Page 219 - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

HOW DO I RESPOND TO DISPOSABILITY AND CHANGE? (GROWTH, LEARNING, AND RESILIENCE)

Boundary Spanning

Leaders can look for best practices both inside and outside
their organization. It is not enough to share a best prac-
tice, however; we must also consider the system in which
the practice works. For example, many copied GE’s town
hall meeting initiatives, only to find that they were not as
successful unless accompanied by many of the other GE
management practices (incentives, succession planning,
leadership training, teamwork, etc.). Also, copying someone
else’s best practice automatically means trailing in gener-
ating new ideas. Even better is to leapfrog a best practice,
improving it before implementing it to move beyond what
others have done.
Steve Kerr introduced us to a learning matrix methodol-
ogy to determine best practices inside a company that can
be shared across geographic, functional, or business bound-
aries. (See Figure 8.2.) This matrix uses five steps:

1. Complete this statement: To be world class at X, we
must . . . X can be anything the corporation is commit-
ted to doing well (e.g., service, quality, customer focus,
cycle time, or training). This steps identifies 10 to 12 fac-
tors critical to success in X. A small research team, task
force, or other group can define these 10 to 12 critical
success factors, which become the columns at the top of
the matrix.
2. What are the units where these factors could be
demonstrated? These units are organizational entities
(functions, plants, divisions, geographical areas, etc.)
where the critical success factors could be demonstrated.
These units become the rows listed on the left side.

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