Nearly everyone feels they work hard. We go to work, give it our best – often working long hours – then end the day and repeat. Then, why are you still often struggling with such fundamental challenges at basic levels of supply chain maturity in key areas impactful to performance? After all, many of the businesses we are in were not created yesterday – there are often teams that have been working on improvements for a decade or more. Then what do you have to show for it? Are you at the performance level you should expect to be, given the amount of hours put into improvements up to this point?

Unfortunately, most will answer an affirmative “no”. So what’s the issue? What needs to change? It comes down to 3 key things that need to happen in your supply chain leadership style:

First, understand where you are going and what is important on the path to get there Make sure you, and your teams, are spending time on the right things, associated with this vision Sustain the gains you have made previously – do not backslide forcing you to solve the same problems again later

So how do you do this, and where do you start?

Understand your vision for the future

How do you know what you should be spending your time doing, if you don’t know where you want to go? This is a common challenge for many supply chain leaders – the areas of focus are too often reactively driven by the challenge of the day, or by a nudging that you’ve received from someone else driving your time in a given direction aligned with their objectives – even if it does not well align with yours.

In order to ensure you spend the right amount of time on the key items for your supply chain, you must first understand your vision for the future. Where are you now, and where do you want to be 3 years from now? 5 years from now? In order to be there, what are the things you need to be working on now? What are the constraints or paradigms you are living under now that will need to change to get there? This exercise is important, since:

It forces you to think ahead, understand your priorities, and better define the end goal for the supply chain organization It pushes you identify & reconcile the “constraints” you are operating under now that will ultimately prevent you from getting where you and the business need to be. The earlier you can truly acknowledge these, raise them up, and force business leadership visibility and a decision on them the better Many of the items that need to be done in year 1, year 2, and earlier phases of the roadmap may be difficult to get prioritized on their own merits due to a weak organizational understanding of the direct benefits, for example “ERP data health”. However when seen as a step on a roadmap to a significantly impactful end goal, the picture changes.

Most have seen the “Eisenhower box”, shown below. These steps help you identify what goes into the “Important” side of the box:

But, be careful how you communicate your vision

This was not originally intuitive to me, and has been something I’ve learned over time. You might think – now that the vision is mapped out, let’s communicate it broadly to calibrate and align the organization on where we are, where we want to get to, and what we need to do to get there. But, be careful, as not everyone may be receptive to this!

If you are not careful, you can strike fear in many across the organization with this approach. To those who are not “vision” people, and who may not feel they have the toolkit to lead everything on your roadmap, this can drive a source of resistance, skepticism, and ultimately become a roadblock and source of dissent on the journey. These individuals are not all that uncommon either, so it’s not just a matter of picking the one or two people out and adjusting for them specifically. If you reflect for a moment, you may be able to think of a time you’ve been on the other end of this – have you ever seen a roadmap shared by a business leader that made you roll your eyes, or think to yourself “Yeah, good luck… there’s no way that’s going to happen!”? Even vision people can find themselves guilty of this, even if there are good merits behind the message.

Instead, take your organization through it one step at a time, always knowing in your mind why each step matters and the ultimate goal it supports. On an individual basis where you have people that like to understand where the organization is going, you can share more broadly and have a productive discussion. But be careful when broadly communicating a multi-year roadmap that drives a significant level of change across the business, as it may be counterproductive and ultimately slow you down. It’s important to use balance.

Do not backslide on the areas you’ve already improved

As you march forward, it is important to sustain the improvements you’ve already made. This is a major issue in many businesses, where they solve the same problem over and over as there is a lack of leadership processes to maintain the gains already seen. Use lean and continuous improvement tools such as leaders standard work, process checks, visual controls, and related processes to ensure progress is retained and can ultimately be built upon – instead of having to go back and reset, preventing progress on the multi-year roadmap.

Please check back soon as I’ll have post #2 in this series, where I will write about how to manage your time, schedule, and work practices to effectively deploy the supply chain vision – remaining focused on allocating the time on moving the vision forward while reconciling other urgent activities and priorities.

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