How Come You Don't Feel So Glorious?

In spite of the good economy, the DMA CEO clients continue to be pressed every month to speed-up their management team's rate of change. Virtually all of our CEO clients are working diligently to speed up the skill and leadership development of their management and staff. Most of these management teams and staffs have not ever been as challenged as they are now to faster growth and development and lead the troops to another year of increasing profitability.

To do this, guess what? Every manager needs to learn to drive down on-going costs. Most managers have not ever truly been accountable for reducing company expenses by 5% to 15%. Usually the company president, the CFO/Controller and, maybe, one other senior person carry the on-going, concentrated burden of producing the company bottom line each year.

Equally, if not more important, every manager needs to learn to increase gross profit margins in spite of the on-going threats of all sorts of new competition from new supply sources and e-commerce sites. What can the CEO do to drastically improve the contribution made to this process by their management team?

There certainly are at least six refinements to be considered in solidifying a CEO's  slice of the glory days in the year 2008, and beyond.

1. Rather than refine and update StratPlans every three years, we insist on annual, on-going updates and changes in listed strategies. Like budgets, StratPlans stopped being three year or semi-annual events in the early 1990's.
2. To improve this StratPlan process CEO's have been opening up their StratPlan training to larger numbers of managers. They are even including selected, high potential non-managers in the process facilitated by highly experienced DMA team consultants.
3. DMA team members have intentionally slowed the initial client StratPlan process - almost doubling the length of time required for the larger teams to complete their first StratPlan.
4. We now include more key client staff in the annual exercise and discipline of Job Objectives/Job Evaluations - DMA Style. In some current instances, we are including up to twenty key staff members in the annual exercise....up from only the five or six direct reports to the CEO. While this increases our work load substantially, the benefits to the client company and CEO are significant.
5. Increasing amounts of managerial incentives and bonuses are tied to each person's accomplishment of specific, mostly (not all) quantifiable Job Objectives. CEO's who have not experienced this link between Job Objective success and incentive compensation, direct and immediate, should discuss this proven element of the total package of change with their DMA consulting team member.
6. Finally, when the timing and people are right, your direct reports and others are encouraged to train their direct reports to follow the same foregoing disciplined process.

All CEO's need to ensure that all six of the foregoing management refinements are specifically customized for their unique organization.  They need to ensure that all of their direct reports and at least an equal number of other key staff are trained and that they "buy in" to the CEO's specific number objectives for 2008-2009. 

To discuss customizing these six refinements at your company, call DMA Group at 1-800- 370-3362 ext. 12.  We can begin the process immediately so that your 2008-2009 net profit improvement is achieved.

Share your own professional experiences and ideas on this topic by e-mailing us at: contact@dmagroup.com. If your feedback is relevant, we hope you will indicate your written permission for us to share it with others on our CEO's Business Resources site.