Is Your Company being Led By a Great Strategist?

Each day you go into the office, you want to be inspired by your work. Elevated by what your organization can accomplish. But if that’s not your daily experience, does the quality of strategic leadership have something to do with it?

Check out my prior columns at https://blog.fwconsulting.com

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

Is Your Company Being Led by a Great Strategist?

Each day you go into the office, you want to be inspired by your work. Elevated by what your organization can accomplish. But if that’s not your daily experience, does the quality of strategic leadership have something to do with it?

Perhaps you have seen the stories of companies led by executives with breathtaking strategies. These top teams produce game-changing innovations which revolutionize industries. Millions of lives are transformed. The likes of Facebook and Netflix displace also-rans who look stale by comparison, capturing hearts and minds in every corner of the world.

But when you compare what happens in these model organizations with your own, you see a big gap. Are you making an unfair contrast? Are the elements you focus on the right ones to examine? What are the naked truths you wish you could explain to your leaders if you had the chance?

  1. Bold Vision

COVID has led many CEO’s to limit the scope of what they say they want to achieve. Times are hard and uncertain, they admit, and things are changing too fast to think about big goals.

All they have is energy for survival. A vision would be a distraction.

Unfortunately, research shows they are likely to fail. Creating Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) is, according to Jim Collins and Jerry Porras of Built to Last fame, essential. Their comparison between companies that use BHAGs versus those which don’t is stark.

However, this doesn’t mean you should throw together yet another vision statement. In fact, these pronouncements can damage productivity if they are vague, undated and insulting to the average person’s intelligence. When employees deduce a lack of seriousness, such declarations destroy motivation.

Instead of nebulous promises to be “world class”, create the kind of vision that paints a clear picture of a single destination. This means it must have a date, and an unequivocal set of target metrics, at minimum.

  1. Feasible Pathway

BHAGs are an essential part of great strategies, but in 2022, they aren’t enough. We have become more immune to aspirational statements than we were in 1994 when Collins/Porras published their book. Why? Oftentimes they include little more than wishful thinking.

The way to bring corporate dreams into existence is to go deeper in the planning stages. How? Craft a credible pathway between today’s reality and the final destination.

This is no easy feat to accomplish. It takes a small team an intense effort to lay out a plan that covers 15-30 years. It gets complicated: within each time period, certain financial and operational milestones must be hit.

While there are projects introduced during this planning horizon that drive the numbers, these should be realistic. In fact, it pays to be conservative.

This powerful exercise forces teams to confront realities that otherwise would be ignored. For example, a client’s strategy called for entering Latin America in a big way. The price? Moving the company’s headquarters to Miami.

This was too heavy a tax to pay and the plan was moderated.

Another client required the acquisition of competitors. But the firm had never undertaken such an activity and would need to hire expensive specialists. It shelved the idea.

Weak strategists leave such details to others. To save face, they pretend to buy-in, which dooms the effort to failure.

  1. Customer Obsession

Who would think that Carnival revellers would pay more for amenities such as mobile bathrooms, cool-down mist and makeup facilities? Tribe Carnival from Trinidad and Tobago has introduced a slew of innovations like these ever since its inception. Over time, they have produced exponential growth for the business, even though it charges a premium.

In a similar manner, clients of JMMB swear by a comparable approach to innovation in its investment operations. Like Tribe, the company has a relentless focus on the customer that leads it to do things other institutions scoff at.

From a strategic point of view, few companies understand their customers well enough to innovate around their deepest unmet needs. Such in-depth study is simply too hard and expensive to undertake.

As such, they end up following the lead of competitors like Tribe and JMMB. But this is the coward’s approach to innovation…to copy what others are doing after it’s been proven to work.

If your company is being led by a strong strategist, expect to see a struggle to capture customers’ unspoken sentiments. Once these are defined, they should be driving every new product and process development. If no such link exists, the strategy is likely to be ordinary.

This list of three activities great strategists undertake is not exhaustive, but it is essential. Use it to judge how your company is being led (not just managed) and to distinguish if today’s actions are inspired by more than mere survival.

