The Reality of Disruption in the Manufacturing Industry

Things are changing at such a rate it is scary yet exciting, to say the least. We are bombarded with an overload of information - available in the time it takes to push a button or click a link.

noun

1. disturbance or problems which interrupt an event, activity, or process.
"the scheme was planned to minimize disruption"

Those who advertise their expert skills on the subject of disruption are revealing their true colours. They are riding the wave to their own personal benefit. Suddenly everyone is a “disruption expert, a coach, a motivational speaker or a futurist!” CAUTION: Creating new job opportunities from thin air, I’d say. Engage these folks at your own risk!

Disruption is a process, a disturbance in the force, usually driven by three elements working in conjunction with each other - smarter, cheaper, faster and maybe, convenience. When these come together in a boardroom, anything can happen, but it demands brave-hearted people to leverage and strategise.

Say for instance car retail leaders get together and decide to come up with a product that is not only cheaper but the monthly installment gets cheaper as the lifespan of the car continues. In other words, the all-inclusive instalments decrease monthly and the car can be replaced within 2-3 years. Imagine that?!

This model is already employed in the world of financial insurance, by King Price where premiums decrease as the insurance ages. So there is an example and possibility.

To be a disruptor, there are a few very important and critical elements that need to be in place. You need to be decisive, brave and have agile leadership in place. Secondly, you need to know your niche and know what it would take to shift your product and branding to a level where it is incontestable.

Thirdly, you would need to connect people: customers, staff, management and everyone in the value chain, strategically to get their total buy-in and commitment for success.

Finally, you would need to be totally customer focused and not just profit focused. This would mean a mind shift of stakeholders and shareholders which may seem like a miracle, in itself!

Coaching Moment

Draw each member of your team on a blank piece of paper, indicating those whom you lead.

Then go ahead and Rate each person out of 10, according to the following criteria:

1. Agile leadership: being aware-alert-influential-incisive-intelligent
2. How well does each team member understand the market and niche you’re in? In other words, it is about the market dynamics: lifecycles-trends-tides.
3. People engagement and connection: being connected to the purpose-the outcomes-the language used in the strategy- their cooperation and willingness.
4. Customer connection :how connected are they to your customers, beyond research statistics but with actual face to face encounters?

Do the exercise now and watch where you need to focus your attention and next conscious conversation.

Any score under 7,5 is a gap and rift that needs to be addressed consciously.

Decisive Leadership

The coaching process paid attention to enthusing and infusing agile leadership competencies into the present styles of each leader with intention and incisive accuracy. Everything boils down to the leadership and the impact they have on the people. Everything!

They were all in a transitional time and had to accept it and commit to being willing and open to change from the inside out.

The coaching process added high value by leveraging intentional awareness and consciousness by all executives into the industry and there was no more comfort for “excuses and blame games.” Coaching became a no-place-to-hide experience and it won the day.

Training was stopped (except for the marketing executive as he was already engaged in an international MBA programme). Interestingly enough, when debriefed on what new things he had learnt during the MBA process, it included; new networks, some new insights as to how the world works, understanding people from different cultural perspectives and some basic knowledge. Nothing exceptional stood out.

The coaching process engaged each executive leader who co-created their own agenda for personal change and areas of business growth. As well as how they were going to measure the ROI of coaching linked to their personal performance systems. We designed our coaching with the leadership in mind. We focused coaching on agile leadership competencies and how to “lead out” with incisive and intentional focus. Constraints and challenges were coached as opportunities. The coaching process took leaders’ minds to the 4 awareness levels and 7 conscious levels of thinking to help them to deploy self-management in self-development ownership.

Leaders were empowered by coaching them to do mind hacking, to disarm personal mental defaults. They were coached to work with ambiguity and creativity. The Executive master Global Coach’s roles included that of: being a Challenger of thought, a mirror to reflect, a listener to absorb and reflect back, an incisive questioner to dig deeper, a provocateur to bring perspective with personal and peer insight as well as being a motivator- guide.

Leaders were coached to use mindfulness techniques and mechanisms to resist “additive personal bias-based recurring behaviours”. An experimental mindset was adopted in all teams and the coach was also deployed to Coach the engineering teams, technical teams, admin teams and marketing and sales.

The on boarded CEO and Coach orchestrated all feedback into a common understandable roll-out strategy which the CEO led out with measurements and inspiration.

