12.4. Objective 3: Drive Service Innovation and Cross-Selling
Downing was keenly interested in better leveraging the expertise and relationships embodied in her unit's senior executives. This would enable them to develop new client offerings, and it would help them cross-sell the array of services available throughout her unit's subgroups as well as in other units within the Strategy practice. She was convinced that achieving this goal would hinge on her ability to integrate her people's unique skill sets and knowledge in ways the unit's competitors couldn't copy. With this objective in mind, she made the following changes to her unit's networks.
12.4.1. Publicize External Sources of Knowledge
In assessing the ONA results, Downing noticed that roughly 20 percent of the ties critical to her unit's performance involved people outside the company, such as contacts at professional associations, clients, external subject matter experts (SMEs), and former colleagues. These ties constituted an important source of innovation. For instance, consultants in her unit might read a white paper on a new strategy-formulation framework published by a university researcher and think of fresh ways to use the framework in a client engagement.
Downing figured that if more of her people knew about these kinds of external resources and understood how valuable such resources could be for innovating new services, they would be more likely to use them. So, she asked one of her best-connected consultants to create a site on the intranet that identified key external relationships and how they had been used over the past two years.
12.4.2. Recombine Skill Sets
The remaining 80 percent of the ties in the unit's networks presented additional opportunities to combine people's skills and knowledge in new ways to create innovative offerings and to cross-sell services. To seize these opportunities, Downing took the following actions:
She compiled a list of competencies most often used in the key engagements carried out by subgroups, for example, the competencies most important to the success of work in joint ventures or PMI situations.
She asked people which competencies they had and would be willing to share in the interest of developing new services, and which competencies they wanted to develop to increase their range of offerings and their perceived value in the organization. This survey resulted in a profile showing areas of strength and areas for improvement in the network's organization and change strategy skills (see Figure 12.2).
She established mentoring relationships to match people who possessed skills of interest to those who wanted to develop those skills.
She identified skill sets of the most central players in her unit—those with the most connections to others. (Downing saw that some skill sets, such as PMI, were so dominant that the Organizational Strategy unit was overly reliant on them for revenue. This put the unit in a vulnerable position should the market change.)
She also connected people who had skills that were less dominant yet could serve as potential sources of future growth (such as leadership development, talent management, and business operating models) with those who wanted to develop those skills. (Downing did this by giving people from both groups assignments they could work on together, such as writing a white paper, research report, or journal article, or developing a presentation to be used in a client retreat.)
Figure 12.2. DISTRIBUTION OF EXPERTISE IN THE NETWORK
She increased the visibility of people with important skills who had become peripheral in the network. (For example, one consultant had developed an innovative approach to building a change-communication strategy, but it had been used primarily on joint-venture-related engagements.) Downing had these individuals publish a monthly postcard touting their client experiences and recent publications. The postcard was distributed to account executives in NorthStar's various practices and industry groups who were managing projects requiring the skills in question.