Stewardship Headroom
By Cenen HerreraWriting from the San Francisco Bay Area, USA
The strategic copula between Trial-and-Error Empirical
Learning (TEEL) and Value-Chain Business Planning (VCBP) provides the
groundwork for increasing one’s stewardship headroom. What is stewardship headroom? I define stewardship headroom as the difference
between your existing creative capacity to contribute community-based
values and the existing limit of your innovative skills. As a career professional, I generally find
three layers of knowledge maturity, i.e., g-level career or entry level function,
m-level career or management function, and c-level career or stewardship function. Bootstrapping the finance functions, i.e., controllership, treasury, risk management, auditing and information technology, drives the strategic copula between TEEL and VCBP.
The g-level career is mostly characterized by
TEEL.
In this entry-level mode, one increases the functional level of knowledge through concrete
and hands-on experience. It is at this level that the skill-set of an employee and its alignment to the job function is held to be of extreme importance. Reading the
office manual is not enough, your research efforts must be grounded on
the core principles of how values are created in your organization and the accompanying rationalization of the financial support that goes to each value that is created. At the g-level, it is extremely important to have a reliable training program aimed at continuously improving the skills of employees.
The m-level group is characterized by people who are able to
differentiate risks and potentials and because of TEEL, it is heavily influenced
by the science of management. The
m-level starts from the supervisory position to senior management. At this level, leadership traits such as character, credibility and reputation are considered to be of high importance. This is the functional group that enables the
organization to monitor the day-to-day progress of work and measures the 5 Es
of organizational excellence, i.e., ethics, effectiveness, efficiency, economy and the eighty-twenty rule. The performance dashboard typically outlines the difference between the rolling plan and actual performance. Gap analysis is then performed and any deviations from the rolling forecast are then accounted for in terms of pricing, material economics, product mix, business performance, and other factors such as contingent events.
The science of leadership in turn provides the groundwork for appropriate
delegation, accountability and responsibility. The third level of career maturity is popularly known as the c-level group in the organization. These are people who are
not only charged with the management of the organization, but also its stewardship. It is at the c-level
group where the interplay between TEEL and VCBP is expected to play the greatest
importance. As the c-level group matures, it is critical that the stewardship headroom is maximized to continuously generate the benefits that the stakeholders of the organization expect from them.
