Unlocking Potential

Unlocking procurement potential allows you and your team to achieve the vision you have for procurement in your organisation.

What that vision looks like will be as unique as the organisations I work with.

The blocks to unlocking the potential are not so unique, and can be found in one of the following areas whether personally, departmentally, organisationally or within suppliers too.


Specific blocks to progress may therefore lie in any one of these 5 areas and might include for example:


Many of these topics have been included in the Purchasing Coach Soft Skills Toolkit. It brings together a series of postcards sent from your soft skills. More here.


If you're interested in further unlocking the potential of your team please do get in touch - alison@alisonsmith.eu +44 (0)7770 538159. 

I look forward to exploring what unconventional tools (or maybe even conventional ones) would support your team most so they may exceed yours and the board's expectations. Although do see my posts where has convention ever got us and give it the benefit of the doubt for pleas to embrace the unconventional a little more because I really do think that's where the breakthrough takes place. The index of posts applying unconventional tools to challenges faced by procurement may also help demonstrate the power of the tools to facilitate change, provide new perspectives and unlock that potential.

PS: The picture above is one of 96 jigsaw pieces we had engraved with the objectives of the procurement team for that year. Everyone had one jigsaw piece, and took them to meetings to swap and discuss. As objectives were met an online jigsaw was completed - see below for a real life attempt at completing it at one team meeting!

This innovative approach, along side other activities, ensured an improvement from bottom quartile in the MORI staff opinion poll in our first year after merger to upper quartile the following year - including the following improvements.

  • Feeling motivated in present job: 19% increase
  • Feeling valued: 32% increase
  • Satisfaction with communications: 42% increase


Alison has a strong passion and energy for what she does which was demonstrated in her ability to run an innovative session for my team that identified what was holding us back from being a high performing team. This ability, when coupled with her capability to bring fun into the session, was a powerful tool for helping my team realise their full potential.” 
Cara Murphy, Senior Category Manager Lloyds Banking Group