Category Archive: Strategic Planning

Clock Building Not Time Telling

Posted by on June 12, 2009

The days of all decisions being made solely at the top with a few people involved are fading fast.  Throughout the Industrial Age of leadership during the last half of 20th century this was the only model of leadership.  The overwhelming percentage of the workforce was for the most part simply telling time based on the clear instructions that were given for them to follow.

Today we are leading from an Information and Idea Age model of leadership.  The entire development process has been delegated to various teams so that everyone who can contribute will be involved.  In essence people are now being asked to help build the clock.

Most people think the changing role of the top executives is by far the most dramatic shift that has occurred.  In a sense of scope that may be true.  Key leaders today do not have to know all the answers to all the questions they only need to know what are the right questions to ask? 

There primary responsibility today is to make sure they have the best possible people on their team because the quality and success of the clocks they are making will determine the future success of the entire organization.

The most dramatic shift in leadership today certainly from a standpoint of scale is not at the top but in the middle of organizations.  There is a big difference in telling time compared to building clocks.  Today people are daily being asked what do you think and what would you recommend?

Many organizations are caught in the middle of this transition and seem to be stuck.  The problem could be that you are asking people who only know how to tell time to build clocks and they are not capable of making that change.  Don’t give up on clock building just find the right people who know how to build great clocks and you will be fine.

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More Than Profits

Posted by on June 11, 2009

Everyone understands how important it is to make a profit if you want your organization to stay in business for the long run.  Incurring debt may be a short term solution but will only buy you some time and may even push your expenses beyond your revenue’s ability to keep up.

What is beginning to happen in corporate America because it is happening in our culture is that many people are moving beyond making a profit to making a difference.  The ultimate bottom line has got to go beyond hitting the numbers to helping other people.

This is particularly important to the next generation workforce that is currently in their twenties and early thirties.  They are connected to everything that is happening in the world and they want to make a difference. 

To this generation it matters how companies treat their employees and if they are willing to allow people a voice in what is determined to be important and what is not.  It also matters that the money that would have gone to the annual company picnic be donated this year to a organization that is feeding the hungry or providing clean water to people who have none.

Today motivating people to accomplish outstanding performance means that maybe one percent of our profits are given to others in need and we show we have a corporate conscious by telling everyone about it.  This goes way beyond just being politically correct to actually caring more about people than profits.

 

 

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Big Hairy Audacious Goals

Posted by on June 9, 2009

There has always been a delicate balance in goal setting between what can be done and what could be done.  Goals should be realistic and achievable but they also must be courageous and challenging.  Safe is not good enough anymore and we must be willing to take risks that stretch us outside our comfort zone to achieve greatness.

I absolutely love this quote that is extremely timely in our current environment, “Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much no suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.”  Theodore Roosevelt, 1899

When President Kennedy said in the early 60’s we are going to land a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of this decade the overwhelmingly majority of people thought he had lost his mind, and yet we did it.

The world has changed dramatically in the last decade.  The power of technology and the globalization of all the world economies are driving change in unprecedented ways that no one could have imagined either just a few years ago.  When this recession is over we are never going back to the ways things used to be.

What goals are you setting for yourself and your organization that are commensurate for the challenges that lie ahead in the 21st century?  They must be big hairy and audacious if they are going to lead to outstanding performance.

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The Five Practices Of Leadership

Posted by on June 2, 2009

 

I am constantly reading new materials on leadership and occasionally I review great books from the past.  One of the all time classics is The Leadership Challenge by James Kouzes and Barry Posner.

This very exhaustive book centers around these five simple but very powerful practices:

 Model The Way-Find your voice by clarifying your personal values and set the example by aligning actions with shared values.

 Inspire a Shard Vision-Envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities and enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations.

Challenge The Process-Search for opportunities by seeking innovative ways to change, grow, and improve and experiment and take risks by constantly generating small wins and learning from mistakes.

Enable Others to Act-Foster collaboration by promoting cooperative goals and building trust.  Strengthen others by sharing power and discretion.

 Encourage The Heart-Recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence and celebrate the values and victories by creating a spirit of community.        

   

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Leading By Storytelling

Posted by on June 1, 2009

Every leader is constantly trying to find new and creative ways to communicate the culture of their organization both internally and externally.  I have found not better way than storytelling.

The simplest definition of storytelling is when you can link existing personnel, ongoing programming and outstanding performance then you have a story to tell.  This will allow you to reinforce core values and celebrate success by acknowledging over and above situations that give credit to your people and remind everyone of what is really important.

In essence if you have no stories to tell then you are not performing in critical areas.  The good news in most organizations there are character driven people that are doing an outstanding job.  The bad news is their stories are not being told.

I have never seen this work informally by just asking people for outstanding results during a meeting or telling a few stories during annual meeting.  This will probably require formalizing this entire process to create a system where stories can be routinely asked for and submitted to someone who can evaluate them and then find appropriate platform for communication.

This must not feel like a monthly performance review system where everyone is checked against their numbers.  It needs to be like what happened great in your area this month that would encourage everyone in the organization to know.

The formula is simple existing personnel + ongoing programming + outstanding performance = Success.  The only missing piece is telling the story.

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The Doom Loop

Posted by on May 13, 2009

In sharp contrast to the breakthrough impact of the companies that practiced the flywheel effect all of the organizations that could not transition from Good to Great were caught in The Doom Loop.  Instead of the consistent daily movement of the flywheel they went for the big impact event that would give the immediate impression of progress only later to regress into failure.