Why CEO’s need to think like Chief Learning Officers

As the top leader, it’s your responsibility to create sound succession plans. But how do you ensure that there is a pipeline of leadership talent available at all levels, such as the board and executive suite?

 

Check out my other columns at https://blog.fwconsulting.com

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

Why CEOs Need to Think Like Chief Learning Officers

As the top leader, it’s your responsibility to create sound succession plans. But how do you ensure that there is a pipeline of leadership talent available at all levels, such as the board and executive suite?

Extraordinary executives see themselves as developers of people. They take a 360-degree view of their world, paying attention to every scrap of expertise they can rely on to get the job done.

This perspective is an unusual one to adopt. After all, the default assumption is that by the time someone reaches the top of an organization, they should be fully ready for the role. In other words, all the training they need should have been completed.

Recent responses to recessionary pressure have not helped. Since the downturn of 2008, learning and development budgets have been cut, and have never recovered. Most companies have narrowed their focus to provide training for essential jobs only. The whole activity is now seen as an expense to be incurred only when it’s an absolute must.

This practice has affected all employees, but especially those at the top. Gone are the two-week to four-month executive development programs in overseas universities. Need a coach? That’s a personal investment. The idea is: “If you don’t have the skills needed at this high level, you shouldn’t have the job.”

But this logic is deeply flawed. Things are changing so quickly in our world, fueled by new technology, that no-one should feel secure in what they know today. Instead, their only lasting weapon is their capacity or ability to grow. How can you produce this transformation as your company’s leader?

  1. Make it safe to have gaps

If you’re the kind of leader who must demonstrate superior knowledge and skill at all times, you’ll be in trouble. Why? Your competitive nature got you the top leadership job, but now it’s preventing you from helping others.

For example, your peers may believe that you don’t have gaps (or don’t see them.) They’ll return the favor. How? They’ll follow your lead and pretend to know what they don’t, or do what they can’t. Neither response is productive. As a CEO, you need to tackle the fear people have to reveal their gaps openly.

The remedy is simple: become the most active learner in the company. Share your developmental needs with staff and your plans to close them. As you do so, create opportunities for others to share as well. Encourage them to be open.

  1. Look in All Directions

This may sound unusual, but you should also engage board members and chairpersons in their development.

If you fail to do so, expect your board to make decisions they don’t comprehend, but think they do. The fact is, much of their knowledge is probably outdated and their skills are stale. Yet, they must decide between competing proposals in board meetings the best they can.

The same, of course, applies to the occupants of the C-Suite. Realize that most companies under-invest in training at this level. Somehow, the thinking goes, smart people should train, coach and develop themselves. Apparently, they have all the time in the world to do so.

This folly leads CEOs to ignore the developmental needs of others immediately around them. When things fall apart, some seek knee-jerk solutions: firing colleagues and hiring replacements immediately upon failure. This short-term thinking mistakenly assumes that new staff members will fix the problem. Instead, they’ll become stale themselves – it’s only a matter of time.

Only consistent 360-degree feedback plus training interventions from the CEO will permanently correct the situation.

3. Become the Chief Learning Officer

The Learning and Development function in Jamaican companies was, before the 2008 recession, a highly respected role. Since then, many practitioners have disappeared, merged into Human Resource departments, becoming freelancers or migrating.

But their reappearance would not necessarily solve the problem of stale executive skills. Why? Persons in this position aren’t suited to determine the training needs of those far above them in the hierarchy. For example, few L&D Professionals can effectively guide a board.

The fact is, the CEO should step in and play the role of Chief Learning Officer. This person can coach those at the top of the organization to higher performance.

Unfortunately, most CEOs don’t have skills in this area. Yet, they must have developmental conversations with C-Suiters and also Board Members. No-one else is equipped. Failing to act is the same as allowing the company to languish.

As such, CEO’s should think like CLOs to help organizations succeed. In these tumultuous times, the need is greater than ever before.

