Are Program Managers the new CEO?

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What is Program Management?

Program management is the process of managing several related projects, often with the intention of improving an organization's performance.

Along with CEOs, Program Management leaders will apply Whole Brain Thinking by fully leveraging one's own preferences, stretch to other quadrants when necessary, and adapt to and take advantage of the preferences of those around them to improve performance and results.

They posses key skills to Power-up from Big Picture Thinking and Selling the Vision, Superior Analytical Skills, Leadership and Team building, Communication, Influencing and Negotiating, Conflict Resolution, Stakeholder Management, Tool Mastery and Consolidation and can Plan with Precision to create successful outcomes. 

Program managers organize multiple projects and prepare for how they influence one another. This requires an array of knowledge and skills related to project management, business, and organizational leadership.

Today, we want to share the sources of Program Management power and why we feel they are on track to becoming a CEO.

Key Areas On How Program Managers Are Powering-Up To Level-Up

1. Think Big And Can Sell A Compelling Vision

   They are thoughtful in assessing and developing the vision and mission statement to sell the program vision and benefits to the various stakeholders.

2. Have Superior Analytical Skills

   Possesses Technical mastery to—quickly and thoroughly—gather and integrate information then use big data to make the right decisions for both the customer and organization.

3. Are Good Leaders In Team Building

   They know how to build the culture across the organization, collaborate with different domain areas within the company with the ability to build relationships with key leaders of influence to increase overall success.

4. Effective Communicators

   Program managers stay connected in the midst of uncertainty.  They practice being master communicators and can use their voice to communicate with stakeholders on the priorities, data analytics and methodologies to make the program successful.

5. Good At Influencing And Negotiating

   They have political savviness and can Influence and negotiate what they want and need for the program. They’re all about getting people to agree on the substance to drive towards the best outcomes.

6. Know How To Deal With Conflict 

   They know how to confront conflict and address it head on. They understand increasing performance velocity, includes removing conflict early in order to accelerate decision-making and the program to move forward.

7. Good At Stakeholder Management

   They are good diplomats and uses their skills to manage expectations; understand stakeholder desires, needs, and requirements; and seek to collaborate with them to get the job done.

8. Manage Planning With Precision

   They will assess the situation and put their project plans together to manage the risks so they can match, and manage resources to execute those plans. They will document the program artifacts and keep them transparent for the rest of the organization to learn.

9. Tool Mastery And Consolidation 

   They will possess the toolkit and techniques acquired over the years and use them throughout the program life-cycle to solve problems, gather and analyze information and increase the productivity of the program.

Remember

The first step in gaining proficiency towards the CEO role is to consistently assess your current knowledge and skills along with discussing out loud your wins and fails. As we mentioned in previous posts, you will need to conduct monthly pivot-or-persevere meetings to understand what areas you need to work on; however, don't forget to also reinforce your superpowers. Too often we waste time working on our weaknesses, when in reality we would be better off focusing on improving our strengths.

Gain Insight Today

Our Portfolio Program Managers have gained a solid understanding on how to address your current needs based on where you are today and need to go tomorrow.   We encourage all CEOs and leaders to invest in Program Managers that are agile and can coach and advise you on the inner flow of the company deliverables so you too can stay Powered-up. 

If you need more insights, please SCHEDULE a 1-on-1 with me to learn how we use our Principle Program Managers to build your companyDNA.

We Build The Culture

8 Strategy Questions You Should Ask Yourself

CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture

Strategy is about knowing what questions to ask

Over the years we’ve shared how important it is for leaders to mobilize a winning culture in order to boost the productivity levels in their teams.  Every quarter we sit down with a dozen of leaders and entrepreneurs to reflect on what’s working and not working when seeking to build their digital transformation initiatives to increase performance velocity.  This process starts with asking tough questions to address the current situation. 

In order to be more creative at building you digital strategy — we identified 8 questions to help you as a strategy leader increase your workforce performance. We believe these questions can often be an easy-miss during the current COVID situation.

In this post, you’ll learn some insightful questions asked with our current and future strategy leaders representing different backgrounds and industries — we hope these questions will help you gain personal insights into what to ask your own CEO about their intent for the business. 

8 Questions to Ask Yourself

1. Are we investing in the right technologies? You will need to know what problem or inefficiency do you want the new technology to solve.

2. How can we become more adaptable to change? You will need to seek talent with Soft skills and establish an Agile environment full of opportunities such as games or simulations to gain remarkable experience in problem solving and adapting to change.

3. Are we secure? You will need to become a data advocate by education employees about data risks and make sure your workforce knows basic security best practices, such as how to identify a phishing scam and not to open links and attachments from unfamiliar email senders. 

