How do you solve complicated strategic organizational challenges that impact multiple areas of a company?  Who holds responsibility when strategic objectives involve different departments?  Mission critical projects can challenge an organization with their complexity, and they require focus, organizational awareness, and tenacity; carrying them out requires a team.  That’s the new role of the Wolverine’s Implementation Team — to define, measure and deliver organizational performance.

Back in October, I announced that I split my Senior Team into three distinct teams:  Executive, Culture and Implementation.  Each of these teams spent November and December challenged with defining their mission and identifying their goals for 2017.  The past two months proved a little awkward as we sorted through our new roles, but I think we’re on the right track.  These new teams bring focus and agility, which we lacked when we used to handle them with the full senior team.

We gave the Implementation Team a difficult role, and that’s to deliver on new strategic challenges identified by the Executive Team.  In addition, I transitioned several of my past oversight responsibilities to their team.  The new structure drives accountability and oversight deeper into the organization.

The Implementation Team will take on some complicated challenges in 2017, and I want to share with you what you can expect from them.  This year they will:

  • Partner with Great Lakes Energy to serve a major new foundry
  • Lead the transition to Northwest Lineman College for Apprenticeship Training Program
  • Oversee the 2017 Budget and provide internal review and approval of the 2018 Budget
  • Implement organizational performance metrics
  • Implement improved inventory management practices
  • Oversee internal approval of the 2018 Five-Year Construction Work Plan.

For the past 30 years, Wolverine operated in a “hub and spoke” environment wherein major decisions came up through the CEO.  As our industry became increasingly complex, and time for decision-making shrunk, our traditional model grew unwieldy.  In addition, the “run it by the CEO” model created bad-habit opportunities for managers to defer their uncomfortable decisions up the food chain.  I hope that employees will see better management with this new Senior Team structure. In addition, we will create better decision-making throughout the company, which will produce a strong bench of future leaders.