Organisations are often overwhelmed by ever increasing demands from stakeholders, regulators and management systems.
Streamline and manage these demands in one simple consolidation.
Without beating about the bush, the answer is simple – integrate your management systems. The actual implementation of this concept is far from simple, mainly because organisations are often subscribed to external management systems which have never been integrated into the mainstream of the business. An example of this would be your compliance department for health and safety, environmental affairs and even your quality control system.
I know you MUST have these systems, in many cases it goes beyond your ethics, it is the law. Where many organisations have strayed from taking responsibility for their systems and outsourced them, I believe they have squandered an opportunity to have control over the process of audits, compliance checking and measurements that are meaningful to the organisation and not only to the regulators.
When one takes a closer look at all the different management systems out there you will see one common thread that somehow we have either ignored or we don’t understand completely. In the majority of these external management systems there is a mention of how you should be including the activities and requirements of the particular management system within your own management system. We never seem to do that.
Being a little jaded, at first I thought it was because we just didn’t want to buy yet another management system from a consulting firm. After some severe criticism from peers and the consulting firms themselves I realised that this is not about the proposed management systems – it is about my organisation’s lack of a formal management system.
Now before you decide you have this covered, I also thought so until I asked some tough questions. Consider how you would answer the following questions:
- What are your decision making criteria for taking a risk within your industry?
- What process do you, as owner / manager, follow when you want to diversify or improve profits?
- How do you predict the future for your business? Is it a documented process? Can your managers do it without you?
The list goes on and I quickly realised that even though I was process rich at an operational level, my processes at management and leadership levels were mostly tacit (in my head) and not-negotiable – a recipe for conflict, failure and no mechanism for learning. I’ve spent the past 16 years figuring out how to define, create, maintain and implement a consolidated management system that actually works for me as opposed to working for the auditors and consulting firms.
If you can identify with this frustrating conflict of interests from various stakeholders and regulators and want to explore how a single management system would benefit you, please drop me a line below and I will send you information about the consulting, coaching and mentoring program I have that will help you consolidate your management systems, reduce controls and increase your control within your organisation.