Last Updated on October 17, 2024 by Owen McGab Enaohwo
Being employed in an organization that has many talented employees and managers, makes it crucial for you to have skill sets that help you stand out from the rest.
While every individual employee is likely to bring their unique talents and skills to solidify their place in an organization, their contribution to the organization will likely account the most towards their performance.
Process management or business process management is an important yet rare quality for leaders to possess. So, if you have the capacity and capability to drive that kind of change in your organization, know that it will only exemplify your leadership skills and set you on a path of unprecedented career growth.
But before you decide to introduce process management approaches to any of your company processes, learn what this approach entails, and the benefits it offers for enhancing your job role and career growth.
What Does Process Management Entail?
For any enterprise targeting growth, market, or revenue-wise, continuously and consistently improving business processes is not optional. Businesses must implement a systematic approach to designing and implementing consistent improvements in processes.
Process management is typically a long-term strategy that relies on leaders motivated to consistently improve and optimize processes. As an approach, process management finds its applications in various sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, finance, customer service, and more.
There are three primary goals businesses target through business process management, which are:
- Identifying Areas of Improvement: The first and foremost goal of process management is identifying the key areas of improvement in your business processes. As an evolving business, the smartest thing to do is acknowledge that your processes can always be optimized and improved, by identifying weaknesses and eliminating them.
- Implementing Necessary Changes: Once you identify weaknesses or areas of improvement, you can implement the changes necessary to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of your processes.
- Tracking Progress: You must also consider implementing key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure and track whether the goals are being achieved. If you feel the current approaches are falling short while tracking the progress, you can then make adjustments to these approaches.
Process management is a core area for any good manager, thus directly related to their leadership abilities and employees’ career growth. With that in mind, let’s discuss some ways in which efficient process management can influence your leadership skills and career growth.
10 Ways Efficient Process Management Boosts Leadership Skills and Career Growth
- Establishes Leader Standard Work
Leader Standard Work, or LSW, is an approach many leaders take to foster continuous improvement and improve organizational performance. It is a set of routine tasks and responsibilities that can help leaders work more efficiently and consistently.
An LSW is the perfect way to standardize the expectations and requirements of leaders in your organization, quite similar to Instructions For Use (IFU) for technicians and engineers. Implementing LSW can also help leaders develop capable team members and collaborate with them more effectively. LSW usually includes basic actions like conducting daily meetings with team members, developing process standards, monitoring processes, and reflecting on results.
- Enables Informed Decisions
Business leaders or executives in leadership positions need to be capable of making difficult decisions. Since some of these decisions can have company-wide implications, leaders must ensure that accurate data and insights inform these decisions.
Efficient process management includes organizing and analyzing data systematically to streamline workflows. Business leaders and managers who can master process management can identify bottlenecks quickly, and anticipate potential issues in advance, equipping them to make informed decisions.
For instance, if your technology firm is not generating sales or revenue as expected, you can analyze the sales data to narrow down the improvement areas. You can even identify patterns in the sales data to make improvements that stick. Since sales is an important vertical for a business, making informed decisions based on historical data might prove more fruitful.
These improved decision-making skills and the ability to make highly informed decisions can help foster confidence and trust among leaders and employees. As a result, the leaders in your business can work more effectively to solidify their role in the organization.
- Creates an Environment of Continuous Improvement
An environment of continuous improvement thrives and adapts to even the most volatile market conditions. Efficient process management encourages continuous improvement in processes and in the organization.
Leaders proficient in enabling efficient process management tend to lean towards continuously improving and optimizing organizational practices. They are also perceived as individuals with a growth mindset who play pivotal roles in important projects and thus assets to the organization.
Mercy Health, a popular healthcare system with a large network of hospitals and clinics in the United States needed to manage patient data across departments and facilities. Using process management, Mercy Health came up with a patient-centered model identifying and mapping out the key steps of a patient’s journey. This allowed the organization to identify potential improvements more easily and find touchpoints to optimize the overall patient experience.
Additionally, a leader’s approach toward continuous improvement showcases their commitment to organizational and personal development. These are qualities appreciated by organizations’ top management and can pave the way for their leaders’ career growth opportunities.
- Encourages Stakeholder Communication and Collaboration
Highly efficient process management can not only help you identify how to leverage and utilize your resources but also your ability to promote transparency and clarity in communication.
When leaders streamline or build workflows through process management, they make it easier for teams to understand their roles and responsibilities. As a result, the quality of communication is improved and a collaborative environment is fostered among the company’s stakeholders.
Whether it is an employee, a high-level manager or a valuable customer, communication and collaboration can go a long way in improving the effectiveness of processes and the results generated from them.
For instance, AB InBev wanted to improve its overall HR landscape through a single solution. So the company opted for IBM Workday consulting services to bridge the gap between the legacy HR apps and the new HCM software, creating a single source of truth for all the stakeholders.
This reduces misunderstandings and creates a more cohesive work environment in the organization. When all of this is enabled by a leader in the company, their role as a central figure is solidified even more.
- Helps Adapt to Market Changes
Say your business operates in a competitive niche and an evolving market environment. You’ll have your hands full with positioning and marketing your product right while also coming up with creative ways to outcompete existing players in the market.
By implementing efficient process management approaches, leaders can adapt to challenges quickly and be more prepared to deal with fluctuating market demands and organizational shifts. Agile organizational leaders are better equipped to lead their teams through complex transitions and adapt to any sudden changes that come with them.
