Finance Monthly Global Awards 2019 Edition

Finance Monthly Global Awards 2019 www.finance-monthly.com 38 CANADA MANAGEMENT CONSULTING ADVISORY FIRM OF THE YEAR What first inspiredyour interest andeventual positionasa thought leader in transformative change? Having spent the last 2 years as the CEO, I’m passionate about the continuous learning you have when you are building tomorrow’s business while leading today’s business; a challenge all CEOs have. It’s something I call ‘wrestling chaos’. With this in mind, it’s clear that few people at any level have really had the luxury of successfully leading multiple transformation programs or great change initiatives. It’s just not something many people have had the chance to do in their careers and yet, today, it’s what we do every day – whether it is planned or not – the ability to engage, enable and energize an entire organization is crucial to growth but also survival. If you think about what CEOs are wanting to implement – diversity, operational excellence, safety cultures, customer experience, process or productivity improvements, achieving better margins and lower costs, or, what about sustainability and climate change? What about some of the world’s most pressing challenges? It all requires a deep knowledge and demonstrated skill in implementation. That’s what transformation requires. Transformation is the outcome. The ability to implement change is the action. We all need to be well versed and skilled in the art and science of implementation and that’s what I’m most passionate about – helping people, helping leaders at every level learn how to implement change and do it repeatedly and successfully. I truly believe Implementation as a core competence, a true capability, has the power to change the world – it’s how you make change happen both big and small. Implementing change is how you make a difference. I have spent 30 plus years supporting and later leading the implementation of performance improvement and behavioral change, tight through to transformative change. Initially I was taken by Proudfoot’s ability to actually measure the outcomes of change – through operational indicators and into financial results. We can show a direct link between a projects actions and the results. This was different than other consulting firms. Not only could we measure our results, but we measured them weekly, down to the details. But we were also getting different results than Industry was achieving. The statistics 20+ years ago were the same as they are today – McKinsey, Brightline and other site failure rates of change and transformation of up to 70% or more. That just wasn’t right. We were not experiencing those rates and so I went about trying to understand what we were doing that was getting the high success rates with our clients. I was fanatical about looking for ways to avert those failures for others and show clients how we achieve success. In the early days, people were talking about change curves and valleys of despair. The thought leadership had not matured into where we knew it needed to be – how to direct change and navigate the curve to change the trajectory and ensure success. While building our change practice may years ago, we focused Proudfoot’s support on the fundamentals of what we called People Solutions; the practice I created with our teams and led in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. We developed deep knowledge in the arena of individual and organizational alignment, education, training all in efforts to sustain change – engaging people more effectively in the journey. This was with a view to supporting the successful implementation of change. But we also knew it had to be a multifaceted solution: Agile project management, measurement, synchronized change that included process, technology, management tools, structure, and behaviors, all wrapped in true People Solutions and embedded through coaching. Underpinning everything was a profound belief in the power of coaching. Like training efforts, unless you applied your new found Q