Quad Consultancy yesterday hosted the first in a series of exciting and interesting workshops led by eminent international speakers who will be visiting the Maltese Islands to tackle a variety of challenging topics.

Yesterday’s speaker was Mark Fritz, who started off with the enigmatic title of Why You Never Wash a Rental Car.  The concept behind this title is one that is challenging for anyone in management and he discussed how managers can lead by focussing on activities or else by concentrating more on outcomes.  The difference between the two approaches is that one direction can lead to tremendous differences in the level of performance of a team.

Foccussing on activities means that each team member concentrates primarily on his or her part of the task.  On the contrary, when the focus is shifted to outcomes, the team can see the WHY – why a set list of outcomes are required, and in this way, energies are focussed on achieving the ultimate objective of the whole team rather than focus on the small part that one team member plays in the whole task. 

A practical example that Mark Fritz brought to illustrate this was that of the US Airforce that was at one stage organised by function.  This was changed to form cross-functional teams that were jointly set a specific objective: that of ensuring that 25 aircraft are kept operational.  This gave more transparency to the ultimate goal to the whole team and the result was that the flying time of the fleet was actually trebeled!

Mark Fritz then went into detail on how to create an environment for collaboration, starting from personal ownership of a company’s objectives and moving to the key role of management: that of enabling ownership in others, thus ensuring that the company objectives do not assume the properties of a rental car that no one can be bothered to wash! The workshop was extremely interactive with regular interjections, questions and shared ideas from all the participants.

The next workshops to be held in the coming months (the next one is going to be held in May) will host a number of leading international speakers who will each deal with important and controversial topics that are essential to a Manager’s performance.  Anyone who would like to receive information about these workshops can subscribe to the mailing list by sending an email to Mark J Galea at: mark@quadconsultancy.com.