The cognitive abilities and powers of all concerned were coached so that there was a commonality of thinking in meetings and brainstorming events.

Own Your Strategic Niche

In the process, coaching paid particular attention to the niche internationally. Each business had its common factors and styles of doing leading which needed to be understood by the various Directors.

There was an occasion in coaching with the CFO where creativity and ideation were deployed and a particular tactic was co-designed with the help of the Coach that made the company more profit in that one deal than in the previous quarter. Time and effort were employed to discover and to know the facts through personal interviews with stakeholders and customers alike. Trends were discovered and the strategy aligned accordingly.

Knowledge here became power not just because of “knowing” but because knowledge was turned into action. Tactics were deployed and followed through on meticulously. They all knew.

On another occasion, the coach was working with a team of factory engineers and he asked the question," What do you do around here?" Some replied using the formulas they use to measure factory matrix and then, after a while, from the sideline, an engineer said, “WE MAKE SUGAR!”

That was when the penny dropped, for all concerned.

Knowing your niche and being intentionally strategic about it, is part of the secret for disruptive success.

Connecting People to the Strategy

Coaching shifted the thinking from communication to CONNECTION. It meant there had to be an internal shift in the minds of people to connection and engagement rather than just communication which is the sharing of facts…... words and words and more words, via email, calls and meetings.

“US” and “THEM” shifted to “WE!” Indeed a moment of change for the focused momentum to take over.
‘We’ shifted to a common understanding
“We” shifted to meaning
“We” shifted to “WHY”, knowing it and doing it!

This was the most challenging coaching task of all.

We shifted away from cultural diversity too, and discovered if we understand that we all have brains and minds that simply “house culture”, we began to treat each other as intelligent beings.

Personality is contained in the brain. Culture and ethics and values and words and memories all are housed in the brain. The brain has 13 intelligences, 7 languages, logical levels, consciousness levels, 28 sorting filters in which all of our humanity and “humanness’ presides in the form of energy and intelligence.

Coaching empowered staff, management and leadership to speak to each other on levels of cognitive awareness, meaning and commonality of outcomes. The results included: more effective focused meetings; less misunderstandings as all ensured that everyone was on the same page. Tension and disciplinary actions were less than ever before and co-operation and productivity increased by around 23%.

Managers and leaders had various items that were internationally built into their meeting agendas so that there was sustainability woven into the leading out process.

Be Customer-Centric

YOUR COMPANY is headed where your customers are headed. 100% of staff, management, leaders, work force and customers and shareholders were PEOPLE. They have values, meaning, identity, purpose and belief systems that drive them. They also hopefully have a sense of humour!

Coaching shifted the mindset of all concerned to be totally focused on customers. We discovered “their world.” Each internal division treated others in their value chain as customers. Respect, appreciation, value for insight, feedback and input rose and there was a gratefulness for each other adding value along the way in the value chain.

We developed a Customer Engagement inter-personal Relationship Instrument ,that was not IT based, but interview-based. The interpersonal relationships with customers, service providers and team members increased to levels of common understanding, mutual respect, knowing what their expectations, values and standards were. Courtesy increased along with mutual respect along with patience and forbearance for each other. Truly they experienced each other as “partners in success.” There was no “Dear Valued Customer”……. ( My personal gripe with my banks, even if they FICA us and know every damn thing about us, they are still too lazy to instruct the IT team to use first names on all communications with customers…..hello my bank!) anywhere to be found.
(Yes this is sarcasm.)

If you respect me and value me, value my name. Value me for who I am and what I represent.

Coaching Moment

How close are you to becoming a disruption in your industry? (scale 1-10)?
If you had to rate overall out of 10 (even ask your executive team to do the same separately) each of the following factors:

Are we using the elements of :

• 1 cheaper,
• 2 smarter,
• 3 convenience,
• 4 faster, to create disruption or are we “same-old-same-old”?
  
  
• Do we embody incisive, agile leadership in action?
• Are we owning our strategic niche market?
• Are we connecting our teams and people to commonality of strategy and purpose?
• Are we consumed with being,” in the shoes of our customers”
• Are we “holding their hearts in our hands?”

You need to talk to Dr Bill Price
A disruptive orchestrator and Executive coach-guide
074 198 1364