Why useful strategic plans require deep handshake agreements

Have you ever played a part in crafting a useless strategic plan? You thought it was a good product, but it ended up languishing on the shelf or in unread email. However, you believed in the process followed, but something was missing… maybe from the final step which condemned the entire plan to the scrap heap.

Click here to read my past articles from the Gleaner newspaper: https://blog.fwconsulting.com

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This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

Why Your Strategic Plan Needs a Deep Handshake Agreement

Have you ever played a part in crafting a useless strategic plan? You thought it was a good product, but it ended up languishing on the shelf or in unread email. However, you believed in the process followed, but something was missing… maybe from the final step which condemned the entire plan to the scrap heap.

As you near the season for developing your company’s strategic plan, you already know that engaging stakeholders is important. Getting everyone on the same page is the only way to implement the plan effectively. However, you may not realize that the final group handshake at your retreat isn’t a mere formality or nicety. Instead, it creates an emotional bond no participant should escape.

Compare this to the fond memories of a wedding. Most recall the fun. A wonderful ceremony. The party after. Delicious food. Engaging people you met.

But there’s only a single short segment that was essential. The vows between the bride and groom may be different each time, but the public promises they make are the ingredients which generate a permanent difference. Without it, the activity is not a wedding.

In the same spirit, a strategic planning retreat cannot skip over the ultimate promise attendees must make to each other. Dr Richard Rumelt from the Caribbean Strategy Conference calls it the “swearing-in ceremony.” (The phrase is borrowed from basic military training.) What makes this final activity – essentially a handshake agreement – so important?
1—It’s a Reckoning

A great retreat is an exercise in “managed disagreement.” Executives from different functions bring together disparate points of view. Collectively, they forge a future none of them could create by themselves.

When the planning horizon is 10-30 years out, profound conflicts are even more pronounced. They can only be resolved via in-depth discussions, including a heavy dose of individual give and take.

But the meeting is wasted if, at the end, everyone is not on the same page. This test cannot be left to a gut feeling. Instead, someone must be brave enough to publicly ask each attendee to commit to moving forward together. In other words, to make a vow equivalent to a wedding’s “I Do”. Or similar to an oath of office. Without this clarity, prepare to declare the meeting a failure. 

2 – It’s Not Compete Consensus

While it would be nice to get total agreement on every single point of the strategic plan, that’s not the best practice. If you follow that path, expect the event to drag on indefinitely. 

Why? A lone person with strong convictions could dominate and wreck the proceedings. 

The fact is, this isn’t a debate. Or a marriage. Or a competition. It’s a business activity intended to move the company forward. With hard realities looming outside the meeting room, the organization needs a plan to fulfill its potential.

The best practice involves the use of a lesser form of agreement…”Disagree-and-Commit.” In this method, which is ideal for time-limited activities like planning retreats, participants don’t need to resolve all their reservations. Instead, they are encouraged to keep them, but simultaneously join the group in moving forward.

This technique is usually taught at the start of the retreat, but its influence is fully realized at the very end. Before everyone departs, there needs to be no daylight between participants and the strategic plan so that a united team can implement it as one.

3 – Defang Backstabbers

This approach is also intended to take power away from those who sit back, waiting to say “I Told You So” at the first signs of failure. But the truth is, if such people exist at the end, the process was defective. At some level, they were excluded. 

Prevent this from happening by checking to see whether “Disagree-and- Commit” bonds are being formed during the retreat. Use your intuition to focus on those who seem to be withdrawn or disengaged.

Also, seek to forge solutions that combine the best elements of separate points of view. By the end, each component of the plan should be identified with the team, rather than any individual.

The bottom line is that the paragraphs and diagrams in the strategic plan don’t matter as much as the human element.

When the team hasn’t stepped up as a unit to make a visible, authentic commitment to the plan, you have nothing but empty words. The true test comes when people are alone in front of their laptops. Do they execute the strategic plan when they are tired, distracted, or just plain comfortable with the status quo?

Such moments are the ultimate proof that your final handshake agreement was authentic. Your plan is ready to be executed.

Stop Conflating Budget with Strategy

Each year, managers in your company sit down to devise budgets for the next twelve months. As a participant in the process, you see that each department’s spending reflects certain priorities. Where do these come from? Are some correct in calling them “strategic”? Should they be reconciled in some way?

