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Category Archive: Strategic Planning

The Essence Of Strategic Planning

Posted by on April 23, 2018

There is so much confusion today in corporate leadership around all of the commonly used terms of vision, purpose, mission and strategy. The most confusion surrounds a through understanding of what strategy really means and how you develop and sustain the best strategic position. This HBR post is excellent:

“It happens all the time: A group of managers get together at a resort for two days to hammer out a “strategic plan.” Done and dusted, they all head home. But have they produced a plan with a strategy? At the start of my public seminars on strategic planning I ask attendees, who rank from board members and CEOs to middle management, to write down an example of a strategy on a sheet of paper.”

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How To Define Your Corporate Culture

Posted by on April 16, 2018

Organizational culture is a hot topic because it’s the secret sauce that allows all of your people and process to work together for maximum effectiveness. It is that unique combination of core values, vision, purpose, mission and stories. When it is working well almost no one notices but when it is not everyone knows and it drains the trust out of your teams. This Forbes Council post was very helpful:

“With employee engagement on the decline, your company’s corporate culture may be at risk. You may find that you are losing the loyalty of your team and that the vision you have for your company is in jeopardy. But, what if you are a new organization looking to create a corporate culture from scratch?

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Blind Spots That Plague Even The Best Leaders

Posted by on April 14, 2018

The ongoing tension between innovation and execution have never been a bigger issue for leaders. Competition and even Disruption demand leaders always watch the bottom line while looking out the window to see which way the wind is blowing. The failure to do both can quickly doom your entire organization. This Fast Company post is excellent:

“There’s a mythology around great leaders. They’re visionary. They’re inspirational. They seem to know what their organizations and teams need intuitively. But make no mistake: No one is perfect—and most leaders have blind spots, says Robert Bruce Shaw of Princeton Management Consulting Groupin Princeton, New Jersey, and author of Leadership Blind Spots: How Successful Leaders Identify and Overcome the Weaknesses That Matter.”

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The Two Traits Of The Best Problem Solving Teams

Posted by on April 4, 2018

Team collaboration is one of the most misunderstood concepts within many organizations. The old axiom of the sum is greater than the contribution of the individual parts it not working. Too much feedback from the wrong people and not enough from others creates predictable patterns of frustration. Teams need real leadership or they cannot be successful. This HBR post will help:

“Imagine you are a fly on the wall in a corporate training center where a management team of 12 is participating in a session on executing strategy. The team is midway through attempting to solve a new, uncertain, and complex problem. The facilitators look on as at first the exercise follows its usual path.”

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How To Train Yourself To Take Feedback

Posted by on March 30, 2018

One of the major weaknesses I find through my executive coaching is many leaders avoid or even hate conflict. This inevitably leads to even more conflict because the situation was not dealt with before it escalated into a crisis. The only way to avoid this is effective ongoing feedback. This Fast Company post is excellent:

“But let’s get real: Sometimes the only way to get perspective about what needs to change comes from an outside perspective. Yes, believe it or not, there is often a gap between who we desire and think we are presenting to the world, and the way others see us. Turns out that when you ask the people around you–the ones who see you in action every day and are impacted by the choices you make–where you can grow, their ideas might be a little different than your own.”

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Creating The Right Organizational Culture

Posted by on March 12, 2018

I find myself in working with executives debating whether prioritizing results or activities is the best approach to building a healthy organizational culture. The activities approach is more directive and seeks to define what things should be done well that will give the greatest return. When you use results as the most important metic, you are choosing delegation that seeks to empower your team to create the best process. This HBR post is a great read:

“Here’s the dilemma: In a competitive, complex, and volatile business environment, companies need more from their employees than ever. But the same forces rocking businesses are also overwhelming employees, driving up their fear, and compromising their capacity.

It’s no wonder that so many C-Suite leaders are focused on how to build higher performance cultures. The irony, we’ve found, is that building a culture focused on performance may not be the best, healthiest, or most sustainable way to fuel results.”

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Seven Essential Steps Toward Building A Stronger Company Culture

Posted by on February 16, 2018

Organizational culture consists of the beliefs and values that allow people and processes to work together for producing the greatest results. It is far more strategic than tactical, however there are some best practices that cross over most organizations. This post by Micah Solomon contains some great advice:

“Whatever kind of company culture you’re looking to create, here is a sequence of seven steps that can help you get there. As a customer service consultant, I’ve limited my practice to cultures that aspire to focus on the customer and support employees as multi-dimensional human beings. So if you have more transactional, customer-agnostic cultural goals, the applicability of these seven steps may be limited.”

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GE The Need For A Single Overarching Strategy

Posted by on January 22, 2018

The best advice I have received in a long time was from a client who insisted that I become competent with Michael Porter’s work on strategy. It is clearly still a work in progress but I now realize that without a sustainable competitive advantage you will eventually fail. Growth for growth’s sake improves short term revenue but could destroy long term profitability. This Forbes post is excellent:

“GE has failed the cocktail napkin test. If you can’t explain your strategy to someone on the back of a cocktail napkin, it’s too complicated. The best-performing organizations have a single, overarching strategic posture that everyone in the organization understands.”

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The Critical Need For Different Leadership Voices

Posted by on January 15, 2018

Directive leadership has taken such a hit that it almost seems out of place in any leadership situation. Tell that to the passengers on any plane or to the patients in any major surgery and they would beg to disagree. Delegation on the other hand is never appropriate until the person has developed the confidence and competency they need to be successful. So leaders need the situational skills to develop different voices. Excellent post by Amy Jen Su:

“Ultimately, you should cultivate enough parts of your voice so that no matter the leadership situation or audience you find yourself facing, you can respond in an authentic, constructive, and effective way.”

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Make Civility The Norm On Your Team

Posted by on January 8, 2018

Almost everyone that works through teams believes there needs to be a healthy dose of conflict from time to time that will produce the greatest results. However, when team members are passive aggressive or unload and say something very critical towards another person, all trust can be lost. So the team leader’s responsibility is to establish the core values that will support civility. This post by Christine Portal is helpful:

“We all want to come to work and be treated with kindness and respect. Unfortunately, my research shows that there is rampant incivility in most organizations. I found that 98% of the workers I surveyed over the past 20 years have experienced rude behavior and 99% have witnessed it.”

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