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Why People Analytics Isn’t Just for HR

Your company is aware of people analytics. It wants to use these techniques to increase productivity. But it’s not clear who should champion this transformation: HR or another unit?

In companies across the world, COVID has accelerated the call for data-driven innovation. Consequently, managers in your organization are concerned. Productivity has fallen due to work-from-home arrangements, but are they thinking about improving it in the best way?

The traditional approach to determine knowledge-worker productivity is borrowed from the factory floor. Put people together in tight quarters. Keep a close eye on them. Then, make sure their bodies are doing the right things.

However, COVID has blown a hole in that practice. Now, it’s obvious that, unlike physical work, knowledge work can be performed anywhere. But this fact hasn’t stopped your managers from campaigning for a return to “the good old days”.

Fortunately, stale, inefficient ways of full-time face-to-face working aren’t coming back. Also, companies which insist on treating employees as if they are manual workers will see their best people leave. Why? Top performers prefer to work with colleagues who trust them to do their finest work, regardless of physical location.

Case in point: a local colleague conducted a search for a remote job. His queries uncovered a company on the US West Coast. Consequently, this A-class worker quit his government position for an organization 3000 miles away.

If this transition is one your best people also wish to make, your organization should beware. Consider the growing use of People Analytics as a productivity tool to help workers and managers become more effective and engaged. Here are three steps.

  1. Retire Old Productivity Indicators

Before COVID, everyone knew a Chatty Cathy who talked a good game in the office. This polished extrovert speaks well. Studies show that her tendency to pipe up first is seen as a sign of leadership ability.

Some Cathys also make it their business to remain highly visible. They attend all meetings involving executive exposure. They never stay quiet, so their voices are known.

Finally, Cathys always arrive to work early and leave late. And on weekends, email threads never lack their input.

In summary, Cathys play into the weakness of managers who judge productivity visually. This lazy method of assessment promotes Cathys, even if their actual work is only average.

Unfortunately for them, COVID has changed the game. Gone are the visual cues Chatty Cathy used to wow managers. And the old flawed ways of measuring her productivity may never return.

  1. New Productivity Challenges Being Ignored

If you have never heard of “People Analytics” you may not realize that it’s an update to the notion of “HR Analytics”.

They are used everywhere employees can be found…not just in HR. For example, metrics are being gathered to reverse productivity losses in two nagging areas: email and meetings.

Both problems have become worse due to COVID according to research by Harvard Business School. In spite of the negative impact, companies treat them like rush-hour traffic – something we all hate but can do nothing about.

Today, rudimentary analytics tools are measuring both.

For example, your company could end each meeting with a smartphone survey of attendees. This should improve its quality.

Email effectiveness can also be surveyed manually, but that’s not all. Sites like emailanalytics.com measure an individual’s message volume and responsiveness automatically.

For instance, it helps you see that a manager who has 3,456 unread email messages is not just “bad at email”. He is a nuisance to his colleagues and an unproductive detriment to the bottom line.

I mention these two areas because they are relatively easy to measure. All it takes is a serious commitment to productivity. Plus a willingness for managers to use data to identify their lack of efficiency.

  1. HR’s Capacity to Lead People Analytics

Your HR Department may not be thinking in this way yet. It may not even have tools or skills available. The truth is that few are ready to lead their companies in this area.

Instead, HR has earned a reputation for being numbers and technology averse. This is a bigger problem than ever given the growing requirement for managers to use People Analytics. They want to impact every aspect of worker performance, not just productivity problems.

Eventually, managers will find the analytics they need even if they must do the search themselves. But this isn’t the best solution.

The revolution in your company’s People Analytics needs to start from HR Departments who understand how and why workers work. The future beckons professionals in HR to stay abreast and get ahead if they intend to remain relevant.

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

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Learning Long Term Planning from Tennis’ Williams Sisters

You know your company should be crafting long-term, post-COVID plans. Why? The pandemic has created once-in-a-lifetime opportunities waiting to be exploited. But you have been so busy just keeping the organization alive that you either have half-a-plan, or none at all. Should you make the investment in strategic planning now even though the times remain turbulent?

When Serena Williams won her first Wimbledon title, an interviewer asked her what surprised her about the experience. She answered – “Nothing.” When pressed, she added, “It was exactly what I had envisioned…since I was four years old.”

The casual listener would think this was mere chutzpah. Except that she was no ordinary tennis player. She was actually fulfilling the 20+ year, 78 page plan her father wrote before she was conceived.

But it wasn’t just a sport plan. The document covered Venus and Serena’s education, faith, family, responsibility, money…all aspects of their lives. It even inspired Naomi Osaka’s Haitian father to coach his daughter to the number one spot decades later.

Remarkably, the three champions have earned over US$180 million in their careers on the court. While some consider it to be all a matter of talent, the two coaches disagree. The success their daughters enjoy is due to advanced planning.

Like GraceKennedy’s 25-year plan and JMMB’s 23-year strategy, they were able to programme and accumulate small gains over time. While others focused on surviving the short-term, they were seen as crazy to create targets with dates so far into the future. Why did this unpopular approach work?