To understand this better, let’s consider the example of a construction firm looking to boost operational efficiency in a country having a volatile real estate market. The leaders in the organization can utilize BPM to centralize the procurement operations of the company and organize the resources into a process-driven framework to maximize operational efficiency.
By tackling complex processes and projects efficiently, managers and organizational leaders have an opportunity to showcase their resilience and versatility in their respective fields.
- Fostering Teamwork and Engagement
With highly streamlined workflows and well-managed processes, your team will have more clarity and can work more efficiently without friction. Leaders who establish clear and definitive processes can foster healthy work environments where employees are empowered and supported.
Empowered teams usually perform better and are more engaged in achieving business goals. High team morale can often lead to better performance and reflect positively on the team leader or manager. As a result, the leader’s reputation and career trajectory will get a boost, and so will the employees who are part of their teams.
- Aids in Better Resource Allocation
Process management is a way for leaders and employees to have more control over the available resources and figure out how to make the most of them. Leaders driven by process management tend to have the inherent ability to implement the right balance of manpower and technology without compromising the budget.
As a result, they can help you minimize waste and maximize output from your processes. Leaders with superior resource allocation abilities are appreciated for their ability to accomplish more with less. Since this is considered a crucial skill in any industry, leaders and team members with resource allocation abilities can lead to more promotions and higher responsibilities.
- Creates a Culture of Innovation and Creativity
While many leaders are committed to consistently making processes more efficient, they and their teams will end up spending less time on redundant or time-consuming tasks. As a result, they will have more time to focus on strategic thinking and creative problem-solving.
Say, you represent a marketing agency struggling with balancing creativity and operational efficiency. In this case, you can utilize BPM to create a dashboard that allows employees to handle all kinds of requests and track their status in real-time thus freeing time to focus on creativity.
When teams have more time for creativity, a culture of innovation is easier to create and as you may already know, talented employees thrive in that type of environment. When a business has forward-thinking and adaptable leaders, they invest in their career development and put in a lot of effort to retain them.
In the end, such leaders and their teams are more likely to be rewarded and experience career growth and development.
- Builds a Reputation for Reliability
When a business is growing fast and adapting to market changes, it requires strong and reliable leaders to take charge of its core processes and operations. When leaders can deliver consistent results through efficient processes and highly optimized operations, they build a reputation for reliability.
At the very least, this reputation only solidifies its image as a strong leader, motivating team members to follow suit. However, showcasing reliability in execution consistently can earn leaders or managers a lot of respect from higher management and peers. What’s more, these are the individuals who are prioritized for greater leadership roles and promotions.
- Strengthens Risk Management
Managing risks and conflict resolution are essential skills for a leader. A leader who focuses on process management and improvement can identify risks in advance and create a plan to mitigate them so they do not escalate and impact company operations.
Organizations prefer to rely on leaders and managers who can not only identify risks on time but also manage them effectively. Such leaders demonstrate the ability to take a proactive approach to problem-solving and are highly valued.
These qualities are especially vital in the finance industry. For instance, if your financial organization needs to beef up its security and compliance process to boost investor confidence, you can integrate industry-specified frameworks, eliminate security or compliance issues, and conduct tests regularly, thus effectively managing potential and existing risks.
The ability of leaders to foresee and address any impending challenges and risks is a valuable asset, making them indispensable to their organizations thus contributing to their career growth.
Steps to Implement Process Management
Now that you have learned about the impact that efficient process management can have on the leadership skills and career growth of employees or leaders, let us discuss a few common ways to implement process management in your organization.
- Set Goals and Targets
One of the first steps in implementing process management in your organization is to set some crucial business goals and targets. These goals and targets can guide your process management efforts and help you implement them more efficiently so they are aligned with the business goals and requirements.
- Choose Low-Risk and Low-Value Processes to Test
If you are dabbling with process improvement for the first time, it is smart not to choose any of the primary processes or functions of the organization. These processes often have a direct impact on the revenue and profitability of the company, and you can not afford to take that risk.
Instead, choose one of the comparatively ancillary processes to test your process improvement practices. This could be any process that does not directly impact your business operations and can be the perfect way to test your strategies before implementing them on bigger processes.
- Assign Process Owners and Workflows
After you have tested out your ability to improve and optimize processes on non-crucial processes, you can move on to implement those practices in crucial ones. But before you do so, you must designate a process owner, who accepts the responsibility of the process improvement and can be held accountable.
Once you have a process owner, the next major step is to map the workflow of the process more effectively. Creating a detailed map of the process workflow ensures that every communication channel, input/outputs, and resource requirements are accounted for, when you are making improvements.
You can then move on to improve specific facets of the process as part of your process management.
- Monitor and Adjust Performance
Once the necessary changes and adjustments have been made to the existing processes, you cannot know whether your process management approach was successful without proper metrics and KPIs.
With that in mind, you must designate some of the key performance indicators and metrics that you already use to measure the performance of a process. You can then compare the data representing your process performance historically to the performance data post-improvement measures.
Concluding Remarks
Process management can be an essential cog in your leadership repertoire as long as you know how to design and navigate the process effectively. Not only does it optimize the organizational processes and improve them, but it can also bring businesses closer to achieving their goals. Having expertise in process management can give your leadership profile a facelift, and add more momentum to your career growth.
Author’s Bio
Carl Torrence is a Content Marketer at Marketing Digest. His core expertise lies in developing data-driven content for brands, SaaS businesses, and agencies. In his free time, he enjoys binge-watching time-travel movies and listening to Linkin Park and Coldplay albums.