Ruan

Ryan Frederiksen

In the increasingly competitive and overly complex world of supply chain, logistics, and transportation management, your most important development strategies should be the ones that support and develop your people.  We’re all selling some form or version of trust.  Trust is earned through consistent reliability and performance.  Consistent performance is forged through experiences.  Experience is obtained each day by the millions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ decisions industry professionals make.  The tuition paid for the ‘wrong’ decisions yield the greatest returns as we define and execute new strategies.  All the technology, AI, and computing capabilities available are mere tools to be used and enhanced by your people.  If you want to be successful long-term, focus more resources on developing your people as you do on the development of your systems.  Here are a couple simple ideas for enhancing your people development strategies.

First, develop your framework for calibrating talent assessments and a natural tendency to look inside the organization first.  For talent assessment, don’t overlook team member track records.  If an individual has done it before, they will likely do it again (both good and bad).  Additionally, it’s important to acknowledge that nobody is ever ‘really’ ready for their next role.  The precise moment they are, it won’t matter for you because they already work for someone else.  This concept is far from earth shattering, yet hiring managers continually choose the wrong people for the wrong reasons.  Define your desired strategy for a role and be specific (i.e., department growth, operational ROIC, team member development, ‘fix the operation’, sourcing tech, etc.).  As an example, team members that have relied on innovative thinking and technologies in the past, will continue to do so in the future—even when (or especially when) the rate of change is so rapid.  This is more difficult for external candidates, so choose your interview questions wisely, critique their examples wildly, and be patient.  When you find someone with the right track record, take a chance on them and give that leader the autonomy to lead their portion of the business. 

"If you want to achieve long-term success, focus your strategies on your people and they will do the rest"

Next, cultivate the talent you do have by moving talented team members around the organization.  Short-term success is far too insignificant these days.  The world changes too often to be content with just winning current month/quarter/year.  Long-term success requires discipline to a strong strategy.  Key leaders in the organization need access to the experience happening elsewhere in within the organization.  If these folks aren’t gaining the important insights from other parts of the organization, who will replace your aging executive leadership team?  Revert to the previous paragraph and reward the track records of leaders that consistently exceed the mark.  Identify and then move these strong leaders around your organization.  In a transportation company, that might mean moving an operations manager into a maintenance role or a non-asset broker into an asset management role.  For a shipper, move a strong procurement manager into a transportation or supply chain manager role.  When people are mobile within the organization, their good ideas multiply from department to department.  When you move leaders around it is important to acknowledge that a few mistakes are likely to happen.  I’m not talking about supporting bad decisions, you do still have a business to run; I’m talking about letting key leaders ‘dent the car’.  Much like our teenage versions of our self.  When we learned drive a vehicle, the greatest lessons where the ones that had consequences.  As a new driver, you needed the support of a parent or drivers education teacher to prepare you for your journey.  Invariably there were close calls or a minor dents/scratcher along the way, but hopefully nothing too serious.  This is how we learn.  Take this concept when you support leaders cross pollinating the organization, sometimes things get broke.  Trust the process and your people will fix them. 

Far too often, I see managers and organizations focusing solely on the ‘What’?  I’d offer that your real focus should be on the ‘Who’?  No matter which sector of Supply Chain, Logistics, or Transportation you support (or really any part of business); the people within those sectors are the ones that truly make things happen.  Technology advancements are incredible and imperative to solving the world’s biggest problems.  We need advancement in virtually all areas to continual to improve and compete in a global economy.  That said, don’t lose sight of the people who deploy the technology and their ideas that truly power the greatest gains.  If you want to achieve long-term success, focus your strategies on your people and they will do the rest.