Posted on

Triaging new workplace ideas

An engaged staff full of bright ideas? This is clearly an aspiration for most leaders. But what happens when employees, armed with a dose of courage, create more noise than anything else? What should organizations do when people pick up the habit of simply speaking what’s on their mind, with little commitment behind their words?

In times past, managers did the thinking and workers did the doing. Thankfully, those days are long gone and staff expect their input to be taken seriously. Their engagement is critical.

However, executives with open-door policies can spend all day at the mercy of those who think they have good ideas. Indulge too often, and they fall into inefficiency, even with the best of intentions. While their openness is a fine start, it’s not enough.

According to Michael Stelzner from the Social Media Marketing Show, you must learn to follow three counter-intuitive steps when you sell your suggestions.

  1. The What

The higher up you go in an organization, the greater the need to begin any proposal with the headline or solution – “the What”. Why? Leaders are time and attention constrained. Their people are required to get to the point.

Journalists have a name for it: “burying the lead.” It refers to a British-inspired tradition of using polite banter before getting to the bottom-line. Unfortunately, it’s a deadly communication sin in today’s world of ongoing distractions.

As such, reporters are taught to unlearn this practice because it loses the reader’s attention. The lead (i.e. the main point) comes first, and the explanatory details after.

However, in everyday life, this takes courage. Most of us prefer the safe approach. We’d rather beat around the bush and leave the punchline for the end, delaying any rejection for as long as possible.

In the corporate world, it pays to train yourself and others to summarize the idea at the start. Everyone benefits, even if the suggestion is ultimately discarded. You’ll save precious time and can move on to other topics of discussion.

  1. The Why

If your audience seems receptive to “The What”, shift gears to explain the reasons your idea is important.

You may describe the past, present and future of the problem. Why has it not been cleared up? Why is this the ideal moment to make a public commitment to deal with the issue? What is the cost to the organization if the obstacle is allowed to continue? What if the challenge is never addressed at all?

One way to answer these questions is in the form of a story in which the members of your audience take the role of protagonists. Their tale begins with the normal, everyday situation where everything is working as it should. Then, it’s interrupted by a failure of some kind that introduces pain. Finally, the saga ends with your suggestion for taking action.

In this finishing step, your solution addresses a range of functional, emotional and social gaps which the breakdown has produced. They amplify the impact of the breach in order to generate real-time attention and commitment.

  1. The Who

If the heads are nodding at this point, you’re ready for the element that most employees fail to address. Who exactly will implement the initiative?

The answer to this question separates the talkers from the implementers. The fact is, most leaders don’t want to entertain solutions which lack this critical piece. Why? No project succeeds when there is no-one willing to be accountable.

Therefore, think through the staffing of your proposed solution before offering it openly. Even if you do not have a definitive answer, show that you have given it enough thought to make an informed suggestion. Your attempt will be appreciated as you help your audience grapple with this dimension and the trade-offs it demands.

Finally, resist the temptation to get caught up in the question of “How should this be implemented?” Usually, this moment is neither the time nor the place to delve into that level of detail. Why? The subject-matter experts are probably not in attendance, accountable individuals have not been assigned and a decision to proceed hangs in the balance.

Instead, trust the project team to figure out “The How” after careful study, once they have consulted appropriate stakeholders.

In other words, don’t allow uninformed (but well-meaning) leaders to indulge in commitment-free, speculative conversations. While they are comfortable and even enjoyable, they are out of place and waste everyone’s time.

In summary, follow the What, Why and Who script, and delay the How discussion. If you discipline yourself as an organization to stick to this formula, you’ll see better ideas bubbling up to the right places from your staff.

Posted on

Stop Your Brainstorming for Better Innovations

Where should good ideas for new products and services come from? Does the customer know best or not? Answer these questions correctly and your company could launch a series of winning offerings.

Is the customer always right? Steve Jobs argued otherwise: “By the time you build what they say they want, they have moved on and want something new.”

At the other end of the spectrum, customers were demanding better buggy-whips when innovators wanted to sell them cars. A survey of their needs would have been trapped within the limits of their thinking.

Here in the Caribbean, researchers complain about the challenge of customer surveys: people will often default to telling you what you want to hear. They are afraid of rocking the boat, or making you feel bad, so they alter their responses.

But should you ignore your customers?

The fact is, there are more companies that have failed by following their instincts and intuitions than by doing surveys and focus groups. Fortunately, there’s some new thinking emerging that solves the dilemma. Here are the steps some of the best organizations are using to craft fresh offerings that win the hearts and minds of their audience.

