Share the Vision seeks to provide total-company involvement & improvement. Part II

Last week’s blog post introduced Concord’s initiative, Share the Vision, which seeks to provide total-company involvement & improvement.

Everything being done now is moving Concord toward the future while establishing value in the present. This includes the all-important plan to train people for future leadership and communication challenges.

This post discusses the first three of ten aims:

Create a culture of collaboration, communication, confession. That’s right, confession. To fully collaborate and communicate requires relating the good, the bad, the ugly. Concord encourages its people to explain what they did wrong and what they learned in the process. This provides a roadmap for what to do going forward and what to avoid. Everyone can learn from mistakes, so encouraging “candid confession” around them is a big part of the culture. It’s common sense and leads to better client performance.

Aspire to continuous improvement. It’s woven into the fabric of what Concord does. It’s the glue that binds the entire business together and enables offering continuous improvement in client, partner, and other stakeholder relationships. As part of this process, Concord surveys the team every three months to take the pulse on what’s working, what needs improvement, and how to get like-minded people together on implementing beneficial change moving forward.

Spread the wealth of knowledge. It’s great to have that one indispensable go-to subject matter expert, until more resources are needed—and there’s no one trained to step up. Then you have an expertise vacuum. Instead of one expert, Concord works to create a team of experts who can share the load and shorten the timeframes needed to meet a challenge.

In the process, it helps the teacher learn more as well, through a sharing of perspectives and ideas among the team. It also helps team members communicate more effectively by changing their words when it’s clear the audience isn’t understanding what’s being said. This is truly a team sport where everyone should have the opportunity and encouragement to participate fully.

Next week, we’ll discuss the next four aims:

• Embrace empowerment, promote passionate thinking, celebrate success.
• Open all doors to change.
• Question the status quo.
• Get LEAN.

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Jon Catlin, Concord Servicing Corporation Chief Information Officer, is a big-picture thinker, strategist, and implementation specialist. His Share the Vision initiative is designed to bring together the collective brainpower, creative insights, and perspectives of all forces within the company to effect positive change, enhance productivity, empower the workforce, and optimize outcomes. Far from being an IT-only focus, Share the Vision is a total company endeavor designed to make Concord all it can be on behalf of clients, employees, partners, and other stakeholders.