The One Hour Service Sourcing Leader – CPO: How to Create Your High-Performance Procurement Team Effectively
– Your Challenge – Lack of Commitment
– The CPOs Leadership Role
– The CPOs Coaching Role
This article is about Corporate Teams and Coaching in the area of Procurement. Many Team members do not see the importance of monthly or weekly reviews or feedback-loops in meeting online or offline; therefore performance management of procurement people is a strategic task for every CPO.
1. Your Challenge – Lack of Commitment
Once I worked in an organisation, as a consultant and the central question was how can we prepare for Monday to delegate work as much as possible and not be responsible for any task. Team members are not willing to take on a leadership role and do not want to develop activities together in the team.
2. The CPOs Leadership Role
The importance of the blame culture and how stakeholders see each other as competitors are vital areas where executives like CPOs should urge in solving to implement the overall procurement performance strategy.
One way is “to find to most efficient sourcing processes in the relationship with your internal clients”.
The CPO can execute the procurement performance strategy in five steps:
1.Select a team, where different category buyers from your department come together and openly communicate the main problem fields
2.Cluster these topics regarding being strategic and operative Purchasing topics and relationship topics, e.g. this could vary from the difficult management of procurement processes with the management board for example
3. After defining and clustering your ideas, communicate on how you can improve the main problem, select on an issue and work the other through in the upcoming weeks. For example, if the management board does not understand the value of procurement, other than just regarding procurement processes as just administrative.,
4. Have a leader in your department who is responsible for the communication in procurement and what value this brings for the organisation. Topics like TCO and what impacts they have on the overall company value concerning EBIT.
5. Start to work it through and write down also what obstacles you might have in your way. Lack of time from the management to listen to this topic, to the person who wants to be the leader.
3. CPO Coaches People to Deliver Results
Here coaching comes into play; you need to have your coaching skills as the head of the department or CPO to be able to coach your team to give them the comfort and strength to initiate the ideas put on the paper. Coaching will not provide the solution, but it will help you and your team to find a solution and help you with all your topics to work them through together step-by-step.
-Start the upcoming week and review the outcomes together in the team. Even if the results do not happen as quickly as you believe, make sure that you examine the findings and determine the next actions in your workshops.
-The key here is not to look at the problems, but at the solutions, as often this is the case that in many organisations the opportunities are not being discussed. As being a Procurement Specialist, I can confirm that the procurement function instead looks at the “dark side of the life”, as this is often in the genes of the various Procurement Specialists. Nevertheless, looking forward to what can be done and how can this be learned throughout the team, brings the most value to any organisation. The team gets the comfort to communicate results to other departments and be in a leadership role within the organisation.
Remember, be in the role of giving coaching support to your team members at all times. Team members get the help they need to manage complex RFPs for example.
Want to discuss new ideas on how you can transform your team into a high-performance procurement team, make sure you contact me for advice or a one-to-one coaching session.
I am looking forward to working together with your to accomplish and reach your career goals in the area of procurement.
Philip David MBA specializes in crafting your breakthrough service sourcing strategy, evaluating and choosing your strategic service providers, developing your business case for optimizing your total service cost of ownership and leading your implementation project for delivering sustainable results rapidly.
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Email: philip.josef.david@gmail.com