1. Uncover Struggling Moments

A “struggling moment” is one which occurs when a customer can’t have your offering. It may not exist, or not be available to them. Some may complain loudly, but the ones you really need aren’t merely the unhappy and opinionated. Instead, you should focus on those who are so frustrated they are engaging in what Amy Jo Kim calls “Solution Seeking Behavior”.

In other words, they are actively trying to solve the problem by finding substitutes. For example, if you want to create a better car, find people who are already working to fill the void you have identified. You’ll know who they are because they are taking visible action.

They probably know more than you do about the problem, because they have been attempting to solve it for so long. Their actual experience of living at their wits’ end, praying for answers, is important information you can’t get elsewhere.

This discovery is a pivotal moment for you as a product or service innovator. You need to stop brainstorming internally, so you can hear real-life struggling moments from the outside. Unfortunately, most companies don’t reach this point and end up missing the mark. But yours could be different if it can be disciplined enough to make the switch.

  1. Find the Best Strugglers

But you are still faced with the problem of locating these rare people. This could be a matter of searching for them in social media communities, or making face-to-face invitations. Perhaps the most efficient way is to conduct a questionnaire or survey intended to weed out the least qualified. Do it well, and the most likely prospects will nominate themselves.

They will definitely be in the minority.

But once you have some prospects, conduct short interviews to select the few who will become your biggest fans. And they should be willing to participate. After all, they have been dreaming up solutions ever since they identified the problem, putting you in a coveted position.

And don’t worry if they add up to a motley crew which doesn’t represent the majority. Or if there aren’t enough of them to earn you a decent profit. That’s OK – their role is not to make you rich, but to teach you.

  1. Craft Strugglers into Co-Creators

While they won’t bring you lots of revenue, these high-quality strugglers will give you something more valuable: their energy and knowledge. Because they are highly motivated, they’ll work with you to craft the ideal offering that would solve their problems.

This small army of practical soldiers will also provide the impetus and inspiration you need to make your first wins. This sets you up to pivot. Next up? The group Geoffrey Moore calls the Early Majority. This is the segment of the mainstream audience that will adopt your offering.

But there’s a catch.

The product or service you eventually offer to the mainstream may not look like the one you crafted to win over the Strugglers/Co-Creators. That’s OK. Today, the average personal computer user looks nothing like young, mostly male nerds who fell in love with the technology in the late 1970s’.

Once you expect this to be the case, you can be patient. Working with customers is a must, but the entire journey requires a nuanced approach.

It’s just not as simple as asking people what they want or trusting your gut instincts. Dig deeper into the reason the Strugglers are so fired up and you’ll find the seeds of solutions that may take you to success.

Posted on

On Fostering Powerful Admins

As an up-and-coming leader in your company, do you need an administrative assistant? If you are adamant that you don’t, consider that it’s only a matter of time before your mind changes. The question is, do you know why this will take place?

The position of administrative or executive assistant has been under assault. In times past, the role was the exclusive domain of women who possessed shorthand, typing, and organizational skills. While the first two tasks have been replaced by note-taking technology, the third has become all-important.

In fact, there are a number of women running Jamaican companies behind the scenes. They all used to be admins. Outside their organizations, they are unknown, but insiders know the real story. Recently, Big Bosses’ memory has started to fade. Their facility with the latest technologies has slipped, but their admin has stepped up to play a vital, but quiet role.

Furthermore, persons in these roles have added specialized digital and online skills no-one else in the company has. But they are far more than IT geeks. Their unique position means that if you aspire to the executive suite, or already sit there, you need an admin by your side.

Take note of the McKinsey research completed by DeSmet and Bevins. According to their article “Making time management the organization’s priority”, admins enhance a leader’s power. Also, executives who are effective time managers receive “strong support in scheduling and allocating time”. Only 7% of ineffective time allocators said the same.

What would it take for you to have that level of support, preferably before you become desperate? Here are a couple of steps.

Invest in Administrative Talent

Following the low pay, low-skilled secretarial positions of the past, some companies still treat admins as if they aren’t important. For example, some HR managers are quite willing to put a brand new hire in the office of the CEO, believing that such persons are interchangeable.

Using the old, outdated definition, they are.

However, once admins are seen as a critical part of executive success, the game changes. The person (who can be any gender) requires specialized training in each step of their development. This should be introduced as they climb the career ladder, enabling them to serve managers at higher levels. In fact, there should be a healthy pipeline of assistant talent at all times.

