Synergy of People, Process, Partners and Performance

To evaluate how this works I guess now is a good time to further examine the synergy of people, process partners and performance. I feel that in the beginning it is important to identify just what I mean so there are no misconceptions, although I am sure there will be.

People: People are those who work for you and through their labors help to achieve your organizations mission, goals and objectives, it also includes you. All can be your company's greatest asset or greatest liability.

Process: Process is the way in which you accomplish your organizations mission, goals and objectives. Process is the “how” of the way you do things. It includes, engineering processes, policies and procedures, marketing and sales strategies, insurance risk management, unique contract language, finance strategy, patents and inventions, and other things uniquely tied to your organization to which your people apply their labors.

Partners. Partners, in their truest sense are any person (except your employees), company, entity or thing that interact with or have the potential for an occasion to interact with your company in any number of ways. Entities can include governmental bodies and this may be a stretch, but they include the weather, hurricanes, tornadoes and blizzards, earthquakes, fires or any natural or man made disaster, and lest we forget terrorist scumbag acts, robbers and crooks (including “white collar” thugs and gangs), which reinforce the need for all those darned regulators. Partners ideally should help your organization reach its objectives. But note that partners, if not evaluated fully, can also be your undoing. A tornado not prepared for, a shady supplier, and crooked regulators are all examples of this risk exposure.

Performance: Is the result, the end game, the score or what ever else you want to call it. It is the output of the people, process and partner inputs and dependent on the synergy that exists between them. Performance can be can be excellent, poor or anywhere in between and is in direct relation to this balance. For more see our website at www.tipsonxl.com

Not Much Synergy Today

I am a staunch supporter of the people, process, partner and performance concept, yet it seems as it is melting down right with the rest of the economy into the abyss. Trust and respect for people has eroded, process innovation is stalled and partners are being fed to the dogs. Does anyone wonder why our performance, aka. economy is like it is?

Some may argue that we went too far the other way, too much trust, too much innovation, and relying too heavily on partners, and perhaps we did, but synergy still has validity. The problem is that some, (those people with enough leverage to topple the country), mixed in a healthy dose of deceit, greed and manipulation, found out how ignorant many have become, and viola, the burst of a system that was not in synergy in the first place.

Educational Synergy

Does the current traditional model of employee training still work? I think there are some flaws and these flaws occur due to a lack of, you guessed it, Synergy. Synergy across the functions of the company, synergy with the mission of the organization and synergy with what matters to our customers.

Most training and education programs are structured with an instructor, the alleged expert, talking to the people sitting in the audience. In this day and age chances are that the collective wisdom of those in the audience far exceeds the expert in the front of the room. However the current structure of most training delivery processes ignore this.

We need to move toward a system where the presenter is viewed more as a moderator intent on building the educational experience from the audiences collective wisdom and experience. Make sure you invite the CEO to this interaction, because chances are that they will get just as much information about their company as the attendees are getting out of the session topic.

For more information visit Tipson Enterprises at www.tipsonxl.com

Synergy the Book Intro

This work is aimed at leaders in all organizations, in all industry segments, public and private, to show them how to enhance the powerful synergistic relationships that exist within any organization.

So what does that mean? Let’s start with the word Synergy. Merriam Webster defines Synergy as a mutually advantageous conjunction or compatibility of distinct business participants or elements (as resources or efforts). Dictionary.com has what I feel to be a more revealing definition as follows; “The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects”. These combined effects are always greater than any one of the agents alone could produce. Arguably this could be good effects or bad effects. The best process, the best people, the best partners, won’t work unless they are matched. Good people and a bad process, a great process and unskilled people, great process matched with unsuitable partners, the combinations go on, but synergy can not be maximized until attempts are made to evaluate the alignment or match between these three elements in any organization.

But where do we begin? Start at the customer, the ones who pay the bills, and work backwards. If you are not aligned to meet the needs and satisfy your customers, then all else is moot. This may seem to flow in an opposite direction from our synergy statement, yet as Covey says, Start with the end in mind.

For our purposes the customers, or those whom you exist to serve, are your primary partners. We start by identifying the critical to quality elements that your customers require. Patients in a hospital require being cared for and reassured they will recover, a consumer of a car will require the car to run and provide reliable and often luxury transportation. Fuel efficiency in America is also becoming a more important consumer criterion in America, yet the SUV’s keep showing consumer demand. It may also be cup holders or MP3 plug ins, but note that these are secondary to the primary requirements of reliable transportation. The public wants low taxes and comprehensive social services, an obvious indication the need for a skilled balancing act. Based on these requirements, the next step is to examine the process and the people that support that process to insure that the process and people skills and aligned to produce results, aka, performance, which can be excellent, poor or anywhere in between.

At each step of the process we then need to determine the best process to evaluate these relationships. When we analyze the available processes we have always returned to the comprehensive tools, systems and practices integrated into the Six Sigma Process, commonly expressed as DMAIC, Define, Measure, Analyze Improve and Control. We believe that most other organizational process evaluation tools are simply hybrids or off shoots of this process, so why re-invent the wheel.

The diagram on our website, www.tipsonxl.com, depicts these relations and illustrates the primary business process adopted by Tipson Enterprises. It should be mentioned here that this is not a simple linear process, one leading to the next. It is more so that one feeds on another, sometimes looping back to challenge previous assumptions. Indeed the overall intent is to drive continuous improvement and this always indicates a learning and re-integration of knowledge gained from a given process. And yes, this process will most likely involve change. Yet if done correctly the change will flow and quickly be adopted since you will be making changes that will ultimately benefit all involved.

The intent of this work is to explain and highlight the key elements of the process and to show the benefits that can be yielded. Given that we have introduced a backward looking model, this work will follow that same progression. However, as I indicated earlier, there are many times where we will maintain a fluid state of interaction as we progress through the process.