Have you embraced HPO best practices?

This is the fourth of six articles on our research into High Performance Organization (HPO) best practices. In our first article, we discussed the challenges — from the speed of business to world events — driving the charge toward High Performance Organization (HPO) renewal. In the second article, we looked at two of what we refer to as established 1980s best practices. And the third article looked at what it takes to develop High Performance Leadership.

The speed of change in today’s businesses and supply chains creates challenges like volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity that make it impossible to conduct business as usual. Benchmark companies embrace these challenges, using speed especially as a compelling business driver: They are engaging their workforces and accelerating their HPO journeys. Companies that have not yet embraced established HPO best practices that we outlined in articles two and three — accelerating people development, 100% employee engagement, high performance leadership, business value creation and a zero-loss mindset —are bound to fall behind. Industry leading supply chain organizations are already working on a new set of HPO best practices.

One of these “new to the world” HPO best practices is a shift from rigid role descriptions based on daily tasks to looser role descriptions enabling work on a series of projects and teams. Paired with a growing emphasis on a merit-based advancement, and the diminishing weight placed on tenure and specific role accumulation, this approach appears to be making roles more flexible and enabling personal skill development through results delivery.

The increasing pace of market and technology change requires diverse, agile teams to mobilize solutions with improvement cycles measured in weeks and months, not years. Traditional fixed roles and rigid career paths simply cannot keep pace and anticipate the organization and supply chain’s impending critical work. By defining employees’ roles as a series of related projects with near term deliverables, companies train employees’ focus on project responsibilities and the results they pursue. While there is still value in defining functional homes for roles, best practices focus them against business objectives first and functional priorities second.

This approach empowers supply chain employees and engages them to solve pressing business challenges. High Performance Organizations gain a competitive advantage retaining younger generations by giving them progressive responsibility within their assigned project teams as opposed to a tenured role track. This approach also allows them to learn unique challenges on the job and connects them to the higher purposes of business performance: two characteristics cited across age groups as pivotal to job satisfaction.

Of course, this shift to project-oriented work over role-oriented, makes developing personal development and progression plans a challenge for leadership who came through the ranks of a tenure-based culture. Their previous success and managers serve as the starting point for their own management style. Instead of expecting employees to spend multiple years and assignments building technical mastery, this emerging best practice requires managers to give subordinates specific responsibilities and freedom, coupled with more frequent, project specific coaching. The emphasis switches from controlling subordinates, to ensuring employee empowerment keeps pace with their increasing capabilities. And support does not need to be limited to managers. It can come from virtual networks of company resources and others employees working on similar projects.

The project-based role approach also requires leadership to maintain a pipeline of projects supporting new business challenges to assign to employees in step with regular one-on-one coaching sessions, career progression planning, and an updated employee skills matrix. By regularly discussing challenges, skill development and interests, the manager and subordinate can plan a series of projects, usually with overlapping time horizons, that keep the employee highly engaged and motivated. Successful HPO leaders find the time to provide this coaching by shifting away from traditional daily direction and firefighting to spending more of their time on clearly defining goals and objectives , establishing project teams and deliverable milestones, and providing faster, more effective barrier busting.

While flattening organization structure tends to speed up decision making and put senior leadership more in touch with dynamic market and organizational conditions, it can also demotivate employees if the reward and personal progression systems are still tenure or role completion oriented. Many organizations find that new generations often seek more recognition steps than flatter organization structures provide. Organizations must re-orient such systems in tandem with role reorientation toward project and responsibility-based approach, so employees see that they are rewarded for their contributions and expanding responsibilities. This also promotes the well-established elements of multi-skilling and flow to the work which are hallmarks of a flexible high performing supply chain organization.

In our upcoming articles, we will explore four more new to the world HPO best practices that can likewise turn challenges into business advantages.

About the authors: Mike Burnette is a distinguished fellow at the Global Supply Chain Institute, University of Tennessee, Knoxville and a retired supply chain executive.

Mike Policastro is a researcher at the Global Supply Chain Institute, University of Tennessee, Knoxville and a retired supply chain executive.

About the Research: Research conducted by The University of Tennessee Global Supply Chain Institute reinforces the need for supply chain leaders to prioritize renewing “2025” high performance work systems (HPO) as a primary pathway to competitive advantage (Mike Burnette, Mike Policastro, Tim Munyon, “High Performance Organization Best Practices” – white paper University of Tennessee Haslam College of Business, 2019). An explanation of each best practice can be found in the GSCI white paper (Click here to download a free copy [url=https://www.haslam.utk.edu/gsci]https://www.haslam.utk.edu/gsci[/url]).