New CambridgeAudits
for 2003/4
Three new "scoreable" audits - use them to measure how well your organisation manages innovation, leadership and the "shadow-side".
Introduction
The Business Innovation Audit
The Organisational Leadership Audit
The Organisation Shadow-Side Audit
Ready to use self-assessment audits
Like all the other CambridgeAudits, each of these three new, self-assessment audits is ready to be run right away without any external support or training. The Audits contain all the information you need to pull together the most suitable team and get started at once.
Scoreable questionnaires
In addition, each of these three audits has been developed with extensive scoreable questionnaires, so you can precisely measure and pinpoint your organisation's current performance. Use your score to compare different sites, functions or processes. Or run the audit again at regular intervals to measure progress over time.
You can also benchmark your performance against that of other organisations using the audit. (For help in identifying and contacting other audit users, simply contact Cambridge Strategy Publications once you have completed the audit).
Post-audit consultancy support
After completing an audit, you may want on-site training or consultancy support from the audit's designer. This can be arranged at discounted rates through the publisher.
About the audits' designer
All three of these new CambridgeAudits have been designed and developed by William Tate, MA, FCIPD, FRSA, MCIM.
Formerly British Airways' Head of HR Strategy & Planning, he has since 1991 run Prometheus Consulting, which specialises in strategic HR management, organisation development, change and learning. He is also a director of Conduct Becoming, a consultancy specialising in corporate social responsibility (CSR), governance and ethics.
He consults and runs workshops on strategic HR, management and organisation development, and CSR. He is a visiting member of faculty on City University's Executive MBA programme in London.
The Business Innovation Audit
Most managers understand the idea and importance of technological innovation. They observe it every day in new products, services and business processes. But few understand how to give their business the permanent ability to be innovative in everything that it does.
Crucial in bringing this about is the way the enterprise manages its people, its internal organisation and networks.
The key to competitive advantage
Innovation in this context means: the systemic capacity to successfully exploit new ideas, wherever and whenever they arise, and to whatever they might be applied. It is widely seen as holding one of the most important keys to unlocking competitive advantage in an increasingly challenging business environment.
The Business Innovation Audit focuses on your organisation's present way of working and on how it impacts on its innovating potential. It has been designed and developed for sophisticated senior managers (especially HR professionals) with responsibility for how well their organisation performs.
Release your organisation's innovating potential
Use the Audit to assess the level of understanding about which business structures and practices lead to innovative capability for the whole organisation. Use it to assess, expand and release your organisation's innovating potential.
10 questionnaires examine how well your enterprise fosters innovation in the way that it is run. Each is accompanied by practical guidance and advice. It then suggests possible changes and improvements.
The 10 self-assessment questionnaires cover:
- Managing creative and innovative people
- Developing people's innovative capability
- Developing a culture of innovation
- Applying performance management to innovation
- Using competency approaches with innovation
- Taking advantage of creative ideas
- Understanding forces that stifle or fuel innovation
- Responding to workplace trends affecting innovation
- Exploiting the many sources of innovation
- Measuring innovation at a strategic level
The Organisational Leadership Audit
Leadership is typically viewed from the point of view of the skills of individual leaders (the approach used in our Leadership Skills Audit - see separate leaflet).
But here, The Organisational Leadership Audit uses a distinctive, new model to help you analyse the way your organisation promotes, sustains, encourages or inhibits leadership right across the business.
Leadership as an organisational resource
The Organisational Leadership Audit looks at leadership as an organisational resource. It shows how organisations need to provide a shared, honest and valid purpose, develop a conscious, supportive leadership culture, create a leadership structure that works, and remove obstacles to individual leadership.
So, the key question for organisations becomes: How well is leadership being managed from an organisational perspective?
The Organisational Leadership Audit is an essential tool for HR departments and senior general managers/directors in any organisation.
By undertaking this audit you will:
- Determine your organisation's strengths and weaknesses in respect of leadership including: the oversight provided by top management to leadership-enhancing initiatives, the leadership culture, leadership-related strategies, policies, plans, systems and processes.
- See the need for organisational leadership that meets the expectations and demands of the changing business and social environment.
- Identify what promotes, sustains and inhibits leadership in your organisation.
- Encourage a consistent approach which ensures that leadership is acquired, developed, used, appraised, promoted, rewarded and retained.
- Design appropriate responses to remedy any deficits in your organisation's provision and exercise of leadership - and remove obstacles to effective organisational leadership.
- Lay the groundwork for a corporate-led senior management development strategy.
- Set a baseline to audit organisational leadership against in future - and measure progress.
The Organisation Shadow-Side Audit
Organisations are not rational. Yet most managers who need to make improvements, talk about the rational: resources, organisation charts, reporting channels, mission statements, committees, policies.
Rivalry, fear, ambition, greed, power, lust...
In fact, most organisations' problems are more to do with inter-departmental rivalry, ambition, personal jealousies, greed, office politics, personalities, power struggles, interest groups, sexual attraction, fear and intimidation. This is the shadow-side.
Its influence is pervasive, but it is also a vital safety valve. It is where we retain our individuality against the pressures of our job and the rules and requirements of the organisation. So the task of management is to not to tame the shadow-side, but to keep a balance between it and the official system.
Organisations behave tabloid but plan broadsheet
Few managers can manage the shadow-side. It is outside the scope of training, often undiscussed and undiscussible. Yet it is the backcloth for much of what goes on inside organisations.
Learn to understand and manage the shadow-side
Use this audit to learn how you and your fellow managers can 'read', understand and manage the shadow-side to benefit the organisation as a whole. This means achieving a balance between the rational and non-rational. The audit shows how to do this and approaches the subject at various levels:
- Understanding what the shadow-side is.
- Why the shadow-side matters in organisations, and why it is important to gain control over it.
- Developing more highly tuned antennae that help managers see the shadow-side at work.
- Acquiring the analytical skill to be able to tease out what is going on at any time.
- Improving individuals' skills in managing the shadow-side.
- Bringing benefits to the organisation in everyday performance, especially at times of change.
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