Need help with a work assignment

Parent Cafe
1

<p>I’ve been asked (along with all of my fellow employees) to write a short response to the following prompt: “The year is 2019 (five years in the future), and X Company is thriving with a fully engaged and highly motivated staff. What did X Company do or change to make the future of X Company and its staff so good? Please provide your ideas for insuring a great future for X Company and its employees.”</p>

<p>X Company is small, 25 employees, and has been in business for 30 years. It is has a very good reputation among its customer base for providing an excellent product at a reasonable price. It is stable, profitable, and well-run. Pay is quite good, benefits are great, and employee turnover is almost non-existent. There is a “family” feel to the place. The senior executive staff has been in place for the entire history of the company, and several of them are getting ready to retire. I know they’re thinking hard about setting up X Company, and its employees, for success after they’re gone.</p>

<p>Here’s my problem: This seems like an entrepreneurial question, and I don’t have a drop of entrepreneurial blood in me. I’m a process person, an accountant. I have no earthly idea how to make a company successful. I can get very creative about designing a new procedure for a monthly report, but ask me a big-picture question, and I got nuthin. The only ideas I’ve come up with so far involve tweaking process.</p>

<p>When the shakeup happens, I stand to get a significant promotion, and so I want to write a credible response which demonstrates that I can think deeper thoughts than spreadsheet design. Even better would be if I came up with something that actually gets implemented. I’m hoping you can get my brain started down a different track than it usually goes.</p>

<p>Thanks!</p>

2

<p>So… Here are some thoughts. It looks like this is a company with an deeply rooted, established culture and traditions that seem to wok well for everyone. The management retirement changes the landscape, and the employees might be (justifiably!) worried that the successors would make dramatic changes in the ways things are done. Psychologists warn that humans are creatures of habit and are averse to change (just think of the outcry the new background of the CC pages caused!), so the retiring managers need to provide reassurance to the staff that the new management will honor the traditional ways of doing business and will keep the company’s culture intact (at least in the nearest future)…</p>

3

<p>Here’s a thought …</p>

<p>As many of the senior executives planned their retirement, each of them designated their successor. Over the course of a year or two, each executive mentored their replacement, creating a new executive team. </p>

4

<p>I think it’s critical that whoever replaces the current senior management is well accepted by the current staff. One way to do that is to have the new management listen to what the staff thinks is important. This will help the staff commit to the new management team and their priorities. The worst thing would be for the staff to fight the new management.</p>

<p>There are “team building” exercises that can help this occur. One thing that I am familiar with is a session called “Jump Start.” See this link for one style of Jump Start: <a href=“http://www.managementcheck.de/downloads/articles/newmanagersassimilationplan.pdf”>http://www.managementcheck.de/downloads/articles/newmanagersassimilationplan.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;