Lisa Levy, CEO of Lcubed Consulting and author of Future Proofing Cubed, started her career in IT. “I grew up as a project manager implementing systems”, she says, “and watching those system implementations fail because people didn’t understand what the new technology was doing or why it was important to them or how it was supposed to actually make their jobs easier.” That early experience led her to focus on “process and building teams that would understand how work is done and then how to use the technology.” She eventually founded Lcubed Consulting to champion better ways of doing work in order to become more agile. Tom Fox welcomes her to this week’s show as they discuss cross-functional collaboration, future proofing, and building agility within the corporate culture through adaptive transformation.
It Starts With People
“I realized that it’s really about getting the right people doing the right work in a repeatable process and then using technology to enable it,” Lisa comments. Business success depends on people first, then process, then technology, she adds. She says that she established Lcubed Consulting to offer middle-sized companies expertise in four key areas: project management, process performance management, internal controls, and organizational changes. Working with her expert consultants helps her clients’ employees build their capacity in these crucial areas.
Cross Functional Collaboration
Understanding what’s going on around you as an employee is important, Lisa iterates. She advocates for cross-functional collaboration, so that each employee and team knows where they fit in the big picture. “If everyone understands where they fit in the flow of the business, we can then tie that into the work value that customers and clients receive,” she remarks. This makes certain that resources aren’t being wasted.
Future Proofing and Being Agile
Tom comments that the pandemic has made “the unknown unknowns almost business-as-usual.” He asks Lisa how companies can future proof their operations for whatever comes along. Lisa responds that you must build agility within your business as the first step of “future proofing.” This is the core of their adaptive transformation framework. “Future proofing is about building a basis in corporate culture that embraces change,” she remarks. “A visionary leader is always looking to the next thing that they want to do…Operations is supposed to happen flawlessly and move with the needs of that visionary leader. And so if we start with a culture … and everybody understands that we really want to change on a recurring basis – that this is natural, it’s how we grow, it’s how we scale – and we have that foundation, and we know how to do our jobs, and we know how to use our technology, a business leader can do just about anything, and the business will follow.”
Getting the Message Out
Lisa wrote her book, Future Proofing Cubed, in 2019 before the pandemic. She tells Tom that COVID-19 has made the message that businesses need to be agile, very clear to leaders. She shares insight on how to create an adaptive culture throughout an organization. The tone from the top is important, but employees need to hear the same message from their direct supervisors. “In order to be successful we need to be able to get our people to move in the directions that we need them to…. with the least amount of resistance,” Lisa remarks.
Resources
Lisa Levy | LinkedIn
LCubedConsulting.com
FutureProofingCubed.com
