development and sustainable knowledge transfer process that is highly effective in enhancing supply chain performance.
The goal is to help successful supply chains improve even more. To do this, a supply chain coach questions and challenges the status quo in organisations delivering a significant step change in performance.
Within the next five years, the question will no longer be “What is a supply chain coach?”, but rather “Who is your supply chain coach?”
Why Supply Chain Coaching™?
Coaching has proven to be 60% more effective than formal training in improving performance. It was found that training alone increased productivity by 22.4%, whilst it delivered an 88% improvement when combined with coaching.
Coaching helps people to break free of self-imposed limits, get clarity on their goals, and adopt to change without fear; and with more determination to excel in their careers.
In today’s competitive environment, the cost of executive failure is just too high. When an executive's performance doesn’t match expectations, the options are to either terminate; transfer to an important but noncritical function; or to implement steps to correct and improve performance.
The first two options require writing off considerable investments in time and money. To prevent executive failure, many organisations are adopting supply chain coaching as a means of recovering or enhancing investment in potential executives.
Accelerating supply chain skills development
Developing cross-functional supply chain teams is crucial for success. A well-balanced team will always outperform the best person.
One cannot embrace supply chain concepts like collaboration and still accept internal silos within the organisation. Misaligned strategies and goals can have a devastating impact on overall performance.
This cannot be solved by individuals working in isolation; it demands exceptional people working together to find and create unique solutions. They need to drive implementation and exceed in order to provide organisations with a competitive edge.
Traditional supply chain training methods are like taking an asprin; it relieves the symptom, but it does not cure the root cause of the problem. “Textbook” training provides mountains of content without translating it into real-world perspective within a specific industry context. Due to everyday job pressures and crises management, training seldom translates into performance improvement. With all of the tools, but none of the support to implement and execute change, executives often regress back into utilising poor company practices.
Coaching provides individuals and teams with the opportunity to learn from their working life, rather than taking them away from it to learn. This creates both context and perspective by transferring relevant supply chain content and knowledge, whilst achieving specific task delivery objectives during the learning experience. It also delivers benefits that radically enhance the rate of performance improvement, and goes beyond getting either the job or training done.
Jack Welsh described five important traits that top achievers need for success: they need to be:
· smart;
· energetic;
· able to execute ;
· able to provide an edge; and
· have passion.
Translating these into skills development requires a tailored approach that is closely linked to the individual’s career needs and goals.
The three stages to future leadership development
Stage 1: Forming
In the first stage of personal development the emphasis is on forming with the aim to build a solid supply chain knowledge foundation. It is easy to talk about supply chain, but it requires specific, complex, and sometimes technical skills to design, optimise, plan and execute a myriad of supply chain functions. These range from the understanding of advanced statistical models used in demand planning, to the use of the “travelling salesman algorithm” in transportation optimisation and in considering the impact of advanced methodologies used in supply chain, planning, management and execution. Being smart does not come without education, effort and skills development to sharpen all available supply chain tools.
Stage 2: Delivery
This stage focuses on delivering organisational goals whilst personal skills are progressively enhanced. Robust mentoring ensures that successful people develop from junior managers into effective leaders. Mentors help people to focus their energy in delivering sustained results during the learning process.
The key to successful development and retention of skills is to balance and align the organisation’s needs with personal goals. Mentoring ensures that the organisation’s strategy is institutionalised and embedded in the execution of all supply chain functions.
Stage 3: Leadership
In the leadership stage, people reach the pinnacle of their careers, and the aim of supply chain coaching is to give strategic guidance and perspective. A supply chain operating at 200 miles per hour becomes a blur; and theory becomes less important than the specific outcome required for success.
To give their organisation a competitive edge, executives need to check the consequences of alternate strategies, and coaching provides a safe environment within which to do this; who else can the CEO turn to when surrounded by colleagues that drink from the same water fountain? Executives need to provide a competitive advantage, not only for the organisation they serve, but also the people they lead.
Use coaching to create passionate people
Coaching creates the time and space necessary to gain the perspective required for sound decision-making and leadership. The goal is to stretch an executive’s comfort zone and boundaries for achievement; far beyond current performance helping people break free of self-imposed limits. Adopting a Supply Chain coaching approach will deliver people and teams that are passionate about their career, organisation, and work life.
Planning career development around an individual’s passion is the key to organisational success and provides positive energy that is a powerful antidote to the stresses a successful supply chain career will provide.
The ancient Greeks never wrote obituaries, they asked only one question after a man died:
“Did he have passion?”