4. Does the culture promote employee well-being by improving their mental and physical health? Culture is everything and you will need to foster a culture by redesigning performance management in a way that motivates employees; allowing for greater flexibility, such as the option to work remotely; and offering benefits that support healthy lifestyles and choices.

5. How can we better attract, recruit, and retain talent? You will need to set yourself and your team apart by emphasizing the positive aspects of the job. These might include unique benefits, learning paths, the ability to work remotely, location, or company culture.

6. What emerging trend will have the highest impact, and how can we build effective strategy? You will need to be a Sprinter with Bold ambitions by looking down the road and anticipate which trends, technological developments and other disruptive factors will influence the business and respond effectively.

7. Are we providing employees with the tools they need to be productive? You will need to improve productivity by seeking tools to simplify the user experience. 

8. How can we gain an edge on the competition? You will need to personalize the connection with your customers in an authentic way to reinforce your company brand by being accountable first and taking a stand on issues bigger than the company itself.

Remember

Change is a mindset. Culture can mean many things too many people, but one thing is very clear when it comes to culture in any organization. It comes from the top. Which is why we advise our CEOs to create a process for the executive team to ask tough questions about the company strategy — but first it starts with asking yourself the tough questions.  

Instantly strengthen your organizational strategy with the help of CultureSparq. 

Schedule some time with me to learn how things work by having a 1:1 conversation about specific areas that can accelerate growth.  

We Build The Culture!

On-Boarding Is A Massive Problem Everywhere!

CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture

Remote On-Boarding.  It is a massive problem, everywhere

Is your company having a problem with OnBoarding Remote Employees?  Companies are losing every hire they have made this year in less than 30 days because of their On-Boarding experience.

Oftentimes, effective on-boarding involves getting-to-know you activities and training from coworkers. These efforts give new employees an opportunity to develop relationships that help them feel more embraced and connected. We are finding companies are not able to retain employees because they don’t feel integrated into their company culture.

On-Boarding Stages and Activities

We have three distinct stages in the employee on-boarding journey:  Pre-OnBoarding, OnBoarding and Post-OnBoarding, each demonstrating an employee experience that keeps them from exiting the company. These three stages allow for new hires to become active participants in their on-boarding process and acclimate to the social and professional expectations of their new work environment so that they can proceed comfortably and effectively in their roles.

As more companies choose to hire remote workers, they face the challenge of creating an on-boarding process that accomplishes this goal for their virtual employees. CultureSparq is helping companies re-imagine their on-boarding process to attract and retain talent. 

In this post, we want to share several ways to get you started and have fun doing it.

Take a look at these 7 activities for On-Boarding remote employees

1. Face-to-Face Connection: Get all new hires on a video call and create social distancing activities to get people outside to participate in a team event so new employees can feel that energy of connectivity (i.e., Neighborhood Cleanup campaign, Feeding the homeless or Renovating a School in  the community or an Ice breaker with food in the park). This is important because people perform better when they know each other.

2. Digital Workspace:  Get employees online quickly by having a digital workspace with the all access to tools and other apps to help them become familiar with the flow of the team deliverables and how things are communicated.

3. Culture Handbook. Build The Culture. Provide a digital employee handbook on the company historical milestones from a culture perspective. People want to be part of something big that inspires them to overcome challenges.  Share insights about the company and on other employees experiences by having leaders across the organization record a short video on their experience, achievements and purpose with the company will help new employees feel they are a part of something bigger than them.

4. Create a sense of belonging. Due to the isolation of working remotely, it can often lead people to have this imposter syndrome and feeling of loneliness.  We suggest hiring Employee Success Managers who work with new hires and teams by serving as a transformational/life coach to help remote employees navigate and get familiar with the company. These Employee Success Managers are experts in organizational and personal development. Their primary focus is to transform business structures by working closely with new employees to achieve their own personal goals in first 90 -120 days.

5. Check-Ins:  Provide an individualized remote on-boarding plan with fun video check-ins and goals. If your company wants to make remote work work, then you need to embrace many modes of communication but more so around video experiences.  As remote employees are spread across different time zones, a bigger portion of your company’s internal communication will be asynchronous–with employees reading email, chat messages and Slack updates anywhere from minutes to hours after they are originally sent — Video checkins are great ways to have fun and take a break from that mode of checking in by allowing people to create cool video message to communicate on their progress.

6. Accountability: Initiate professional development and personal growth from the start. Expect them to take initiative and seek ways they can level-up and be accountable for their responsibilities. 

7. Encourage collaborative learning. Have new employees work as a group to complete a proof-of-concept or project during on-boarding to get them to bond with each other— this introduces team members personalities and skills along with providing an opportunity to cross-train teams early on.

Remember 

Make your objective to create experiences in which remote employees feel as assimilated and supported as traditional in-office employees. This will take some experimentation along with some careful hiring and an open mind. If you don’t get it exactly right the first time, gather feedback to make an adjustment and try, try again! Or give us a call.