Also, companies shouldn’t pay assistants peanuts. Not only is the role important, it should attract quality persons who have their own aspirations. Low salaries simply won’t engage those who can add value to the C-Suite.

Be Prepared For a Partner

As a high-performer, you may be quite capable of navigating any new technology, and managing the demands on your time. However, the moment will come when you won’t be able to juggle all your business and personal commitments on your own.

As such, you need to give thought to the kind of person you intend to work with. What practices will they perform? How well? Should other staff relate to them as the power behind the throne?

Unfortunately, personal productivity among executives varies widely, because few have received any formal education on the topic. As such, they aren’t taught how to leverage someone who helps them manage a busy calendar, to-do list, or project plan.

Up until now, it’s also unlikely that you have benefited from the feedback or coaching required to be productive at higher levels. As such, you may be underestimating the demands which will be made on you, and the need for a team approach.

Consider the television show “The West Wing”. Jeb Bartlett, the President, had a decades-long working relationship with his admin, Mrs. Landingham. Several times per day, he asked: “What’s next?” In keeping with the character of a perfect assistant, she was always ready with an answer.

If you haven’t recruited such a person in preparation for promotions you hope to attain, start looking. Likely subjects may already be in your company. But sometimes you can recruit talented admins from other organizations where they just aren’t being appreciated.

More importantly, if your corporation doesn’t foster its administrative assistants, undertake a coordinated attempt to change the culture. If folks think that having an assistant is a perk like a bigger office or a company car, challenge this thinking.

Introduce the idea that admins are powerful contributors to the executive suite. Without them, your organization may be wasting time and effort on meetings, email and scheduling activities.

Advocate the notion that these necessary evils are better left to the trained professionals. Show the powers that be that the value of their skills far outweighs the cost of their salaries. Then, champion concrete changes.

Posted on

Personal Productivity Scorecard

What can you do in short periods which demand that you get a lot done, sometimes with overlapping deadlines? They are especially bothersome if your calendar is full and you feel as if you are already giving 100%. In those moments, you can’t defy time: you must ramp up your productivity.

As a Jamaican manager, January and September are probably a couple of your busiest months. Why? Both represent traditional returns from days spent away from the office. Projects which have been paused need to be resumed with gusto, energized by your downtime.

Some professionals fear or hate these two busy seasons, and others. They are forced to increase their productivity by several notches, but face a problem. They lack the methods. Believing their plates are full, they are actually mistaken. Here are some solutions the most effective people apply during their crunch times.

1) Tracking Personal Progress

What indicators of success do you use from one week to the next? While your company and department may have no problem measuring financial and operational metrics, there are few professionals who employ a personal scorecard.

If you’re like most, you probably have a vague sense of your performance, but it probably will not be enough. Certainly, those who perform at the highest level of any sport don’t rely on fuzzy feelings. But few professionals know how to create a scorecard showing their measurable accomplishments. And if they track one or two goals like sales or expenses, they almost never have a “balanced” scorecard covering the critical parts of their lives.

Consequently, even if they set ambitious goals such as a promotion or placement on a key project, they get lost. Instead of making progress, the daily grind buries them. A short-term focus driven by emergencies dominates.

Over time, their inattention leads to personal problems: unwanted pounds get added, technology skills wane and close friends drift away. Then, life intervenes with a dramatic, unexpected wake-up call. For example, the big plan for a relaxed retirement turns into a series of medical crises initiated by a heart attack. You failed to maintain your health at a younger age.

The remedy is simple: treat your entire life as if it were a precious resource whose well-being must be actively fostered. Pull out a spreadsheet and begin tracking. The cost? $0.

2) Creating a daily start-up routine

Most professionals who start personal tracking eventually stumble across another powerful technique: the morning ritual. Each single practice, which is a component of the ritual, may be ordinary, but the power lies in completing them as a group, over and over again.

Follow this habit and you’ll find it easy to scale to weekly, monthly and annual rituals. They all serve a similar purpose: at the beginning of a time period, you simply follow your own instructions.

But this is more than a convenience. Research shows that your mind requires a great deal of cognitive energy to innovate a brand new activity. However, when there is an existing script or checklist to follow, you can execute without pausing to re-think. So a periodic ritual saves precious time and effort.

You’ll also find that adding data to a scorecard is easy when it’s part of your daily ritual. The two practices are perfect complements.

3) Recognize Your Own Progress

New recruits from school to most companies often have a difficult time making the transition. The reason? Their former learning environments are highly gamified, but the new one isn’t. What do they find instead? Poor feedback, vague performance reviews, unclear goals and internal politics, which trump objective standards. Disillusionment sets in, blamed on the opaque, unfair nature of corporate life.

