COPPENRATH MANAGEMENT CONSULTING -- Leadership

Leadership

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This is not just another leadership course but a high value-added strategy that combines assessment, on-the-job training, coaching, aimed at improving individual and organizational performance.

Our suggestion: to develop leaders who deliver results.

Robert Coppenrath & Associates in collaboration with Results-Based Leadership

presents

Leveraging Intangibles: The Intangibles Audit™

An Intangible is anything in a firm that generates value that you can’t drop on your foot: people, brand, reputation, the ability to innovate and learn, how decisions get made and by whom, the relationship to your customers, the confidence investors have in your strategy and ability to deliver it, and so on.

The Economist, 2004

2004 survey of global senior executives:

96% think that intangibles are important;
Half think that they are one of the top three most critical issues they face;
95% say they have no deliberate management systems to deal with them.

Accenture

Intangibles Account for Half of Market Value in Publicly Traded Companies

“When asked what companies they admire, people quickly point to organizations like GE, Starbucks, Nordstrom’s, or Microsoft.

Ask how many layers of management these companies have, though, or how they set strategy, and few people know or care. What people admire about these companies is not how they are structured or the processes through which work is accomplished, but their capabilities—their ability to innovate, for example, or to be responsive to changing customer needs. Such capabilities—what we called “organization capabilities”— represent key intangible assets. You can’t see or touch them, yet they can make all the difference in the world when it comes to market value.”

Capitalizing Your Capabilities,
Harvard Business Review,
June 2004, Ulrich and Smallwood

Intangibles account for so much value because they give all of your stakeholders—your executives, employees, customers, investors, analysts, regulators, suppliers—confidence about the future of your organization.

Not Just Assess—Assess, Improve, Re-assess

You may already recognize the significance of intangibles and utilize measurement approaches like the Balanced Scorecard.
However, measurement is not enough. Your leaders must create a virtuous cycle of assessment, followed by targeted investments to improve followed by re-assessment to assess impact. Since intangibles drive value, you must rigorously manage for improvements.

The job of your leaders is not just to understand where you stand today, it’s to target where to create value, then make decisions and take action to improve where it makes the most difference.

Examples of where your leaders can go further to increase value through intangibles include:

You have a clear strategy, with milestones and financial plans. How do you manage talent, brand, communications and culture to make sure that they all support and drive your strategy?
You have completed cost cutting and streamlining programs.
... How do you give your organization the courage to grow and take intelligent risks?
You have a fabulous new technology that will pull you into a new business area. Have you articulated how this will impact your strategy in terms of your customers? Your regions? Are your executives, employees and investors aligned with it?
You have a fine set of new governance rules. How do you make sure that they are actually lived in the firm without simply adding more costs in terms of checks, balances and audits?
You know what the three things are that keep you awake at night. Are you dealing with them effectively? Indeed, are these the three things you should worry about?
You want to change the organization, but realize that the structure matters less than what you are good at doing. So, how do you build a more effective organization?
You want to build your leadership bench since you know that leaders make a huge difference in results. So, how do you start?

Identify Highest Impact Areas: The Intangibles Audit™

RBL has developed The Intangibles Audit ™ that allows you to successfully tangle with intangibles. The audit makes intangibles tangible so that your leaders know precisely where to invest their time, energy and money to optimize value.

Just as financial audits allow your leaders to monitor cash flow and leadership 360s assess your leaders’ behaviours, The Intangibles Audit ™ allows your leaders to monitor and improve on your organization’s intangibles. Your audit assesses which capabilities are most important given your history and strategy, measures how well your organization delivers on these capabilities, and leads to an action plan for improving them. Your entire company, a business unit, or a region can do this exercise—indeed, any part of your company that has a strategy to produce financial and customer results can do an audit, as long as it has the sponsorship of its leadership team. The analysis of the results of these Audits enables your leaders to focus their decision-making on those areas with highest impact on performance and value creation.

Audit Practices That Build Value

RBL research and experience has identified the Architecture for Intangibles™* that describes four levels of well-managed intangibles.
This architecture provides a roadmap for how your leaders can increase value. The Intangibles Audit™ identifies what different stakeholders’ value at each level (see Appendix B) and then compares and contrasts your stakeholder value perceptions in a clear feedback report and executive workshop so that your leaders know where to focus decisions, initiatives and actions.