Managing costs has become a bigger priority than ever in these pandemic times. The best method of control? It’s nothing new: negotiate budgets with your department managers. Then, hold them to account.

There is no question that this process works. It sets expectations and regulates purchases. In fact, some companies use the terms “budget” and “revenue targets” interchangeably in a nod to its universal acceptance.

However, as negotiations proceed each year, inevitable questions arise. Each department appears to be operating from its own background assumptions. Where did they come from? And what strategy is the unit pursuing? Is it related to the overall corporate plan?

Perhaps you are like many managers who notice these discrepancies. They exist, but you want them to disappear. The answer? Pull together a single “strategic plan” which covers all the budgets at the same time. Towards that end, a mandatory retreat is announced.

While this reasoning may appear sound, it’s often deeply flawed. A budget should not be conflated with a corporate strategy for many reasons. Why? Here are just a few.

Reason #1 – Required Budget vs Optional Strategy

In terms of immediate threats to your business, a broken budget process is a huge risk. Why? Compared to the existence of a strategic plan, a busted budget can cause cash to run out.

Consequently, managers who disregard budgets are likely to face severe sanctions. By contrast, when you ignore the strategic plan, you are probably safe in the majority. After all, it only serves long-term interests.

This is just human nature. We pay more attention to our anxieties than long-term concerns. In this context, strategic planning becomes a nice-to-have business activity which adds little real value. When a retreat is not scheduled, nothing changes from one day to the next.

Reason #2 – Strategy as an Afterthought

Your company may be like many. It only thinks about strategic matters when the fear of competition or disruption arises. The trigger might be a case study of failures, such as Kodak or Blackberry. Or a competitor’s advertisement for a new feature you didn’t even know existed.

In these moments, it becomes obvious: strategy matters. In fact, the right strategy probably earned your company the success and stability it experiences today. Someone had a vision of where the company should go.

However, history often reverses itself. I have led many corporate retreats in which the strategic planning activity was scheduled after the budgets were completed. They were merely last-ditch attempts to reconcile different points of view.

Today, the danger in leaving strategy as an after-thought is that your company might be heading into extinction without knowing it.

If you are a top executive, you may not be detecting slow changes underway in your industry. By focusing on budgets before strategies, you fail to scan the horizon for changes before setting priorities. This mistake renders the entire budgetary exercise impotent – a shuffling of the chairs on the Titanic.

But there’s no need to wait for a scare. Instead, examine your current strategic plan. A timeframe of five years or fewer is probably just an update of prior documents. It’s Business-As-Usual, plus some small changes.

If incremental improvements are all that’s expected, get everyone excited about producing a disruptive strategic plan instead.

Reason #3 – Game-Changing Results Become Impossible

Unfortunately, while your company rides on decisions made long ago, the world has continued to change. Before long, competitors will notice your slow-moving ways, leading them to look for disruptive ideas and technologies.

As they climb the learning curve, they anticipate transformations which build on each other. A dramatically different future comes into focus.

Such was the case of Apple’s iPhone division, and much closer to home, Digicel. By the end, thousands lost their jobs as the incumbents’ leaders failed to set a new direction.

If you’re interested in a new paradigm, consider the advice of Dr. Richard Rumelt from the recent Caribbean Strategy Conference.

He recommended that companies decouple budgetary and strategic activities. How? Ensure that they don’t follow the same annual cycle. Break them apart.

At the conference, we also learned to dream big by asking your team to contemplate 15 and 30 year scenarios. What does your company want to happen in decades to come?

Approaching your strategic planning in these new ways can preserve the integrity of the process. It might even keep your company from destruction.

Stop Conflating Budget with Strategy

Each year, managers in your company sit down to devise budgets for the next twelve months. As a participant in the process, you see that each department’s spending reflects certain priorities. Where do these come from? Are some correct in calling them “strategic”? Should they be reconciled in some way?