If you want to become more effective, you must learn to be content with self-recognition. This may take some maturity to achieve, but it’s the key to accomplishing important goals, even when others may not understand or approve.

This doesn’t mean you should be a hermit: it’s just that outside feedback is just one input, not a final judgment. Retain that ultimate power: as the decision-maker, you can ride far above circumstances and opinions.

Now, you’ll be playing an entirely different game of your own creation. You won’t be relying on the ones other people try to enforce using society’s popular yardsticks. With your scorecard and rituals, you’ll determine success, especially in those moments when your workload spikes upwards.

This should leave you confident. You’ll never be stuck wondering how to respond to a situation that demands more from you than ever before. For you, it will be a matter of adjusting your tracking and rituals before proceeding.

Posted on

The unending new-tech learning curve

What can you do in short periods which demand that you get a lot done, sometimes with overlapping deadlines? They are especially bothersome if your calendar is full and you feel as if you are already giving 100%. In those moments, you can’t defy time: you must ramp up your productivity.

As a Jamaican manager, January and September are probably a couple of your busiest months. Why? Both represent traditional returns from days spent away from the office. Projects which have been paused need to be resumed with gusto, energized by your downtime.

Some professionals fear or hate these two busy seasons, and others. They are forced to increase their productivity by several notches, but face a problem. They lack the methods. Believing their plates are full, they are actually mistaken. Here are some solutions the most effective people apply during their crunch times.

1) Tracking Personal Progress

What indicators of success do you use from one week to the next? While your company and department may have no problem measuring financial and operational metrics, there are few professionals who employ a personal scorecard.

If you’re like most, you probably have a vague sense of your performance, but it probably will not be enough. Certainly, those who perform at the highest level of any sport don’t rely on fuzzy feelings. But few professionals know how to create a scorecard showing their measurable accomplishments. And if they track one or two goals like sales or expenses, they almost never have a “balanced” scorecard covering the critical parts of their lives.

Consequently, even if they set ambitious goals such as a promotion or placement on a key project, they get lost. Instead of making progress, the daily grind buries them. A short-term focus driven by emergencies dominates.

Over time, their inattention leads to personal problems: unwanted pounds get added, technology skills wane and close friends drift away. Then, life intervenes with a dramatic, unexpected wake-up call. For example, the big plan for a relaxed retirement turns into a series of medical crises initiated by a heart attack. You failed to maintain your health at a younger age.

The remedy is simple: treat your entire life as if it were a precious resource whose well-being must be actively fostered. Pull out a spreadsheet and begin tracking. The cost? $0.

2) Creating a daily start-up routine

Most professionals who start personal tracking eventually stumble across another powerful technique: the morning ritual. Each single practice, which is a component of the ritual, may be ordinary, but the power lies in completing them as a group, over and over again.

Follow this habit and you’ll find it easy to scale to weekly, monthly and annual rituals. They all serve a similar purpose: at the beginning of a time period, you simply follow your own instructions.

But this is more than a convenience. Research shows that your mind requires a great deal of cognitive energy to innovate a brand new activity. However, when there is an existing script or checklist to follow, you can execute without pausing to re-think. So a periodic ritual saves precious time and effort.

You’ll also find that adding data to a scorecard is easy when it’s part of your daily ritual. The two practices are perfect complements.

3) Recognize Your Own Progress

New recruits from school to most companies often have a difficult time making the transition. The reason? Their former learning environments are highly gamified, but the new one isn’t. What do they find instead? Poor feedback, vague performance reviews, unclear goals and internal politics, which trump objective standards. Disillusionment sets in, blamed on the opaque, unfair nature of corporate life.

If you want to become more effective, you must learn to be content with self-recognition. This may take some maturity to achieve, but it’s the key to accomplishing important goals, even when others may not understand or approve.

This doesn’t mean you should be a hermit: it’s just that outside feedback is just one input, not a final judgment. Retain that ultimate power: as the decision-maker, you can ride far above circumstances and opinions.

Now, you’ll be playing an entirely different game of your own creation. You won’t be relying on the ones other people try to enforce using society’s popular yardsticks. With your scorecard and rituals, you’ll determine success, especially in those moments when your workload spikes upwards.

This should leave you confident. You’ll never be stuck wondering how to respond to a situation that demands more from you than ever before. For you, it will be a matter of adjusting your tracking and rituals before proceeding.

Posted on

The Perfect Work Day

How do you design an inspiring day’s work? Is it a matter of luck, or chance? Or can it be engineered and turned on like a switch?