RBL’s Architecture for Intangibles

* Why the Bottom Line Isn’t: How to Build Value through People and Organization, Ulrich and Smallwood, Wiley, 2003

Getting Started: Three Options

1. Collaborate with RBL
RBL professionals collaborate with you to ensure that your Intangibles Audit™ experience is successful. We can help you tailor an approach for your organization that not only gets the right information but also ensures that your leaders know how to make decisions and take actions that deliver the most value from the information.

Our collaboration can range from extensive to minimal. By collaborating with us, you have access to a knowledgeable and experienced resource that ensures your success.

2. Primary Focus on One Level
Sometimes, it is not necessary to focus on all four levels of the Architecture for Intangibles™.

For example, your organization takes action to improve a targeted level and desires to determine the impact of your investments.
We call this follow-up process Intangibles Audit™ Pulse Checks.
Alternatively, your HR team may periodically audit level 4 Organization Capabilities to determine if your efforts to build value through organization and people have succeeded.

As a rule of thumb, we recommend a thorough Intangibles Audit™ every 18 months with periodic Intangible Audit™ Pulse Checks to gauge impact of actions taken every 6 to 10 months.

3. Do it yourself
This option allows you to utilize several of our services on your own:
• The Intangibles Audit™;
• Online Processing;
• Generation of Feedback Report
We recommend this as an option after at least one collaboration experience.

Taking the Audit

Whichever option you select, you will gain deep insights following
a proven eight-step process:
1. Tailor the focus of your audit—corporate, business unit, geography, or function;
2. Determine the extensiveness of your audit—quick and dirty (90-degree data from a management team), comprehensive (360-degree data from employees at multiple levels throughout the audited unit), or thorough (720-degree data including external suppliers, customers, and investors);
3. Identify your stakeholders who will participate in the audit;
4. Tailor surveys to your stakeholders (e.g., for language, industry/company terminology, additional questions) and determine best method of reaching each— online survey, personal interview, etc. For example, we recommend that someone personally contact your targeted customers before they receive a survey, whereas a letter to your executives or employees may be sufficient;
5. Administer audit;
6. RBL analyzes your feedback and creates feedback reports by desired demographics (e.g., overall, each stakeholder, business unit, geography, product, and so on);
7. Conduct executive workshop to review the data from your audit and identify key actions and decisions;
8. Monitor effectiveness of key actions taken to reassess specific changes in perception of your target stakeholders through the use of targeted Intangible Audit™ Pulse Check.

Benefits

If you do the audit, you will be able to add intangible value to your organization because you will be more able to:

Target where to invest your time, energy and money to execute your strategy;
Determine if current initiatives are delivering the desired results;
Make and keep your promises;
Set and communicate a clear vision for the future. This vision will focus on how you will grow your business (e.g., by product innovation, customer connection, or geographic expansion) and offer specific ways to make it happen;
Define and deliver core competencies to accomplish your vision, such as logistics, marketing, manufacturing, sales/service;
Define and deliver core capabilities like talent, collaboration, learning, speed, accountability, leadership, and shared mindset.

If you want to ensure that your organization delivers maximum value, contact RCA, we are focused on results that deliver intangible value. Please contact Robert Coppenrath at 514-938-4100. We look forward to speaking with you.

Appendix A: Sample Feedback Report

A. Sample Feedback Report

Table of Contents
Summary of Findings

Actions requiring executive sponsorship
Relative strength of rater group feedback
Relative strength of Intangible Levels
Core strengths to leverage
Key improvement opportunities
Important themes across the Intangibles Architecture
Suggested next steps
Section 1: How to Interpret the Intangibles Audit Results
Section 2: Overall Results
Overall Scores for Each of the Four Levels of the Intangibles Architecture™
Overall Scores Segmented by Rater Group
Overall Scores Segmented by other demographic (If applicable)
Section 3: Inside - Out Misalignments (gaps in external vs. internal view)
- Areas of stakeholder confidence and hidden concern
Section 4: Value Drivers
- Top 20 and Low 20 responses by Audit Item
Section 5: Written Comments
Section 6: Rater Groups at a Glance
- All Survey Results by Rater Groups
Section 7: Audit Items at a Glance
- All Survey Results by Audit Question

Also available within RBL’s electronic interactive reports:

Section 8: Integrating Themes Between Levels of the Intangibles Architecture™
Communication
Measurement
Leadership
Culture
OR any specific organizational capability

Sample Report Pages
Section 1
Overall Scores by Level of Intangible

Implementation process

Pre-Work
Intangibles Audit
Pre-reading
Interview sponsors- target chronic problems
.

