Three Ways CPOS Are Sustaining High Performance Teams

Is your COVID-weary team in need of some inspiration? We’ve got the top 3 tips to help them reach peak performance!

Attitude will go a long way to helping you outperform your peers.

During a year of pandemic, natural disaster and geopolitical upheaval, many CPOs and their teams still managed to achieve success.  But sustaining that peak performance and making it business as usual can be just as demanding.  How can CPOs make high performance the normal state of affairs?

At the February Procurious UK CPO Roundtable, presented by HCL Technologies, senior procurement executives met (virtually) to consider this very issue.  So, what was the insight from the day?

It’s important to frame the quest for high performance in a way that can be used in every aspect of the procurement teams’ work.  Performance coach and Roundtable keynote speaker, Jamil Qureshi, advises that attitude, above all things, is the all-important factor for success.  High performing teams need to:

Think about the desired levels of performance and the ways that CPOs and their teams need to work to sustain them.

Feel committed to achieving these desired outcomes.  “Merely telling ourselves things doesn’t change how we act”, Qureshi warns.

Act and plan to achieve the required levels of performance.  Qureshi is optimistic about what can be achieved by teams who take action: “Take advantage of the opportunities presented by disruption.  Don’t play it safe, now is the time to out-perform your peers.”

And for CPOs, the opportunities in 2021 are presenting themselves in three ways:

Become Digitally Dexterous

HCL Technologies’ VP – Cloud & Infrastructure Services, Ashish Arora, reports “The evidence is clear: companies that prospered in terms of growth during 2020 were, more often than not, are those who had already invested in digital and cloud.”  So, delivering on digital dexterity is arguably the first step CPOs need to take to outperform.

The advice for CPOs is to go with established people who can help you scale cloud rapidly rather than niche vendors who are going to help with POCs as the time for POCs has passed. Cloud is now mainstream and will happen at scale, and that is what CPOs should be focusing and working with vendors on: How to scale cloud and digital initiatives at an enterprise level.

In the digital space, research has found that companies are usually good at getting better at what they already do, but not at being different.  

Could it be that implementing all the functionality that a CPO has on offer from an existing tech provider is not the most dexterous route to take?  “Thinking through the strategy for “digital first” is an important first step to take on the road to dexterity,” Arora urges.

Getting “digital first” buy in from the procurement team involves them believing that it matters.  We need to define outcomes in terms of what stakeholders (customers) really value.  “Adopt a persona-based approach to a digital roll out” Arora advises.  “Think about each stakeholder, what they value, what they need, where they are feeling pain points,  and then act with that in mind.”

To read more from Arora, visit his recent article on how the cloud is contributing to improved sustainability outcomes here.

Focus on the People

Many CPOs report that the mental health and wellbeing of COVID-weary procurement teams is high on their agenda.  The challenges of working from home, heavy workloads, economic uncertainty, disruption to sourcing and supplier relationships, and a loss of connection with peers, has all taken its toll. 

High performance cannot be sustained without thinking through how the team’s mental health can be maintained.

Working out an approach that makes people feel like they are valued can help to maintain the attitude that’s needed for teams to perform.  And Qureshi has clear advice for CPOs, “Attitude is always more important than intelligence or facts. Give me ‘I will’ over IQ any day!”

And with this in mind should the search for new procurement talent be carried out in the same old way?  “Absolutely not!” warns Mark Badley of talent specialists Ronin. “There’s an increasingly wide value gap in the recruitment space between what you pay for and what you get in return”. Badley urges radical change in the way CPOs conduct recruitment.  

“Act to remove the blockers in process and culture to find the right people for you.”

Bring Suppliers into the Question

No conversation about high performance would be complete without mention of suppliers.  And Bianca Cooper, a senior procurement leader at Cadent Gas knows how important suppliers have been in the year just past.

“Fortunately, we’d already done some of the thinking and contingency planning with suppliers as part of Brexit preparations,” Cooper reported, “but the strength of those relationships really bore fruit when Covid struck”.

Implementing approaches like dynamic purchasing systems are one avenue that CPOs can pursue.  Cooper recommends an approach that helps suppliers to feel part of the solution, “Take action to make those relationships more dexterous if you can.”

The prospects for great results from procurement teams look excellent.  CPOs who are taking steps to work with their people, suppliers and technology through digital dexterity are well placed to create and sustain outstanding performance.

All by adopting an approach that combines think, feel and act in a high-performance way.

The Procurious UK Roundtable was sponsored this month by HCL Technologies.

To learn more about the Roundtable 2021 program, please email Helen Mackenzie