How do leaders help others think and act strategically? part #2

When helping others to think and act strategically, make sure the senior team  has certain key characteristics in order to position the entire organization to be successful. As John Kotter noted years ago in his book, Leading Change, when building a change cycle, make sure you have the following as part of your key team, namely positional power, expertise, credibility, i.e. good reputations, and people with leadership experience. In particular, make sure this group of people have enough power to lead the change process and enough ability to communicate the new vision related to the change.

Every time I think about Kotter’s advice, I also think of Jim Collins and his distinction between executive power,, i.e. the power to make decisions based on your place in the table of organization, and legislative power, i.e. your ability to form a coalition of people to make something happen given you do not have enough positional power to change the current situation. It is the combination of both that needs to be part of the senior team. These are the folks who have the potential to make sure thinking strategically and acting strategically will take place within other groups within the company.

Yet, as I share this with you today, we need to remember the advice and counsel of Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao in their book, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting To More Without Settling For Less (Crown Business, 2014), who note that “Effective scaling depends on believing and living a shared mindset throughout your group, division, or organization. Scaling is analogous to a ground war rather than an air war because developing, spreading and updating a mindset requires repleteness vigilance. It requires stating the beliefs and living the behavior, and then doing so again and again.” From my experience, leaders who have ground level experience and credibility make a huge difference when it comes to strategic thinking and acting. 

This week, check to make sure your team has the right combination of characteristics to ensure that they and others will be successful in thinking and acting strategically.

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

How do leaders on-board the next generation of high-growth opportunities while managing daily operations?part #2

In meeting after meeting during the last six to nine months, I have heard the same phrase used over and over, namely “We need the right people in the right seats”, referencing the concept from Jim Collin’s book, Good to Great. In reality, we need the right people in the right seats, the right teams with the right focus, and everyone using the right tools connected to the right outcomes.

This morning, let’s talk about right people and right teams. First, people need individual competencies to be successful at a team level. Individual competencies refer to a person’s knowledge and skills required to fulfill specific role requirements.  Second, teams need team competencies which are the collective abilities of the team required to execute the business strategy. For example, being competent at working through conflict as a team is a basic and yet so few teams have discussed this or been trained on how to do this.

When we get so busy focusing on solving operational issues, we forget that having the right people in the right seats and having the right teams with the right focus will create a healthy living system. As Margaret Wheatley wrote: “A healthy living system is a good learner and can thrive even though its environment is moving toward increasing disorder. But to do so it must be actively engaged and aware.” Many leaders are not ready for this level of work because it means they will loose control of the people and/or the solution to certain problems. 

Therefore, I believe we need to build more professional learning communities, a term I learned from working with educators, where in-depth sharing and practice takes place. I have seen these communities work together at our From Vision to Action Executive Roundtables. As they sit around the table, they are building common knowledge, common language, and common perspective. They also are building and maintaining important relationships, sharing what is and what is not working which is in part a micro strategic and operational review, and building a foundation for handling beginnings and endings . One interesting element of these professional learning communities is that they become a way to build culture and institutionalize an organization’s culture.

Next, I believe we need senior teams to be true teams rather than simply single leader work groups. The two defining characteristics of excellent senior teams are that they can hold in-depth strategic debate and dialogue, and at the same time have respect for the other members of the team, especially their skills, their talents and their strengths. In order to build this depth of good strategic debate, dialogue and respect for others on the team, senior leaders need to do the following:

- Clarify identity. This process involves defining the core principles about how to deliver high quality, day to day service and how to move forward through difficult times. A clear sense of identity mobilizes people into purposeful action. It also helps build networks of relationship, which ultimately builds community

- Build community. What many leaders forget is that effective teams are born from healthy community. When the overall sense of community is grounded in clear ethics and core principles, we have social coherence and community resilience.

This week, sit down with your team and talk about identity and ethics. Discuss and clarify with them who we are, what we believe in, and how we work through the challenges that are happening around us. We as leaders must be and create an “island of sanity”, a new term by Margaret Wheatley, in an ocean of challenge and difficult choices.

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

Some of the Major Problems in Creating Organizational Clarity

Currently the greatest external challenge to most companies is the high degree of strategic ambiguity. More and more organizations are doing a PESTEL analysis, i.e. the study of political, economic, social, technological, environmental, legal trends, and finding too many variables and uncertainties within the service delivery environment. Furthermore, these same companies are finding a lack of strategic clarity within the organization and a lack of strategic flexibility in systems and people also within the company. In short, many companies have discovered that they lack clear systems for managing or creating strategic adaptability. Overwhelmed by the complexity, they also are not proactively creating a system for building and maintaining an adaptive strategy.

From my vantage point, the underlying causes for organizations not being able to build and maintain an adaptive strategy starts first at the senior team level.  More and more of these teams are becoming dysfunctional. Rather than acting like teams, they often default to being senior leader work groups. Built around status and ego with a dash of artificial harmony, these so called teams avoid accountability and show little commitment for holistic strategic success. Furthermore, most are afraid of conflict and only talk about commitment, but show little behaviors related to it.

