Preparing Your Company For Change

Index

1. The Evolving Game
2. The Cost of Losing
3. Coach or Manager?
4. Choose the Playing Field
5. Know Your Players
6. Pick  Your Lines
7. Assign Your Captains
8. Draw Up the Game Plan
9. Play the Game

Choosing the Playing Field

As the business owner and likely Team Manager, your job is choose the game to be played. The Manager sets the vision for the team and sells that vision to the players, so that they become stakeholders and feel an important part of it. Technology or the planned changes are only tools to achieve the bigger vision. What is your differentiation strategy as a company? Is it that you are striving to provide the best customer service in your market, the highest product value or the lowest cost? The Manager understands how technology supports that vision and how it can help achieve the company's objectives. Unless the whole team understands the big picture, there will be no buy-in to the planned changes.

Once that vision is defined and adopted company wide, the Manager remains fully committed to it. Sometimes that means tough calls have to be made. The effective Manager does not waiver. It is also the Manager's role to recruit the players that maximize the team's chances of winning.

For major change initiatives to succeed, Management must determine the game field, obtain team ownership, then remain fully committed to finishing the game.