Let’s begin by defining what your “ideal” work day looks like. It probably doesn’t mean sitting in meetings dominated by others. Neither does it involve hours responding to electronic messages that should never have been sent in the first place.

Some employees don’t even try: they have resigned themselves to deliver a half-hearted effort. It’s the very opposite of a great days’ work.

Instead of following their example, let’s imagine that you have set a personal standard for top quality performance. In your best moments, you are solving unique problems using your finest abilities.

However, you can’t be successful without committing a major portion of your attention. In peak episodes, you tackle challenges which cannot be solved while watching television, or browsing YouTube.

But the structure of the modern office does not lend you much help, and this carries over to working from home. As such, these miracle days need to be consciously created, and may benefit from the following three elements according to the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and other experts.

  1. Uninterrupted Time to Hit the Flow State

It takes about 20 minutes to “get into the groove” and achieve the high-performing Flow State. In this mode, time flies as you give a challenging task your complete attention.

You have blocked all human, audible, visual or other interruptions to stop you from staying in a deep problem-solving mode. Here, you are using all the expertise you can muster to create a unique solution.

Your mind should also be free of distracting concerns that threaten to take you away. Handle them by scheduling time to deal with them later in your calendar and you’ll be shielded from their intrusion.

Given the priority nature of this work, your time in the Flow State must be pre-scheduled. This protects it against other activities which may crop up.

  1. Condition Your Environment

Unfortunately, your boss may not agree. Some of the worst managers believe they have a right to impose their priority-of-the-moment on you at a whim, disrupting whatever plans you had.

This is often little more than a power play.

Over time, you must make it your duty to train your boss to get what he/she wants in a different manner. In other words, there should always be a conversation to discuss the outcome wanted and its priority relative to other commitments.

The sooner you both realize that an unthinking habit of random switching won’t work, the better off you’ll both be. Your top quality work will give him/her improved results.

Consider the case of an employee I met who is managed this way. In a class she reported that she doesn’t make plans – she just does whatever her boss tells her to do that day. She arrives at work each morning as a blank slate.

Unfortunately, this kind of staff member is the first to be fired when budgets are cut. Why? She brings nothing unique or distinctive to the workplace, and learns little over time. Anyone can replace her.

If you work from home, you must be even more careful, as you should also turn off disruptive technologies and train family members to leave you alone when you’re doing your best work. But the principle remains the same. People in your life need to know when you are deeply engaged.

  1. Coffee and Stimulants

I never grew up a coffee drinker and only tried the stuff for the first time a few years ago. After some experimentation, I learned that it helps me do my best work, but there’s a caveat: like many good things in life, it needs to be carefully rationed.

As such, I drink only a single cup every one to two weeks, just when I need to enter the Flow State. In these rare instances, it does its job very well, allowing me to continue focused work for three times as long.

I’m not addicted, and my body is not accustomed to a daily dose. In addition, I only use it on weekends where I have more control, due to the fact that most offices are closed. This reduces the chance of emergencies and interruptions.

COVID-19 hasn’t changed the need for us to do great, inspiring work, but most agree that a traditional office isn’t required. In many cases, it only makes things worse.

However, there are principles which you can’t violate wherever you pull out your laptop. Customize them for your emerging hybrid situation and you can be more productive than even ever before in any environment.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

Posted on

Shifting to online methods of reaching prospects

Too many executives are unaware of game-changing ways their markets are shifting. Their post-COVID audience of prospects and customers now expects more than message blasts. Instead, they require your company to become better attuned to their unmet needs. Fail to do this and they switch to competitors.

Remember the days when advertising meant print, display, and broadcast messaging? The core idea? Deliver to you a blast of information from the company, targeted at your attention. Then, cross their fingers, hoping that you would respond favorably at a later time and date.

Contrast that method with the effectiveness of social media advertising. On Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, your clickable behaviour is tracked and analyzed. Then, an algorithm decides which advertisements to send. As such, you receive a highly customized and targeted set of messages.

If you are a typical executive, you may be dimly aware of the difference between old and online methods. An interesting factoid.

However, you should pay closer attention.

The companies who are using online messaging are “learning” more about their customer’s unmet needs than you can imagine. They’re analyzing the details to draw powerful conclusions.

It’s an improvement over the prior state of affairs, captured by John Wanamaker’s joke: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half!”

With today’s technology, one can actually tell. How should your business use this capability?

  1. Track changing customer behaviour

If your company isn’t doing business online yet, you may explain that your customers are not to be found there in large numbers.