  1. Back from the Future

It takes skill and a dose of tenacity to stake a claim far into the future and make it stick. Even as Richard Williams had ribs broken and teeth knocked out by Compton gang members, he never relented.

Neither did Norman Manley and other heroes, each of whom lived “from the future”. This approach helped them sidestep creature comforts, sometimes putting them at risk.

Quote: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” The Prince, by Machiavelli.

But those who do come from the future inspire themselves to make changes. They declare a stated vision and live from it. This makes them two-headed: able to live today, and in the future at the same time.

  1. Detailed Planning in Reverse

If your organization’s executives shy away from putting themselves in harm’s way, it could be a lack of courage. But it may also come from the lack of detailed planning.

While most teams know how to spout vacuous vagaries to be “world-class,” they rarely have a 20-year plan to do so. The shortage of specificity lets them off the hook.

But the truth is, there are numerous ways to craft detailed multi-year plans which work, even without a shred of college education (i.e. like Richard Williams.)

One method successful companies use is to:

a. Convert the vision for 15-30 years away into details to be accomplished by a set deadline.

b. Translate qualitative details into an array of metrics.

c. Backcast metrics from the target year to today.

d. Schedule staggered projects to drive the metrics.

These techniques are challenging to employ during an offsite meeting. But the detailed plan produced can galvanize an entire company because of its credibility.

  1. Stand Alone

In retrospect, Williams argued that he needed a meticulous plan due to the uncharted waters he was navigating. No-one had ever done the impossible.

Furthermore, the role models in the sport at the time were succeeding wildly following the traditional approach. He refused to follow their lead, causing many to accuse Williams of ruining his daughters’ prospects. “Stop being selfish,” they said.

In retrospect, his wisdom is apparent. Countless others have entered the women’s tennis circuit and burned out. Only a tiny handful have played as long as the sisters have.

Some say it’s all a result of the Williams’ “character”.

Again, he argues differently. While his family has lots of it, he says that having a clear plan helped them weather and repel the criticism of experts who publicly questioned his sanity.

In other words, a good plan helped the family to stay the course. They found it easy to decide next steps – simply stick to the plan. After all, it was easier to do so than develop the “character” needed.

In this context, families are just like organizations. There’s no plausible reason to put off long-term planning if your company is committed to high performance. Instead, take the challenge seriously and accomplish the impossible.

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Strategic Plan Implementation Reset

Your company is considering its next strategic planning retreat. But the last real one, held just before COVID, didn’t anticipate a pandemic. So, the plan had to be shelved. Now, attendees are reluctant to schedule a new session. Do you give up on the idea?

As a past attendee at strategic planning retreats, you have seen both big plans and grandiose commitments. However, you may never have seen these goals realized. Now, you remain a bit cynical.

“Take the same resources and invest them elsewhere”, you argue. But you harbour doubts about this idea. Here are three elements of strategic planning to consider so that implementation improves.

#1 – Big Decisions Don’t Make Themselves

In order to resolve a difficult strategic issue, there comes a critical moment when an executive team must make a final decision. The live occasion must include all the organization’s top leaders, armed with the best information possible. It’s the point of no return. “Argument done.”

The bigger the decision, the more intense the discussion, and the longer the deliberations can take. Why? The risk involved amps up expectations and fears.

Unlike lifesaving announcements to close offices to reduce infections, these big strategic decisions don’t make themselves. They require proactive, collective courage.

In this context, you shouldn’t use past failures (such as pre-pandemic plans) to avoid making critical decisions today. Why?

Consider the biggest, scariest decisions you don’t want to confront in your next retreat. For each day you delay, you make things worse for future stakeholders. In fact, they’ll probably look back and regret your indecision.

On the other hand, even a strategic plan which isn’t implemented fully can benefit the organization. Why? It represents a brave step closer to ultimate success.

#2 – Support New Micro-Behaviors

All strategic plans comprise both single actions versus slow, steady behavior changes.

For example, a single action may be the purchase of a new machine. This investment is relatively easy to implement.

However, slow, steady changes in habits or routines are much harder. And those which require a new mindset are even more difficult.

For the most part, organizations approach these behavioral changes as if they can be bought with financial incentives. Research shows that this is true, but only for a subset of work. In fact, more money leads to more output for simple, physical tasks.

However, knowledge workers don’t become smarter or more creative with better bonuses. A big raise does not foster better decision-making.

When these slow changes are called for in the strategic plan, it’s time for HR professionals to step up. Usually, they understand the culture of the organization. Using the latest change management theories, they can help teams craft realistic tactics…the kind which actually can be implemented by motivated people.

#3 – Tactics to Overcome Inertia

However, the strategy will require more than sound planning. Starting the day after the retreat, when the excitement has worn off, things will be tough.

By definition, attendees return to a world which does not support the new vision. Instead, it is filled with inertia, such as past email messages, which still need to be answered. Plus, each person’s calendar still reflects old priorities.

Finally, attendees are surrounded by folks who weren’t in the retreat and have old habits. They were perfectly tuned to meet the demands of a prior age and a now-obsolete performance review system.