Second, most of these same organizations and their leaders are showing the hubris born of success, a problem first identified in Jim Collin’s book, How The Mighty Fall and Why Some Companies Never Give In, HarperCollins, 2009. As he writes, “Great enterprises can become insulated by success; accumulated momentum can carry an enterprise forward, for a while, even if leaders make poor decisions or lose discipline. Stage 1 kicks in when people become arrogant, regarding success virtually as an entitlement, and they loose sight of the true underlying factors that created success in the first place.” By neglecting their primary flywheel for success, these leaders allow “what” to replace “why”, not realizing that when the rhetoric of success replaces an understanding of why, there will be a decline in the learning orientation of successful people and the entire company.

Third, these same leaders also lack a clear understanding of the relationship between culture and strategy, resulting in a lack of “institutionalizing” a clear definition of their culture and not leveraging their organizational core values to their competitive advantage. The result is that the company and in particular the senior team tolerate people in management and leadership positions whose behavior is out of alignment with the stated culture, core values and strategy.

While the above is taking place at the senior team and cultural levels, the next challenge for many leaders and their companies is how to successfully capitalize on expansion and growth opportunities. Most think of it as an effort problem when the vast number of problems actually fall into the area of strategic infrastructure to support expansion and growth opportunities. 

As we all know, new innovations compete for company resources, i.e. time, talent, and management attention, with the cash generating projects during any fiscal year. When all of the company’s budget, reporting and management processes are focused on the current fiscal year, they also define the compensation and incentives systems and thus focus everyone on accountability to the current fiscal year’s goals. If people do look ahead during the current fiscal year, they look to R&D and their long range strategic options by reviewing research, data and trends. The result is that any new innovations fall into a Bermuda Triangle where they are considered to a degree strategic but not yet fully implementable because the resources of time, talent and management attention are not fully given to them. In this no man’s land, the “new projects” here fail to be embraced because they can not deliver like the current fiscal year goals and systems. And because they can not show a fast ROI like current fiscal year products and services, they also are then hampered by lack of full operational support. Therefore, the new innovations become “demo bait” for selling more of the current fiscal year projects and services. 

Finally, there is one other problem that is causing many organizations to struggle at this time period. They do not understand the real challenge of talent management and performance management. They consider them to be something different but do not recognize that they are also interconnected. For example, many leaders do not recognize that talent management and development is about preparing an individual for future positions within the company, i.e. building bench strength, while performance management is about managing their current performance as it relates to agreed upon annual goals and 90 day plans. 

Given the aggregate of the aforementioned issues, many organizations need a clear strategic infrastructure which helps them to adapt strategically, manage talent and performance, and prepare for and implement strategic innovation. The sum of the above problems are hampering many organizations who are seeking a better future.

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

The Need For Clarity And Alignment

Right now, many people in leadership positions are still trying to discern what are the best choices to make in 2013, especially given all the challenges happening at the federal and state levels of government. Most read the tea leaves about what it all means for the future and come up confused and frustrated. To say we live in a time period of strategic ambiguity is an understatement. In many companies, executives share with me that they believe we live in a time period of strategic avoidance and strategic ambivalence.

However, when I step back from the pressing issues that cross my path and listen deeply into what is being shared with me about strategy and strategic choices, I believe we are heading into another round of significant challenges. Former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove called these points a “strategic inflection point”, i.e a time when change in the competitive environment requires a company to make a major adaptation to new circumstances, or risk extinction. In short, he is saying we are approaching a change or die scenario. 

Yet, the response in some executive suites is to act like turtles with their heads and limbs pulled inside their corporate shells. They have chosen a path of taking less and less risks, and instead focused on control, compliance and compensation rather than strategy, talent and execution.

But the best companies I know are not falling into this trap and are instead focusing on two key concepts, namely alignment and clarity. Patrick Lencioni in his book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business (Jossey-Bass, 2012) writes “Within the context of making an organization healthy, alignment is about creating so much clarity that there is as little room as possible for confusion, disorder, and infighting to set in. Of course, the responsibility for creating that clarity lies squarely with the leadership team.”

However, many senior leadership teams struggle with creating alignment and clarity. Therefore, I have chosen creating organizational clarity to be the central theme of the Spring 2013 From Vision to Action Executive Roundtable on April 11-12, 2013.  Here is the agenda for your review:

Thursday: April 11, 2013

- 8:30 am - Registration

- 9:00 am - 10:15 am - The Prerequisites For Organizational Clarity

- 10:15 am - 10:30 am - Break

- 10:30 am - 12:00 pm - Creating, Communicating & Cascading Clarity

- 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm - Lunch and Networking 

- 1:30 pm - 2:45 pm - Reinforcing Clarity Through Systems

- 2:45 pm - 3:00 pm - Break

- 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm - Managing Clarity & Performance

- 4:30 pm - Adjourn

Friday: April 12, 2013

- 9:00 am - 10:15 am - Finding & Creating Personal Clarity

- 10:15 am - 10:30 am - Break 

- 10:30 am - 12:00 pm - Integration and Application

- 12:00 pm - Adjourn

We will be meeting at the Courtyard by Marriott in West Des Moines - Clive, Iowa. Here is a link to this location: http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/dsmch-courtyard-des-moines-west-clive/

If you and members of your team want to attend, then here is a link to the registration form: http://www.chartyourpath.com/pdf/2013-From-Vision-To-Action-Exec-Roundtable-Regist.pdf

In a year where we need to be achieving focus and alignment throughout the entire organization, now is the time to sign up and participate in the Spring 2013 From Vision to Action Executive Roundtable. It will help you and your organization to be well prepared for the future.

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