Lead styles of buy-side executives
Important contracts only succeed when there's a good relationship between the parties -- though the contract may be between entities, the relationships are between people. Dr. Sara Cullen's research into personal styles offers insight into the way contracts play out. Using innovation as an example, she notes "the entrepreneur is the most common style in buy-side C-level executives, with nearly 35 percent having this as their lead style. Typically, executives want innovative providers and continuously improving deals."
Cullen continues, "One of the reasons why the desired innovation rarely actually happens is that the rest of the organization probably doesn't share this value. Less than 15 percent of the managers and front-line staff members of the study are entrepreneurs, as shown in Figure 1. So while innovation may originally have been envisioned when an outsourcing deal was a twinkle in an executive's eye, it quickly disappears when pushed down the hierarchy."
"Let's look at a typical silo approach to the contract lifecycle, where different people or groups hand off to another as a contract progresses from "womb to tomb." Executives decide what to outsource, the legal team drafts the contract, procurement runs a tender process, and, finally, operations manages the contract. Executives are largely entrepreneurs, both legal and procurement have a stock of buy-side organizers and monitor protectors, and operations is dominated by relationship developers."
* Excerpted from "The Human Side of Contracts: The People and Their Styles," (
) Business Technology Strategies Update, Vol. 17 No. 11