But that’s not a valid reason: you can use online interactions to learn about your customer’s behaviors, even if their numbers are small.

For example, your firm can test a hundred marketing messages to see which ones bring people into your funnel. Then, in your next step, apply different followups to determine how they react.

Consider it to be a cheap way to do critical research.

This level of detailed information puts your ads on broadcast media to shame in terms of its feedback value. Better yet, you should be able to learn where behavior changes lead to long-term habits that didn’t exist before.

This kind of precision is taken for granted by online advertisers, but few traditional marketing executives understand its power firsthand. The learning curve is too steep. As such, COVID has catalyzed changes they can’t track.

Consequently, many companies are being left in the dark by competitors who are gaining deep intelligence. Your best customers may be at risk.

  1. Conduct experiments on fresh innovations

A side-effect of this new capability is that your organization can shorten the time it takes to confirm an original product or service. This solves an age-old problem: how can you determine which offerings to bring to market?

In the online era, you actually don’t even need to sell anything to find out. Simply create advertisements for a new imaginary offering and see how an audience responds.

It’s a form of advanced market research that works far better than asking people whether they like something or not.

Imagine, you can bring prospects all the way to the point where they enter credit card numbers, revealing their intent to pay. In this approach, you are following their actual behavior, not their surveyed opinions.

Plus, you should gather groups of likely customers in a single place and partner with them to build the first version of your introductory offering.

As your fans, they give you valuable feedback that helps you craft the new product or service for the larger mainstream market.

These experiments deliver you invaluable data quickly, giving you a powerful advantage. The cost? Minimal.

  1. Anticipate Unmet Needs

Finally, you can even track the precursor to prospect’s new behaviours – unmet needs. By definition, these make up a moving target. Why? As customers absorb your prior innovations, they outgrow your existing solutions. Breakthrough technologies accelerate this process, leading them to start looking earlier than ever for replacements.

COVID has accelerated these changes, but many organizations will close down waiting for old behaviours to return. For most, the “new normal” is one they can’t anticipate: they just don’t have the information necessary.

Better, smarter companies will arrive at the same point in time with a bunch of data on their new customer’s needs. They’ll have innovations lined up which might be in demand by customers who know when they’ll be released.

Does your firm believe that after COVID finally departs it plans to launch a big, traditional advertising blast? If so, you could be making an egregious error.

Instead, take action now to develop the sophisticated information to build deep relationships that anticipate customer’s unmet needs.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

Posted on

Why “We’re Number One!” Goals Have Become Useless

In times past it was fashionable for corporate leaders to craft vision statements with commitments to be “number one” and “world class”. Lately, these have become less popular, with good reason. They are a sign of lackluster thinking which signals a lack of detailed planning.

Corporate leaders tend to fit a particular profile. They show strong Type A tendencies: energetic over-achievers who are time-sensitive and impatient. They drive themselves hard to accomplish great things, often bringing others behind them for the ride, ready or not.

However, if you have this trait, there may be an added one which gets you in trouble: your tendency to be competitive. If you get a lot of juice from beating other people, this approach works when goals are simple. It stirs up lots of extra effort and leads to reliable, continuous improvements.

Most CEO’s use this characteristic to grab the corner office ahead of others, at which point they often shift their focus to defeating other companies. This compulsion to be the captain of a winning team creates three kinds of problems.

Challenge #1 – CEO’s Play Games Employees Find Irrelevant

Part of being an effective executive involves learning the language of the C-Suite. Over time, this new lingo separates leaders from lower-level employees.

But the big problem is that what excites you, a Type A executive, is unlikely to inspire others. While staff knows there is a connection between EBITDA and their job security, it’s all a theory. Certainly, they feel no emotional bond.

As such, when you conduct a town hall you’re likely to speak glowingly of achievements in words that don’t resonate. You staffs’ needs are far more human, and it’s easy to lose track of them.

To build engagement, you’ll need to uncover employees’ actual aspirations, in order to satisfy them. For example, if getting their kids a decent education and making ends meet is a major part of their lives, you must start there.

Challenge #2 – CEO’s Craft Imaginary Competitions

The world is changing so rapidly that the old ways of thinking about competitors have become stale. In the past it was easier: ultra-competitive CEOs would find similar companies to compare themselves against. Then, they’d choose metrics such as profitability, stock price or revenue to be their yard-stick of accomplishment.

However, in a fast-changing landscape, your “competitors” are actually imaginary: made up. As industries and circumstances evolve, it becomes impossible to find other companies which are just like yours. There may be some overlap, but no perfect fit. Your orange ends up racing to a make-believe finish line against their apple.