Click below to read all my past articles.

https://blog.fwconsulting.com

 

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

Check calendar or read email? The right pattern of effective work habits

In general, you want to be responsive to those who wish to reach you. Consequently, each morning, before doing anything else, you scan your email inbox for new messages. However, if you have ever questioned the wisdom of this habit, your concerns are justified. The most effective professionals refuse to process email first. Instead, they start the day differently: they plan the time in their calendars.

Read more articles like this from my Gleaner column https://blog.fwconsulting.com

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

First: Check Your Calendar or Read Email?

In general, you want to be responsive to those who wish to reach you. Consequently, each morning, before doing anything else, you scan your email inbox for new messages. However, if you have ever questioned the wisdom of this habit, your concerns are justified. The most effective professionals refuse to process email first. Instead, they start the day differently: they plan the time in their calendars.

Back in the mid-1990s when email was introduced to the general public, receiving a message was a rarity. It was exciting. Your computer announced the event, and audio-visual pop-ups celebrated its arrival.

But the practices you developed to address this new form of communication may no longer work. Why? They were suitable for a handful of messages, but useless for the 100+ deluge we face today.

One habit you may have adopted is the first-thing-in-the morning-check. If you’re opening email as the initial task upon entering the office, jumping in the car or sitting up in bed in your pajamas, you may be committing an error. Here are the reasons why.

  1. You should be timeblocking your priorities

Most of us are careful to write down appointments with other people, treating our calendar as if it were a scheduling tool used by doctors and dentists.

In addition, the most productive also schedule their priorities. Unwilling to leave them to chance, they program time in their calendars to complete them. The result? Each day they are more likely to act on the tasks which are most important. This technique is known as timeblocking.

However, when you don’t timeblock, you are at the mercy of other forces. Some days your energy might be lagging… so you check social media. On others, you may be feeling a lack of motivation… so you focus on routine actions.

Left to chance, it’s easy to miss deadlines because your work is being driven by factors unrelated to the importance of the task and its urgency.

Even so, as ruinous as these internal factors are, the worst culprit of all is the email you receive from others.

  1. How colleagues control you with messages

Too many people accept a passive role in their jobs. In other words, they see themselves as good soldiers whose job it is to take orders. In extreme cases, often with younger staff, they only aspire to make others happy.

If you’re in this cohort, email is a fantastic way for other people to transmit their priorities. Your assignment? Simply answer as many messages as fast as possible, and do what they tell you to do. Consequently, they give you more to do… which increases your email volume. The faster you respond, the more you get.

With this mindset, it’s only natural for you to check your inbox as soon as you can in the morning. If you never break the habit, you end up spending the better part of the day at the mercy of others who are happy to overlay their priorities over yours.

Unfortunately, while some encourage this practice, it’s not sustainable. To climb the corporate ladder, a person needs to show increasing self-direction and intrinsic motivation. In other words, they must lead, not follow.

Doing so means letting go of the anxiety felt when you haven’t replied to someone immediately.

This inner turmoil which leads to feelings of overwhelm has a name: The Zeigarnik Effect. There’s no way to climb the corporate ladder without learning to manage it.

  1. By the end of the day, you have accomplished little

We all know that person in the office who is very busy with email, but seldom accomplishes much. Often, they appear exhausted.

You may think they are simply being lazy, but here’s a simpler explanation. They are failing to examine the habits, practices and routines picked up in adolescence. Therefore, they become stuck.

The antidote is to exercise relentless, continuous improvement in your task management. For example, checking your calendar before your email inbox each day is not a popular habit among Jamaican workers.

However, by seeking out best practices and experimenting with them, you can be as productive as anyone else in the world. At the highest levels, professionals accomplish both productivity and peace of mind. The key? High performance in core areas such as task management, even when your friends, family and colleagues don’t act as role models.

If you’re serious, bypass the conventional wisdom. Drive each day using the priorities written in your timeblocked calendar. This best practice (and others) will help you become someone who has both peace of mind and productivity. You’ll be striving to find the right answers to greater personal capacity.

Francis Wade is the host of the Caribbean Strategy Conference on June 23-25. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.