They were not willing to use the deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done and then simply doing it.  “The comparison companies frequently launched new programs-often with great fanfare and hoopla aimed at motivating the troops-only to see the programs fail to produce sustained results.”

They wanted the big event or the grand program or the new celebrity CEO that would allow them to skip the daily discipline of the flywheel and move immediately to breakthrough. The repeated pattern of this cycle consistently produced disappointing results and then reaction without understanding starts the loop all over again.

Peter Drucker commented on these companies, “The drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.”

The Doom Loop is a classic example of an organization continuing to do the same wrong things over and over again and yet somehow expecting different results.  At the core of this problem is a leadership team that is more concerned with short term personal success than what is best for the long term benefit of everyone involved?

In the end this is not a strategy problem but a character one.

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The Flywheel

Posted by on May 12, 2009

The concept of the flywheel was used by Jim Collins in his best selling leadership book Good to Great.  The major point of the illustration is that significant change occurs when you do the right things repeatedly over time and eventually you will have a breakthrough that results in significant success.

We all would love to have the quick fix strategy work instead, we want instant culture change.  For every company that moved from Good to Great there was no single defining action, no grand programs, no celebrity leader and no one killer innovation that produced the results.

“Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.”

A great example that really makes the point is used is from the legendary coaching career of John Wooden at UCLA.  Most basketball fans know that he won ten NCAA Championships in twelve years and at one point had a sixty-one-game winning streak.

What most of us do not know is that for fifteen years coach Wooden worked in relative obscurity at UCLA before he ever won his first national title.  During that time he was building the foundation for the program of great recruiting, player discipline and refining his style of playing the full court press style of defense.

The real character question for leaders today is how many are willing to pay the price of not demanding short term success at the expense of long term sustainability for the organization?  It may keep you off the front page of the business section of your local paper but in this economic environment that can be a very good thing.

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Communicating New Vision

Posted by on May 8, 2009

 

After you know that you have top down buy in to the new vision for your organization, you need to create a team that can develop a strategic plan for the change you need that will allow you to move into the future.  I cannot tell you the number of times I have reached this point in the process with great new ideas and the approval to implement the necessary changes only to fail.

The next step is that is extremely important is communicating the change vision.  In all my years of doing this I think this is the beginning point of where the process starts to break down.  We all have served on teams and worked for months on change initiatives and come out of the process totally together and passionate only to meet one year later trying to decide why the plan died.

What we simply fail to remember is that we have thought, discussed, and even hotly debated these ideas for literally hundreds of hours and the people who are on the front lines for execution have had no exposure whatsoever.  We always undervalue the process of bringing everyone else up to speed and wonder why in the end they simply don’t get it.

There are several key criteria for effective communication.  They are: keep it simple, use multiple forums and methods, repetition, repetition, repetition, and environments that allow give and take.  The only way I have found to know that people have got it, is to let them hear everything they need over time and then let them ask questions and give back to me in their own words what we want them to understand.

Another very important aspect of communicating vision is that the leaders must be prepared to immediately walk their talk.  John Kotter writes based on his research, “Nothing undermines the communication of a change vision more than behavior on the part of key players that seems inconsistent with the vision.”  If the vision is empowering teams and the top leaders of the company are still micromanaging everything you can be sure the plan is dead.

 

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Three Critical Questions For Leading Change

Posted by on April 22, 2009

 

I want to tell you a simple story that illustrates  what every leader must do to lead their team or entire organization through the change process.  You are the leader of a team that has been involved in an outward bound teambuilding session for two weeks.

Your team is out in open and you are eating your lunch on the ground.  The weather conditions are changing and you are monitoring the situation on weather radio.

In first scenario you as team leader say to your team in stern voice get up and follow me right now.  A few people respond but the majority stay in place.  Now you raise your voice and yell I said come with me.

The second scenario you say as the leader we are going to move.  Here is the plan, we are going to stand up together at the same time and form a single file column and make sure no one runs or gets left behind.  The group is very hesitant to get up and it takes time to get everyone in a line and progress is slow.

The third scenario is you say to team there is a tornado less than five minutes from here, follow me to that brick building and we will all be safe.  Everyone moves and no one is hurt.

In the first situation the leader tried to use positional power which almost never works anymore especially with next generation workforce.  The second scene was perfect example of trying to manage the change process instead of leading.  The major reason most change initiatives fail is they are over managed and under led.

The bottom line for me is this based on our simple little story.  Leaders always need to answer three questions when they want an individual or an entire organization to change.  What is the Problem?  How are we going to Solve it?  Why is this important to You?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Leading Change

Posted by on April 15, 2009

The greatest mistake organizations make during difficult times like we are currently experiencing is to try to manage change rather than leading the process.  Sometimes survival is the only critical issue and then you do whatever you have to do to stay alive.

Most of time though we look very short term and develop a bunker mentality that’s only goal is to ride out this storm until things get better.  This means of course reducing expenses through personnel reductions , delays in capital investment, marketing and of course training and development.  Especially, all those bad trips and conferences that congress is railing about.

Leading change recognizes the brutal facts that the fundamentals of global economics have been permanently changed.  Effective leaders will use the urgency and severity of this current cycle to reposition their entire organizational culture for success in the 21st Century and beyond.  The future is incredibly positive for all those who are willing to embrace it.  No going back!

 

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