If you need deeper insights, please schedule a 1-on-1 with Chris Campbell to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture.

We Build The Culture.

Digital Transformation Success Metrics

CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture

What are your Digital Transformation KPIs?

As one CEO whispered to me while everyone began entering the room, “wait and see, once we get to our corporate KPIs managers will start looking for the exits.”

No CEO doubts the importance of measuring their company’s performance properly. Yet the executive teams we’ve assisted over more than 10 years generally struggle to engage with the challenge. 

What Are You Really Measuring?

Executing your digital transformation initiative will be a major undertaking even if you have the most experienced leadership team.  The work begins with your team creating meaningful KPIs to make your transformation experience ROI justified.

At CultureSparq, we take KPIs personal because we know measuring digital transformation progress is a challenge and many companies avoid monitoring it altogether. 

• The Gartner team found, almost half of all organizations have no metric in place to measure digital transformation.  This is due to the fact that many companies get caught up in the excitement of launching a groundbreaking digital transformation initiative missing out on the opportunity to measure what really matters like KPIs.

We want you to Choose the right digital measures of success to help you achieve the expected business outcomes. So we decided to share some metrics to keep you focus on measuring progress and help you make that shift from using operational efficiency metrics to measures that interest executive decision makers. We encourage you to level set by knowing how to use metrics with a purpose.

For example be sure to list what you are trying to achieve by doing the following:

1. Have a clearly defined and defensible causal relationship to a business outcome

2. Work as a leading, not lagging, indicator

3. Address a specific, defined audience

4. They can be understood by a non-IT audience

5. Drive action when they change from green to yellow to red.

Once you aligned your team you can start thinking what metrics you want to use to measure success. Here are a few KPIs you can explore to measure your digital transformation progress.

1. Digital Proficiency from percentage of the marketing spend that is digital to your Brand value in the market

2. Customer Focus such as the percentage increase in customer engagement in digital channels and the reduction in time to market new products to customers

3. Return on Transformation like your Percentage of revenue from new products/services introduced due to the digital initiative and the number of new products or services launched in the market and being consumed. 

Be sure to keep things simple, start with 2-3 metrics so you can pivot-or-persevere in a meaningful way.

Just know, a lack of urgency is the greatest obstacle businesses face when considering the value of digital transformation. Proper planning is important but, more than that, the execution as per the KPIs you select is what take you through the journey.

Leading a digital transformation calls for an entirely new mindset on the way you do business. We are helping companies make that transformation leap.

If you need deeper insights, please schedule a 1-on-1 with Chris Campbell to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture.

We Build The Culture

Reimagining Your Digital Transformation Journey?

Here’s what you need to know before you reimagine your digital transformation journey

From an industry wide perspective, you will need to learn and track how digital technology will deliver the next change in business impact. 

Then start with a core mission so you can begin aligning leaders of influence around it to  understand the social impact-value you’re trying to deliver.

Don’t be fooled by the word ‘digital’ in ‘digital transformation’ - this is a Culture change process at its heart. Leaders of all types will need to have a role to play in delivering digital transformation, but the challenge is getting more inspirational change-makers with a high emotional-IQ at the top to help guide the Digital Transformation Journey through the next few years of change. Getting your Digital Culture established will be key to your success.

As you explore the landscape of how to build the digital culture needed to thrive in this new reality — let’s put a few things in context from a data perspective. 

1. 61% of Companies will likely hire talent with skills relevant to new technologies

2. 54% of Organizations believe that a digital talent gap is hampering their transformation initiatives

3. 51% of Organizations state that they lack talent who possess digital transformation skills

4. 78% of Companies believe that they lack the capabilities to manage digital transformation

Here are some some areas you should reimagine prior to kicking off your Digital Transformation Journey.

• The New Digital Culture 

• Digital business models and strategies

• Marketing in a digital world

• Customer insights

• Customer journey in a digital world

• Data analytics

• Design thinking

• Digital operations

• Digital Tools

• Workflow Automation 

• Cloud Migration 

• Robotic Process Automation 

CultureSparq is helping companies build their capabilities to understand the business impact of Culture, Data and Technology to apply frameworks for value creation and innovation that lead customer success initiatives for a sustainable competitive advantage.

We are transforming businesses back into high impact startups —  from shrinking the complexity, being nimble, innovative and building a Customer obsessed culture. 

Go to CultureSparq to signup for your Digital Transformation workshop today.

Or If you need deeper insights, please schedule a 1-on-1 with Chris Campbell to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture.

We Build The Culture!

CEO Talk: Power Equals Play

If you need deeper insights, please schedule a 1-on-1 with Chris Campbell to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture.