Clients frequently don’t want to take the time to assess their organization’s leadership alignment. My experience is that the assessment always provides some new insights. One such client was a division of a large conglomerate. The 2008 economic recession had hurt their industry particularly hard. The CFO had been aggressively cutting costs and the business began to implement new systems from SAP to support their business.

When asked, “Why are you implementing SAP,” nearly 100% of their top management had one of two answers. “Our corporate parent wants us to standardize on a common system.” Alternatively, “The finance department needs better reporting to help us manage our costs better.” Both answers, however, were wrong.

This business had already cut its costs nearly to the bone and was under no pressure to standardize. The CFO was enabling the business to have a more vertically integrated supply chain. They needed a new supply chain so they could compete more effectively with imported product. Their huge effort wasn’t about costs, it was about revenue.

Had the client not uncovered this misalignment, their leadership would have faced significant challenges. The team would have been working to deliver the wrong business model and processes. With this new understanding of how the leadership was oriented to think, the business was able to head in the right direction a lot sooner and with less friction along the way.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2011 at 7:17 am and is filed under Change Management, Leadership.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.