As such, your claims to be (or plans to become) “Number One” are increasingly empty. They are a simplistic way to motivate yourself that may suit you, as a Type A executive, but no-one else.

Even aspirations to claim a “World-Class” standard look silly in today’s world. Anyone who cares can achieve this goal by defining a narrow standard. But even then, customers don’t care about such claims.

Challenge #3 – CEO’s Forsake Customers

While most MBA programmes are built around competition, that approach is becoming a distraction…at best a sideshow. It’s far better to develop a sharper focus on meeting customer’s unmet needs.

But this is no solid target. Customers’ needs are evolving due to new technologies so it’s become harder than ever to discover a customer’s “Job-to-be-Done”. (The term refers to the actions a customer takes to meet their unmet needs.)

The pandemic has led to shifts in many customers’ Jobs-to-be-Done, as they adopted new behavior patterns. Many companies unwittingly fell out of touch, and haven’t re-established a unique understanding. They run the risk of missing the mark.

Just observe the way Uber and AirBnB disrupted their respective industries before the pandemic. They used modern technology to tap into idle, low-cost resources (i.e. people’s cars and rooms). Now, they are shifting their processes to accommodate the new customer need for sanitized environments.

In short, they have been adjusting their companies’ business models, in concert with changes in their customers’ needs.

There are other ways your company can meet unmet needs, but when it happens, don’t be confused by your success. Definitely don’t claim it as proof of being “Number One” or “World Class” to start a new round of chest-beating.

Instead, use it as fuel to fire up a fresh cycle of customer research which, in the end, is the best insurance policy against disruptions of all kinds.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

Posted on

Why New Employees Need to be Gamified, or Else

What’s happening in the workplace to young employees? They seem to operate by a different set of values, showing little interest in company events.

Yet, they willingly give time and energy to off-the-job pursuits. How can executives create an environment in which they direct some of that discretionary effort towards their work?

“The company’s culture was good enough for me, why isn’t it good enough for them?” If your organization’s leaders are asking this question about engagement, consider the presumption: young employees need not receive any special privileges. After all, the argument goes, “I had less than they do and I made do with what I had!”

At first glance, this seems to be a fair statement.

Yet, the result of such thinking is disengagement. Whereas, in past generations, a paycheck was enough to guarantee a certain level of staff engagement, those days are over. Today, the young, post-COVID employee isn’t interested in merely trading time for money. (The only exceptions might be those who stand to earn a windfall which allows them to retire early, and those who are desperate.)

This state of affairs is hardly a sustainable recipe for fostering a new generation of leaders. In fact, if the status quo is maintained, it’s likely to repel the most creative talent, which is neither greedy nor desperate. If this rings true for your company, it might be time to call for a transformation. Here are some guidelines to use.

1. Young Employees Expect High Engagement

Consider that most of their lives before joining your organization were highly gamified. As achievers of better-than-average grades in school, they accepted the default structure and became winners. They filled their spare time with apps specifically engineered to grab their attention for long periods.

The resulting heightened states became the norm. Constant, high-quality feedback followed intense efforts, helping them make clear, undeniable, prize-winning progress. Whether it was CSEC/CAPE, Schools’ Challenge, Facebook or World of Warcraft (an online game), they benefited from great gamification.

Now, consider all of these to be powerful competitors to your company’s best attempts to engage staff. They are formidable: not even our Parliamentarians can resist Instagram or email during speeches at Gordon House.

And if your employees are spending their spare time starting new companies, or hustling side-gigs for extra income, consider that to be more of the same. Some of their interest in becoming entrepreneurs is to compensate for a lack of engagement in a disappointing job.

2. Your Company is Allowing Bad Games

If your leaders aren’t using game mechanics to deliberately engage staff, they do them a disservice. Some may go start new companies, but most will remain in your employment, falling into games which are harmful.

One of my summer jobs as a teenager with a government agency revealed a game of “Cat and Mouse”. Employees waited until the manager left the office to bring out cards, dominoes, and radios. When the appointed lookout spotted her return to the parking lot, shouts of “She ah come!” sent staff scurrying to remove the evidence, and resume the pretense of work being done.

According to one conspirator, “Sometimes she tries to trick us by not pulling up in her usual spot!”

Unfortunately, most Jamaican companies are infected with a cabal of the most disengaged. They make fun of new employees who work too hard (at best) and may even ostracize those who persist in making them look bad with high performance.

