New solution to skill shortages revealed at conference for business leaders

Making it easy for average performers to adopt winning ways is the key to tackling South Africa’s skill shortages according to Prof. Colin Coulson-Thomas speaking to members of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA). He revealed: “A new generation of support tools can help average performers to adopt the winning ways of high performing superstars.”

Business leaders attending the ACCA event at the Park Hyatt Hotel, Rosebank, Johannesburg were shown examples of what pioneering companies are doing to boost the performance of key workgroups. As a result the Professor claims: “Workgroup productivity and corporate performance can be transformed to deliver commercial success for organisations and personal satisfaction for individuals.”

In many sectors leading competitors have similar offerings, adopt prevailing technologies and systems, recruit similar people, fall for current management fads and employ the same professional firms. Yet because his studies of key activities reveal huge variations of performance, the Professor asks: “Why are some people so much more effective than others who undertake similar tasks in equivalent circumstances? What do high performers do differently?”

Coulson-Thomas’ Winning Companies: Winning People research programme examines how people operate in areas such as building relationships, bidding, pricing, purchasing and exploiting know-how. Over 4,000 organisations have participated and some 2,000 of these have contributed to studies to identify critical success factors for key business development activities. The findings are remarkably consistent across sectors, professions, corporate nationalities and different sizes of organisation.

Areas examined range from communicating to visioning. Investigating teams distinguish the approaches of high performers or winners from the practices of low achieving losers to identify critical success factors and winning ways that can be built into processes and support tools. The results are summarised in a forthcoming book ‘Winning Companies: Winning People; Making it easy for average performers to adopt winning ways’ (Colin Coulson-Thomas, Policy Publications, 2007) *.

Individual studies within the Winning Companies: Winning People research programme rank participant’s attainments in relation to outcomes achieved from the most to the least successful. The approaches of high and low achievers – for example, those in the top and bottom quartiles of accomplishment – are then compared to isolate critical success factors that explain the differences of attainment.

Coulson-Thomas finds that: “Identified winning ways can be quickly adopted. Every participant in the research programme could boost performance by embracing additional critical success factors and adopting more winning approaches.”

The Professor reports: “Winners don’t work harder or cheat. They approach challenges and opportunities differently. Pioneers are building critical success factors into the processes for key activities and adopting cost effective ways of helping people to emulate the winning ways of high performing superstars.”

Overall, the research findings and winner-loser comparisons are intriguing. Companies that excel at certain activities usually perform badly at others. Coulson-Thomas believes: “Were companies to adopt winning ways across the board overall productivity and personal satisfaction would increase by an unprecedented amount.”

The investigating teams found massive expenditure on activities that do not relate to critical success factors and winning behaviours. Prof. Coulson-Thomas reports: “Almost every company visited during the research programme was found to be devoting considerable resources to similar initiatives that would make little if any difference to outcomes achieved in areas covered by the investigation.”

Coulson-Thomas believes there is a huge opportunity to improve individual and corporate performance: “Even high performers could do so much better. In relation to competitive bidding the superstars in the top quartile of achievement are only very effective at less than half of the identified critical success factors.”

According to Coulson-Thomas, “‘Winning Companies; Winning People’ provides a compendium of the differing approaches of winners and losers and a variety of checklists for those with ambitions to build successful businesses and achieve their full potential. Individuals, entrepreneurs, managers, coaches and consultants can use it as a tool to identify losing behaviours that need to be addressed”.

The core research data bases have been constructed so that in addition to the guidance available in the new ‘Winning Companies: Winning People’ book and individual critical success factor reports bespoke benchmarking reports can be generated that offer comparison with average and high performers and highlight areas to concentrate upon to match the achievements of superstars.

*‘Winning Companies; Winning People, Making it easy for average performers to adopt winning behaviours’ by Colin Coulson-Thomas is to be published by Policy Publications and will be available from www.policypublications.com. Information about the handbook can be obtained from http://www.coulson-thomaspublications.com

Details of reports presenting critical success factors and winning ways identified by the Winning Companies; Winning People research programme and related bespoke benchmarking reports can be obtained from Prof. Colin Coulson-Thomas by Tel: + 44 (0) 1733 361 149; Fax: + 44 (0) 1733 361 459; email: colinct@tiscali.co.uk and via http://www.policypublications.com
The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) is the world’s largest and fastest-growing global professional accountancy body, with 296.000 trainees and 115,000 qualified members in 180 countries. ACCA helps the world’s employers attract, develop and retain the finance leaders of the future in all business sectors through nearly 80 offices and centres worldwide. Information about the activities of ACCA in South Africa can be obtained from Tel: + 27 (0)11 459 1900; Fax: + 27 (0)11 268 6374 or from http://www.southafrica.accaglobal.com/

Professor Coulson-Thomas reports has helped over 100 entrepreneurs and their business development teams to build their businesses, reviewed the business development processes and practices of over 100 companies and spoken at over 200 national, international and corporate events in some 35 countries.