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Creating a World Beating Capability

The England football team seemed to enter the FIFA 2010 World Cup South Africa with its hopes resting on two or three “magic bullets” – the fitness of Wayne Rooney, the dead ball skills of Steven Gerrard, and finding a team formation that would miraculously bring out the best from a bunch of gifted individuals.

Unfortunately, Rooney was never really fit since his injury against Bayern Munich whilst playing for Manchester United; Steven Gerrard had only a limited impact and the team formation didn’t bring the desired transformation.

Magic bullets rarely exist in the real world and success is usually based on much more mundane things. Sir Clive Woodward, who led the England rugby team to World Cup triumph in 2003, has been quoted as saying that he put his team’s success down to working on a one percent improvement in 100 different things. In the lead up to the finals the England rugby squad and its support functions were improved in every department - applying incredible attention to detail. For example, the players received specialist training in how to improve their peripheral vision, and skin tight shirts were introduced to make players just a little bit harder to tackle. Tiny improvements – the “one percents” that added up to a winning performance.

And the same is true in corporate life. When two of our directors, John Hunter and Terry Russell, worked together as managing director and sales director of a large financial services operation, they managed to quadruple its income in only five years. As a result they are often asked “how did you do it – what’s the answer to getting that sort of improvement in sales performance?” Well, rather like Sir Clive, they did it by improving just about every aspect of the operation.

But where do you start?

A simple model might be helpful. The capability of an organisation is made up of three inter-related things

• The capability of its people
• The efficiency of the systems and processes they use
• The effectiveness of the leadership and management they receive

Developing world beating capability depends on continuously improving all of these things.

To illustrate further let’s start at one corner of the triangle – the capability of the workforce. This depends in the first place on having the right people – so we need recruitment processes that attract and select the people we need. After that we need processes and capable managers to equip the people with the knowledge, skills and beliefs to perform their roles well.

Turning now to systems and processes, the key here is to measure efficiency and then involve our people in identifying how to make improvements. For example, if it takes two weeks to process a piece of new business and it involves eight people in four different departments, how, as a team, can we streamline the process and cut the time taken? If errors on new business applications are running at 13%, what are the main causes and how can they be eliminated?

This approach requires close attention to detail and a dogged determination to get to the bottom of issues, and by now you might be thinking “this doesn’t look easy”. And you’d be right, it isn’t – it takes time and commitment and a lot of effort. How else is a World Cup won? That’s why so few companies never develop world beating capabilities and, ironically, that’s why it’s worth striving for, since it can generate massive competitive advantage.

However, we’ve saved the best ‘til last. As if it isn’t bad enough that you have to work hard to improve the people and processes in your business, the third corner of the triangle is “leadership and management”. And for the people who report to you, a large element of that is down to you. So as a manager trying to pursue genuine improvement in the capability of your operation, one of the things you need to work on is you! Your capability as a manager and leader is a crucial part of the ‘corporate’ capability – you owe it to your employer, your people and yourself to improve that corner of the triangle as much as the other two.

So the route to world beating performance is unlikely to be through a single breakthrough – a lone star-striker up front – but through the patient application of effort to all the areas represented by the three corners of the triangle, and via having the humility to acknowledge that you need to develop as well. We can’t promise you’ll win the World Cup but both you and your business will grow as a result.

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