Eventually, the average new hire surrenders, dropping their standards (and expectations) just to fit in. This game of “Do as Little As Possible” can last an entire career, even though it may never be formally named.

The point is that these negative games (and innumerable others just like them) are at play in all companies. The only question is one of popularity. Call it a version of “The Devil Makes Work for Idle Hands” if you will.

3. Transforming a Dysfunctional Culture

What’s a way to prevent a culture of nasty games? Get leaders to explicitly create better ones. By so doing, you can scoop up new employees before they fall prey.

If your organization is already overrun by people playing destructive games, start by teaching your managers the principles of gamification. Then, use these same principles to give them a great first-hand experience as they apply them to their departments.

Continue by setting up programmes which place young, new employees in high engagement activities from the moment they join. Don’t let them lapse into the boredom which invites mischief. Just help them experience the reality of positive games which ultimately give them more of what they want in life.

Posted on

How to Tackle the Problem of Conglomerate Strategy

How do you craft a strategic plan for a group of companies? Why do so many efforts end up with nothing more than “last-year’s-plan-plus-5%?” Discard this path of least resistance if you hope to capitalize on COVID opportunities.

Conglomerates are, in the best of times, difficult to plan for. Units compete for resources in different markets, creating a headache for whoever must make an optimal allocation. It’s a challenge of comparing apples to oranges by executives who don’t specialize in either fruit.

The hope is that by the end of the day, each business unit has a unique set of marching orders: a custom “breakthrough strategy”. It should be powerful enough to meet customer’s unmet needs, conform to disruptive technology trends and prevent competitors from gaining a foothold.

Furthermore, at the group level, the overall strategy shouldn’t be just a grab bag of ideas. Each individual plan should be part of a puzzle that makes up a single coherent picture.

However, I have sat in group meetings in which business unit MD’s flounder when asked for their organization’s strategy. After a bunch of PowerPoint slides, it becomes clear: they have no real strategy. At most, they have a list of tactics.

Furthermore, in these pandemic times, most are facing game-changing disruptions. This requires them to engineer the “next normal.” More often than not, they simply aren’t equipped to get the job done.

Before your business units drift into becoming another Nokia or Blackberry (i.e. a has-been), how can your group of companies prevent its component businesses from failing?

Step 1 – Engage business units in long-term planning

The simplest request is for business units to lengthen their planning horizons. Ask them to look 15-30 years out. Give them the examples, support and templates they need to produce a feasible, detailed plan. While it needs to account for current trends, the team shouldn’t be limited by them.

After all, this is not an exercise in predicting the future, but crafting one which includes preferred outcomes.

For the average MD of a business unit, this is likely to be a tough activity. But even clumsy attempts will push executives into the right zone of discomfort.

Step 2 – Develop leaders’ everyday planning skills

To improve C-suite skills, don’t turn strategy into a onetime or annual event. Instead, train them to think strategically at all times.

Some group CEO’s mistakenly assume this is easy. In their role, they spend 80% of their time on strategy, and 20% on daily operations. However, the reverse is true for their business unit MD’s. The fact is, in their progress up the ranks, the drumbeat for immediate results kept them awake at night. Their ability to adapt quickly helped them get promoted.

As such, your organization may not be organized to think strategically, and MD’s will find this to be a challenge. Don’t let them languish.

Instead, give them the training and coaching to implement their strategy from month to month. Their environment is changing so fast that if they don’t keep the big picture in mind, they could miss out on opportunities created by disruptions like COVID.

What if they fail to grow the required skills? Expect big mistakes that destroy value and produce a “diversification discount” in which the sum of the parts of your company is greater than the whole.

Step 3 – Make Clear Proposals

Once a business unit has completed its planning, MD’s must advance proposals to the central group organization. This is pure lobbying: an appeal to support the business unit’s strategic plan with tangible resources.

Your leaders may also need to be trained to become balanced, fact-based advocates of the specific value they can bring in the mid to long term.

Their clarity is essential. Why?

As group executives hear a range of proposals, they need to make collective decisions about the direction of the entire organization. Consequently, business units will receive good news or bad news depending on decisions made to allocate funds, attention and power.

As such, MD’s must be clear as the future of the organization relies on the quality of their analysis. If they do a poor job, bad decisions will be made: a harsh reality.

But the worst decision of all is not to make any. Some companies drift along, sitting back to watch what happens next.

By then, the savviest staff members have found jobs elsewhere, looking for real leaders to follow. Customers uncover better products and services, and value is destroyed.

While it’s hard to marshal a conglomerate strategy, it’s a problem which must be tackled to assure the future of the entire organization.