Results-Based Leadership
Challenges facing our organization
Leadership Value Proposition
Employee, customer, organization and financial results
Review Action Learning Projects
Tools for targeted capabilities
Action Learning process consistent with building targeted capabilities 2 days Classroom

Action Learning & Coaching
Internal sponsor/mentor
Faculty coach 8-10-12 weeks Application

Value Creating Leadership
Review AL projects- impact to date
Problem Solving and Project Management
Measuring impact
Change Management 1.5 days Classroom

Follow up
Measure Impact of AL projects after 16 weeks
Redo intangibles audit after 6 months to 1 year (stakeholder impact) 16-52 weeks Application

Robert Coppenrath & Associates in collaboration with Results-Based Leadership

presents

Strategic Human Resource Development Program

Purpose:

The Strategic Human Resource Development Program (SHRDP) builds the ability of your HR professionals to make more strategic business contributions. These abilities enable your HR professionals to develop and implement high value-add HR agendas that contribute to your business success.

The Strategic Human Resources Development Program is built on the assumption that for your HR professionals to become business partners, they must directly contribute to creating value that matters to senior executives, to external customers and to the investment community. A significant channel for HR value creation is to build organization capabilities that increase the capability of your business to grow profitably.

The Strategic Human Resources Development Program incorporates three levels of professional development:

Conceptual understanding. The program examines the best and current conceptual and empirical research.
Insights from state-of-the-art best practices. Participants learn current best practices from companies that are among the acknowledged leaders in HR value-add practices.
Applications. Program success is measured by the ability of participants to deliver results when they return. Participants learn specific application tools relevant to business problems and opportunities.

Program Content

The program targets individual HR competencies as well as HR departmental capabilities necessary to contribute more powerfully to business success. Two content areas support this:

Linking HR to Business Strategy. Based on the most recent research and best practice summaries, participants learn how to link HR practices to business strategy. In this segment of the program, the logic and best practice frameworks for strategic alignment of HR agendas and practices are examined and applied.
Developing Key Organizational Capabilities. More traditional HR development programs have focused on what HR does (e.g., staffing, measurements, rewards, training, communicating, etc.) rather than what HR delivers (e.g., creating key capabilities that promote company performance). This program is targeted at the HR deliverables. Participants learn the skills to build key organizational capabilities that drive profitability and top line growth.

Such capabilities include:

Developing more efficient and cost effective organizations,
Improving overall product and service quality,
Getting new products to market ahead of the competition,
Enhancing the firm’s cultural brand identity,
Creating and sustaining a powerful leadership brand,
Higher success rates for mergers and acquisitions,
Increasing the velocity of cash flow generation,
Leveraging synergy across teams and business units,
Creating high productivity and accountability,
Optimizing flexibility and adaptability relative to market threats and opportunities.

Program Components
The program is delivered through the following six phases.

Phase I: Conducting individual and organizational assessments:
Individual Assessment: Each participant completes an HR Competency Self-Assessment and 360 feedback on the required competencies.
Organization Audit: Customer, financial and organization factors are assessed to understand specific needs that participants must address in their work setting to have impact.

Phase II: Working closely with senior HR and training executives, the program is tailored to be consistent with your business strategy, your HR strategy, and the competency gap of your HR professionals.

Phase III: 4.5-day classroom experience that builds the linkage between your HR and business strategies. The first day is allocated to a review of the business strategy of your company together with an overview of the state-of-the-art in strategic thinking and strategy formulation. The other three days review the steps for linking HR to business strategy. Concepts, logic and best practices are translated into specific tools. The teaching style is highly interactive and consists of small group discussions, personal application, case studies, best practice sharing, and mini-lectures.

Phase IV: The first of the two Application Projects provides the opportunity to apply the Phase III materials to a specific business situation. Participants are divided into business teams and work together to develop a high value-added HR strategy for their assigned business. During this project, teams will interact with faculty and will be supported by a Virtual e-Learning website to support project success.

Phase V: Includes both a classroom component and the second of the two Application Projects.

Build Organization Capabilities: Participants learn frameworks and tools to build and sustain key organization capabilities. The final determination of the organizational capabilities to be taught is made based on the organizational assessment from Phase I and on discussions with the company’s senior HR leadership team.
Second Application Project: Measuring impact is critical, so each participant is required to complete a second Application Project that has a $100K - $200K impact on their business that incorporates tools/frameworks learned in the Program. This project alone ensures that the Program has a high return on investment.

Phase VI: To ensure the effectiveness of the overall experience, faculty members are available to coach individuals and teams through the implementation of their Application Projects.