How Do Leaders Build Cultural Clarity And Alignment? - Part #2

Some days we get so busy solving problems as leaders and managers that we forget that most people will shift their thinking only after new behaviors have led to results that matter to them and have been validated by others. The best leaders understand this and recognize that building cultural clarity and alignment is playing the long game. As Jon Katzenbach, Ilona Steffen and Caroline Kronley in their article,“Cultural Change That Sticks,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 2012, note “deeply embedded cultures change slowly over time.” We have to be patient then with this level of work.

Still, I have seen alignment take place over the course of my career. In these organizations, leaders make some unique choices. First, results matter within these organizations, i.e. qualitatively and quantitatively at all levels of the organization, not just at the senior team level. You can visit with front line staff or the senior most people and all of them are talking about outcomes and results. 

Second, there is “line of sight” within these organizations. My daily actions and my quarterly goals all connect with the current strategic plan and with the overall mission. Here, alignment is defined as shared beliefs and shared behaviors which achieve a collective goal, outcome, or result. It is not a vague  idea but instead is an executable reality and choice.

Next, the leaders of these companies agree with John Doerr in his book, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs (Portfolio, 2018) when he writes: “Healthy culture and structured goal setting are interdependent. They’re natural partners in the quest for operating excellence.”

From my perspective, there also is one more small but important difference in these organizations, namely there is a clear difference by all involved about what are committed goals, i.e. ones tied to metrics and well defined action plans, and aspirational goals, which reflect big picture, higher-risk, more future-tilting ideas and efforts.

This week, I encourage you to sit down with your team and discuss the following two questions: Do we know the difference between committed goals and aspirational goals as a group? Are we clear about who is working on which ones? This level of dialogue and the resulting clarity will make a big difference this coming summer.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

Dealing With Continuous Change - part #2

In a world of constant change and now continual transformation, many leadership teams are stuck in analysis paralysis. Often quoting to me the phrase, “we must inspect what we expect,” one major problem is that they inspect too much, and hold unrealistic or unclear expectations. For these leaders, short term wins are not planned but called short term wins only after something has happened. The win is an after thought because people in multiple positions in the organization can not measure their progress. It is just work, work, and more work this spring. 

At the exact same time, many leaders and leadership teams are not building horizontal collaboration across their organization. People do not recognize that collaboration is the sum of a multitude of behaviors from working together on a one to one basis to managing teamwork during project implementation. One key to success from my vantage people is that collaboration takes place best after strategic level dialogue.

To help your team not get stuck, I first encourage you to clarify your collective and individual areas of focus. Line of sight is critical. 

Second, make sure all bi-directional communication is timely and accurate. This means working less from a place of command and control, and more from a place of clarity, commitment and connection.

Third, recognize that project management must result in system integration and systematic execution. As Ron Adner wrote in his book,  The Wide Lens: A New Strategy For Innovation, Portfolio/Penguin, 2012, “The real question is not if it can be done, but when. Not just when will we be able to complete the project, but when will we be able to align the necessary ecosystem for the complete value proposition to become a reality. The question of if speaks to success in the abstract. The question of when speaks to return, to attractiveness, to viability in the concrete.”

This week engage in more strategic level dialogues and focus more on why and when rather than if and maybe.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

Competitive Advantage - Part #2

Picking up where we left off last week on competitive advantage, once we start working on retaining the right people, then we need to do something else that is very important, namely sell the problems and strategic variables before the company.

Right now, many organizations are suffering from the disease of under-communication. Realizing that one of the primary roles of a leader is to create organizational clarity and to make sure this clarity is cascaded down into the organization, what I have witnessed during the last quarter of 2010 and now again in 2011 is an amazing amount of disconnectedness within organizations. From my perspective, this is a symptom of under-communication.

In a healthy and competitive company, any employee should have a line of sight from what they are working on today to how this work moves the company forward strategically, how it fulfills the brand promise, and how it supports the company’s competitive advantage. But, what I am seeing over and over this month and last, is that many employees, supervisors and mid-level managers can not connect what they are doing on a day to day basis to the company’s strategy, brand promise or competitive advantage. To them, the work is just stuff to get done. And when we work with a “get ‘er done” mentality, we do not always maintain focus on the right things and instead just focus on getting things completed.

However, if this symptom surfaces in your work place, the goal is not to scold or yell at the employee because they are forgetting the right stuff while they work, The goal is to realize that the manner in which we lead is not working. Too many times, the worker is seen as the problem when in reality it is the management and leadership that they are experiencing that is the problem. As Pogo said many years ago, “We have meet the problem and it is us.”

Under-communication happens because we as executives are so busy we forget to get around to something, namely communicating the bigger picture. We become operational leaders rather than strategic and operational leaders. And once we do communicate the big picture, we assume that those who heard us actually understood it. So many times in my work as an executive coach, I have to remind leaders that just because you said something once or sent the e-mail once does not mean that it was received or understood. This is why I keep asking key leaders what is their theme for a quarter. From experience I have learned that it takes at least 90 days for a message to consistently be cascaded down into an organization so that people actually remember it and reference it when thinking about what to do today or in the future.

To build organizational clarity, many leaders need to remember that most workers are simply focused on the day to day and do not understand or even pay attention to the strategic variables or problems that consume an executive’s day to day work experience. We forget that a Bud-lite and a TV remote are common forms of stress management at the end of the day. With the bandwidth of an employee’s mind focused on “get ‘er done” and how much longer to the Bud-lite and the TV remote, competitive advantage is not part of their day to day lexicon or mentality.

Therefore, to improve organizational clarity, we must do the following. First, we need to sell the problems which are getting in the way of us being more competitive. When employees understand that doing nothing is more dangerous than doing something, then they will move through the challenges of change from a different perspective.

Second, we need to sell the company to our own people. We need to explain to our employees why we are the answer to our clients' challenges. We need to point out how what we offer is a solution that will solve not only today’s problems but help them in the future. We need to explain how our strengths as a company assure us the capacity for a sound and profitable future. Otherwise, we are doomed to loosing our best people and loosing our competitive advantage by problems of our own making.

This week and this quarter sell the problems, resell the the company, and focus on making sure clarity is cascaded through out the organization on a consistent and regular basis. If we are to leverage our strengths in an unpredictable economy and to capitalize on short windows of opportunity when they arise, then we need to have everyone focused on the right things at the right times. This demands that we are more connected to the core of what makes our company unique on a daily basis.

Geery Howe, M.A.Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer inLeadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational ChangeMorning Star Associates319 - 643 - 2257