Continuing our takeaways from the baa-rilliant quarterly Best Companies Live event, with insights and initiatives shared from C-suite leaders in construction, digital transformation, project management and IT strategic solutions:
Murphy
The construction company’s Group People & Communications Director Dawn Moore shared their corporate strategy is explained on ONE PAGE:
– Purpose statement
– 5 values, 5 strategic objectives and 5 strategic drivers
– Ambition – to be leading family owned construction business by 2026
Annual ACORN awards – an acronym of the initials of their 5 values, proving that small ideas or daily behaviours can have BIG impact on the wider environment.
FSP
Simon Grosse CEO of digital transformation specialist FSP told us about Sir Clive Woodward‘s impact.
The guest speaker at their company event was then engaged to unearth from everyone what ‘winning behaviours’, the theme of Sir Clive’s talk, looked and felt like to them.
Simon also talked about their 5 C’s – the company’s performance check-in:
Confident, connected, clarity, control, challenged
Helps to gauge and benchmark how people are feeling about each area of their role.
“Performance isn’t results, it’s the high quality inputs”
ramsac
Rob May, its executive chairman, provided the most memorable nugget of the day by far:
🥬Take me to the cauliflowers
From an ad lib comment in a strategic talk to its people, cauliflowers has stuck and has become ingrained in the IT company’s culture, their language and even their décor!
Imagine going to an unfamiliar supermarket for some wine then remembering you also need something else – and out of Rob’s mouth came “cauliflower”!
You ask a member of staff where to find cauliflowers and depending on where you’re shopping, the response will differ:
Ranging from a grunt and vague pointing, through being told what number aisle, to actually being almost taken by the hand to the selection of cauliflowers and being handed the one they would recommend to go with your wine!
If any stakeholder asks a question, ramsac people must ‘take them to the cauliflowers’
Another unrelated nugget arose from a discussion on preferred communication styles. At ramsac their people photos are colour coded accordingly to help others communicate in the most appropriate manner.
Association for Project Management
CEO Prof. Adam Boddison OBE joined from outside the profession so looked at other chartered organisations for inspiration.
Project management is less established than accountants, engineers, etc so to compete would be outlandish.
Instead Adam asked APM’s people “what would it take to work with 1k companies, 10k chartered professionals, have 100k members” which made them feel involved and start to believe they could make it happen.
Next time: from the audience at Best Companies Live on the same topic – “how do you create clarity at every level?”
