Mission to motivate: Transforming military finance began with aligning the team

The Adaptive Challenge

Fiscal efficiency is a “force multiplier” but even in a military culture, inefficiency creeps in over time. A large service organization was tasked with a financial transformation that would bring the spit and polish back to audit, budgeting, and technology systems, with the goal of standardizing ledgers, processes, risk management, and other functions within three years. The vision was there. The ingredient that would make it a reality across a large, tradition-bound organization, was alignment.

The Deloitte Greenhouse® Experience

The team tasked with transforming the organization’s financial management knew it could not operate in a vacuum. To silence potential cynicism inside and outside the team, there had to be a clearly defined journey everyone could follow—as well as trust in the team that would lead the way. The team began by assessing its members’ Business Chemistry styles, and found there were few Integrators in the mix even though it would take one unified voice for the team to prioritize, make decisions, and show the value of their work. The team used a multi-path, three-year roadmap to define success, and used storytelling techniques to envision what its success—and failure—would look like.

The Breakthrough

At the conclusion of the lab, the team’s finance transformation work still lay ahead. But the steps they took to align among each other laid the groundwork for both the technical challenges and the cultural alignment they would need to inspire change across their service organization. The mission now had a manifesto that mandated visibility, flexibility, and collaboration. By forging a new role as “journey champions” they generated momentum that channeled their urgency into a plan and left them with valuable momentum.

To unite a university system, it was time to get collegial

The Adaptive Challenge

A public university system was in the middle of implementing a new cloud-based HR, financial, and student management system. Many locations were still using spreadsheets and word documents to manage their HR processes. The system’s independent campuses didn’t only have separate technology systems; they had different cultures with different attitudes toward the change, and some people objected that time spent implementing the new platform would take away from other necessary work. The university system was bringing its technology into alignment. Could its people make the most of it by doing the same?

The Deloitte Greenhouse® Experience

Being collegial doesn’t always mean playing nice, and this was the moment for frank exploration. Workforce reductions weren’t a motive for the change, but they would happen and the team had to address that. On the other hand, a unified system would serve students better by streamlining enrollment and transfers. By sharing and ranking the concerns and benefits that accompanied the platform change, Lab participants realized communication and leadership could help people feel empowered. The university’s platforms had to start speaking the same language. So did its workforce.

The Breakthrough

The technology part of the story was already unfolding along a planned timeline. That momentum was already rolling. The Breakthrough Lab participants had to match it by creating momentum of their own on the human side—to help all participants know why the change was happening and that they all had a voice in it. By clarifying the concerns they needed to address, the messages they needed to share, and the benefits everyone could look forward to, they left the Breakthrough Lab with a shared vision to function as “journey champions” with their colleagues.

Learning to keep up with your own runaway success

The Adaptive Challenge

Selling your products faster than you can manufacture and ship them isn’t the worst problem to have, but it’s still a problem. One company in that situation turned to the Deloitte Greenhouse® Experience to look beyond the traditional levers of production and rethink the winning business strategies that were under such keen customer demand.

The Deloitte Greenhouse® Experience

The team gathered to pore through its recent history of piecemeal restructuring and redesign of projects, analyze the barn-burning market performance that made a new approach so necessary, and align around new ways of working. Facilitated conversations and scenario exercises helped the team strip away old assumptions so they could overcome skepticism, build confidence, and tackle the job in stages.

The Breakthrough

Step by step, the group created momentum that turned a crisis-level logjam into a fresh approach to supply chain and inventory management—not just better, not just faster, but reimagined from the core on out. The team left with clearly identified next steps and a concrete plan of action designed to keep its hungry market satisfied without sacrificing on standards.

When destruction reigns, the work of recovery takes a high-performing team

The Adaptive Challenge

A territorial government agency established to help rebuild a disaster-stricken region was in charge of overseeing and coordinating almost 300 different action plans at once, all of them vital to their people’s future. With food, water, energy, shelter, and other basic needs in the spotlight, there was never a problem with the clarity of the mission. The issue was building a team that could work together in unusually effective ways to meet the unusually pressing need. The bottom line was people—and the agency’s relationships and ways of working together would be the keys to getting there.

The Deloitte Greenhouse® Experience

The damage and the danger were unmistakably real. For the recovery agency team, it was time to get real—to shed old habits and make new connections that could amplify their strengths. As part of the Breakthrough Lab, the team took orthodoxies head-on, such as “there’s not enough time to communicate”‚ “silos exist for a reason,” or “duplication across roles is inevitable.” By digging into why these assumptions existed and what would be possible if they didn’t, the team mapped a road beyond them.

The Breakthrough

In ordinary times, an organization can weather ordinary problems—like duplication, information silos, communication lags, and inertia. The response to a life-threatening emergency is a time to disrupt ordinary thinking and push through to a new standard of collaboration and responsiveness. What the team realized is that the same urgency can also force people to default to old patterns. They left the Breakthrough Lab with a better understanding of individual strengths, renewed vision for the team and how they could work better together to achieve success, and a multi-year plan of concrete steps to bring lasting recovery to the people who are counting on them.

The Adaptive Challenge

Can you transform customer service without transforming yourself? That’s the challenge one team took on when it engaged The Deloitte Greenhouse® Experience. Everyone knew building better relationships with customers would take a plan and a map. But the team also needed to align their doing and being so their big, bold vision could become a reality.

The Deloitte Greenhouse® Experience

During the two-day Breakthrough Lab, the team confronted the fact that making change often starts with tough questions. Orthodoxy and incrementalism had taken them to the threshold of transformation, but to make a meaningful dent, they needed to shatter the plan and build it back from scratch. Deloitte Greenhouse facilitators helped them overcome their skepticism and make progress using spirited debates, full interactive communication technology, and old-fashioned human bonding.

The Breakthrough

The Deloitte Greenhouse helped the team disrupt ordinary thinking and see that its customer service challenge was more than a set of discrete operational needs. They “widened the aperture” to embrace deeper possibilities for change, including new claims for themselves as transformative leaders within their own company.

Newly appointed executive expedites impact in new role

The Adaptive Challenge

How can a new executive expedite their impact and ultimately accelerate their career from day one? Following a shake-up at one organization, a newly appointed executive, who needed to get a new team of 300 professionals aligned, looked to the Deloitte Greenhouse team for help in developing a new strategic vision, creating a leadership roadmap, and managing expectations.

The Deloitte Greenhouse® Experience

Deloitte helped the executive and her team realize their vision for their first 180 days by creating an unbiased environment to align on the goals, set priorities, access the talent and resources required to achieve those priorities, and identify the key stakeholders, who are critical to the plan’s success.

The Breakthrough

By prioritizing 15 of the 100 projects critical for immediate success, identifying the opportunities to align with other teams important to their success—and building team consensus on the project timeline, milestones, and talent requirements—they had a clear vision and the momentum to achieve their goals.

The Adaptive Challenge

Ask people about medical frontiers and many will think of drugs. But devices are undergoing a revolution in materials, technology, and application. What can the future bring in this vital field—and what’s the plan that can turn that potential into reality?

The Deloitte Greenhouse® Experience

The Deloitte Greenhouse® Experience designed an interactive experience that could help a major medical device manufacturer pursue the answer first-hand. In addition to the in-lab experiences, the joint team visited several key industry sites to absorb real-life examples of the kinds of innovation they needed to emulate, including analytics, operating efficiency, and cost control.

The Breakthrough

This innovative organization has a clearly defined its path to and through digital transformation. In addition to a vision for what the next few years can bring. The company now has a plan for reeling in those possibilities and making the future its own.