Our “Procurement Experts on CPO Rising” series continues today with an excerpt from my 2021 episode of the Procurement Rising Podcast — Greg Tennyson, who at the time was the Vice President, Chief Procurement Officer and Head of Global Corporate Services for VSP Global (click to listen to the full interview). Greg has since joined Fairmarkit. Note that this excerpt has been edited for readability.

Andrew Bartolini: So Greg, you mentioned how your team achieved a 22% return on spend under management. That’s a fantastic return in a challenging and very different year. Let’s talk about how you sustain that. Amongst the shocks to the system and possibly the supply chain as well, have you and your team started to think about what you need to invest in to ensure you keep that high level of performance going?

Greg Tennyson: We do annual individual development plans (IDPs). Everyone carries an IDP that gives them specific areas of opportunity to develop. What are those specific investments that you want to make in yourself to further your career? We identified two themes. First, over the last three or four years, soft skills have been a priority for most organizations. What shifted with COVID-19 is that you’re no longer engaging face to face necessarily in all of your transaction negotiations. So, it’s now about how you develop and leverage your soft skills to be better equipped to engage virtually. We’re really focused on soft skills.

And second is analytics. We’ve deployed a number of tools on a comparative basis using the same size and sector. I think we’ve implemented a good set of tools from contracts management to supplier analytics to performance management tools, etc. Now that we’ve implemented this slew of tools, we’re taking a step back to see if they’re being used effectively.

Thus, we’re monitoring clicks and how information gets downloaded. Even with other third-party tools, what information is being queried? How’s the information getting used and applied? Really focusing not only on soft skills, but the analytics from the tools, and also on how information is consumed and applied. Then reinforcing that through the individual development plan with regular check-ins on the development opportunities and how things are progressing. Do we need to pivot and refocus people on other opportunities based on what we’re seeing as the year plays out? A significant focus in those two areas is what we’re seeing at this point.

AB: You mentioned a focus on the development of soft skills for your team. On our last call, you explained how you trained your team to not just dive into business on kick-off calls, but rather begin with a little social interaction. How are those conversations going and have you seen a benefit from that?

GT: We have seen a benefit. Because we have a distributed workforce, we lost the art of engaging in idle chatter. Harvard Business Review posted an article about this and I shared it with the team and discussed how we’ve been engaging virtually with each other. We start a call with idle chatter and asked about our weekend. It’s how you start a conversation and collect meeting minutes and action items. Ironically, it’s really getting back to the basics.

You think about how you manage a conversation. You provide an agenda, you document the meeting minutes, you capture action items, and you identify who your participants are. We’re hyper-focused on it because we’re in this distributed workforce model. I haven’t been in a conference room with my procurement team since mid-March of 2020.

Given not only the longevity but the future of what a distributed workforce model may look like, we’re focused on developing those soft skills by building rapport, driving outcomes, and holding people accountable to action items to achieve objectives. It’s interesting how this conversation plays out almost every year or two. There’s a cycle to it. But now it’s occurring under a distributed workforce model. It definitely has added complexity and urgency as we drive toward common outcomes.

MORE CPO TOPICS

Procurement Experts on CPO Rising — Moving Procurement into the Spotlight

Procurement Experts on CPO Rising – Driving Procurement with Four Elements

Procurement Experts on CPO Rising – Maximizing Patient Outcomes

Procurement Experts on CPO Rising – Hardwiring Sustainability into the Business

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