Am I the Orchestra’s Conductor … or Am I Playing First Violin?
March 28, 2011
Contributed by CRT Mentor Alan Creutz, Principal of mergePoint Solutions and Executive Partner with Milestone Strategies.
Your company is like an orchestra – when the pieces work together for a common purpose, they create a symphony of success; but like a youth orchestra, if the various sections don’t keep rhythm and are out of tune, the symphony is a cacophony. And if the orchestra produces a cacophony, do the players and the audience see an organization still learning to perform, or do they see amateurs that may play well as soloists but cannot fit into an effective ensemble.
Your business is like an orchestra: it can reliably produce symphonies or it may never get past “Mary Had a Little Lamb” – and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” gets old on the fiftieth performance.
As CEO you owe it to yourself, your employees, your customers, and other stakeholders to be sure that your company strives to be a symphonic orchestra. To do this, you need to see yourself as a conductor rather than an individual player.
And for many CEOs who started as star performers, learning how to be a conductor can be difficult. One helpful mechanism is to develop a way to think of your business that focuses not on individual performance but rather on functional operations – are the strings performing well, and is what they play complementary to the horn section.
As the conductor, you need to work with each section to help it perform at its best. And research has indicated that business functions, like people, go through a process of maturing. Typically when a business is small, business functions are executed by talented individuals who “know how to get it done” and have the energy and passion to make it work.
The really good conductors build teams around them that allow wider reach and greater scale. But in the best businesses, each business functions performs in a routine way that not only meets all of the current demands on it, but also provides flexibility when business requirements change and scalability that allow it to grow to meet expanding business demands.
A good mechanism for helping your business develop business functions that are sustainable and can grow is the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), originally developed for the software industry but applicable across all organizations regardless of industry or organizational mission. CMM identifies stages in the maturation of functions within an organization and provides methods for both assessing their current level of maturity and facilitating growth.
At its core, CMM defines five levels of performance, and a maturing organizational function grows (and sometimes regrettably regresses) from level to level:
- Initial, characterized by individual contributors and subject to shifts based on personnel decisions and day-to-day priorities
- Repeatable, characterized by defined expectations and routine success – generally in terms of defined metrics – and usually delivered by a team of people who work towards shared outcomes
- Defined, characterized by agreed, documented business practices and procedures that provide easy transition of individuals into and out of specific roles with minimal disruption of the overall team behavior
- Managed, characterized by integrating business processes with metrics, and typically including work breakdown structures or documented procedures at the tactical level. Generally metrics are directly linked to procedures so that work is focused on those activities and methods most important for functional success.
- Optimized, characterized by a culture and methods that provide feedback into processes and outcomes and that both encourages and facilitates innovation, thus ensuring strength in meeting changing conditions and business expansion
In future blogs we will discuss how to translate these conceptual levels into meaningful tools for assessing your current business as well as how to facilitate growth from one level to another.
But even with this introductory understanding, you can begin to think about your business in terms of how strong it is in the event that you lose a key player, or how flexible it is in terms of changing business conditions, or how ready your business is to grow past the capacity of your current team to execute.
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Dr. Alan Creutz is Principal of mergePoint Solutions and Executive Partner with Milestone Strategies as well as a mentor with the Chairmen’s RoundTable. He works with emerging companies to develop business and market strategies, particularly focusing on helping them understand new markets, and then develop and execute strategies to penetrate them. He also mentors and has invested in early-stage companies through Tech Coast Angels and his work as a coach with the Larta Institute, supporting companies with SBIR grants from NSF and NIH.
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Can’t wait to hear more Alan!
Comment by Kristi Cerasoli — March 28, 2011 @ 9:50 am
Thank you, Alan. Definitely worth sharing. Looking forward to your follow up blogs
Comment by Esther Rodriguez — March 28, 2011 @ 2:11 pm
Alan
Great prospective on leadership… Thank you!
Comment by Mac Clarke — March 28, 2011 @ 2:46 pm