Over the course of two days, I spent six hours with the CIO of one of our largest customers. She took on this role a year ago, and one of the first things she did was to create a strategic plan. Ironically, Radiant is at the tail end of completing its three-year strategic plan (board presentation this week!). So, we compared notes.

When I explained some of the highlights of our plan to her, she asked me what it meant for the assignments of our people (among other questions (she likes to ask questions)). I told her we had not gotten that far yet in our planning, but that the strategy didn’t call for an overhaul, so it would be more tweaks than radical shifts. She offered some advice that is now shaping much of my thinking on the execution of Radiant’s strategy. These were my lasting impressions from the discussion.

First, ensure that people are assigned to the most crucial priorities. The tendency is to align people with the volume of work and not necessarily the importance of the work. Don’t overload everyone on one thing, especially if that thing is less strategic and very time-consuming. And, ensure infrastructure people are aligned with the business priorities. If customer satisfaction is a crucial priority, ensure there is a leader in the infrastructure team assigned to it, thereby avoiding potential hiccups as the journey evolves.

Second, make people uncomfortable with their assignment. As an example, if it is a strategic priority for our applications to be more flexible so other application providers can interface to Radiant’s, then assign that to someone (per the first point above) and re-title the person to be the Manager or Director of Application Flexibility. If it is important for a person to increase the productivity of salespeople, then create a position called Manager of Salesperson Productivity. It may feel narrow for the person receiving this assignment and new title, but it is clarifying to that person and everyone else exactly what is expected.

Third, mentor people. Not in the Big Brother, Big Sister way (although that’s good too). If we have different pockets of people in various divisions and regions, find the best person at a specific activity and partner others up with him or her. For Radiant, defining the right products is a very important activity. We have some very experienced and talented people in different divisions who perform this activity. But we also have some more junior people performing this activity who don’t have access to the best ways to get their job done. Mentorship leads me to the conclusion that we should get the junior people to work for a week or so with people who perform this activity the absolute best, but who might be in other areas of the company. It may be difficult to increase our training budget in any particular year, but it shouldn’t be that tough to create an environment of mentorship.

I’m not sure what she got out of her visit to Radiant, but Radiant got a lot out of it.

This entry was posted by Andy Heyman, Chief Operating Officer on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Executive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.