Consequently, the change required at the individual level to support the new strategy is considerable. In fact, the likelihood of success can be predicted. Just look at the support provided to help individuals make the transformation needed. If they are left to their own devices, the inertia will lead to failure.

At this point, this isn’t an HR problem: it belongs to the entire organization. If this fact isn’t embraced, you can expect more of the same: a strategic plan which sits on the shelf, alongside all the others.

Taken by themselves, the three ideas I have provided are not big. But if you bring them together, they become a foundation strong enough to forge a new direction.

Such is the nature of game-changing strategic plans. They are painstakingly slow to put in place, but become an unstoppable force that employees in the distant future will see clearly, in retrospect.

As such, this isn’t about COVID-era, short-term survival tactics which are in such vogue today. Instead, it’s about future generations and the legacy they are left to contend with.

Herein lies the motivation needed to implement the most challenging changes and the most outrageous strategies. While success isn’t guaranteed, they’ll help your organization move past prior failures to accomplish a brand new future.

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

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On Boring Your Staff with Small Goals

You’re a corporate leader who wants to inspire your organization. But you aren’t naturally charismatic, nor are you famous. Is there a way to energize and motivate stakeholders who must play a part in the transformation you envision?

A startling number of CEOs forget what it was like to be inspired in a manner that leads to hard work. They think of themselves as unicorns, born to lead. It’s a mystery to them why everyone doesn’t wake up with the energy they have, excited about the chance to accomplish great things.

Some give up. Their secret sauce cannot be replicated, so they don’t try. The best they can do is threaten, trick, or bribe staff into compliance. That’s “the only way to treat these people”, they convince themselves.

However, you may be different. Inspiring others is a leadership skill few possess, but you should be interested in learning what it takes. One of the critical elements is BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), as articulated by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. How can you use them to lift workers to better performance?

  1. People Want More Than Business as Usual

The easiest way to disengage staff is to send a signal that “there’s no need to pay attention.” This probably isn’t what you intend. Instead, you want board members, executives, managers, and employees to be sitting on their edge of their seats. In this mode, they bring their best ideas, maximum energy, and highest creativity to every task they do.

Recently, COVID-related emergencies have infused organizations with a kind of fake vitality. However, as the pandemic wanes, everyday operations resume. People are drifting back to ordinary standards.

If, as a leader, you don’t replace this temporary intensity with something more durable, expect your staff to be disappointed. They want to be like Apple and Netflix – companies which are moving forward. They enjoy using their products or services. Plus, the people who work for them are proud.

Meanwhile, some of your employees refuse to wear company uniforms in public.

But don’t see this as a rebuke. It’s a natural regression to dull, humdrum, mundane, corporate life. Daily work becomes a vision-less routine if you fail to disrupt it with your BHAG.

  1. People Want to Believe

However, you must be careful. Some leaders specialize in inspiring themselves…in isolation. Others may inspire a few colleagues – the ones they work with directly. But this should be an organization-wide game.

To communicate, lazy executive teams try to get by with traditional vision and mission statements. Unfortunately, times have changed. The usual saccharine bromides no longer work – they are just too vague. If your statements can be swapped with that of another organization without anyone noticing, consider them to be stale.

Instead, you need far more details to make your plan credible and worthy of an emotional investment. Skeptical staff need to see metrics and milestones stretched out over several years. They want a concrete bridge between today and the final outcome. Something they can trust. After all, their future careers are on the line. Why should they bet on your company? And your vision?

  1. People Want to Act Now

Ever had a conversation with a child who wants to become a surgeon? They are probably two decades or more away from realizing their dream.

But one benefit of their public commitment is that there are clear and immediate expectations. For example, wherever they are on their journey, academic excellence is required. “Are you studying hard right now?” This clarity orients the child towards daily priorities and choices.

Contrast this with the corporate world, where the opposite tends to happen. A CEO announces a BHAG. Then employees go back to whatever they were doing before, safely knowing that it’s the path of least resistance.

The fact is, no-one translates the vision into everyday action. Between retreats, the BHAG flops.

The solution? Craft game-changing projects. Then, enlist sponsors and participants who understand their importance and believe in taking action.

They’ll probably need to set aside other projects and delay competing commitments. But this is exactly what you want. If this is important, other efforts must cease so that you can focus people’s attention.

Fail to do this and you’ll be dismayed to see people going through routines which should have been eliminated. They’ll waste time on email messages and meetings simply because of inertia. You’ll fail to make progress as people sit on the sidelines…bored…waiting for something interesting to happen.

Instead, gather your leaders together and lead from the front, with BHAGs which inspire everyone. You’ll tap into discretionary effort which has remained dormant and assure a sustainable future for your organization.

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Email: Not a Nuisance, It’s Your Job

You are forced to deal with email every single day, most of it arriving at odd moments. At the same time, you need to be effective, but it seems that there’s invariably a slew of messages getting in the way. You want the problem to go away so that you can just focus on doing your job. This is a common sentiment, but is this frame of mind a help or hindrance?

It’s fashionable nowadays to complain about email. Why? There are always too many messages. They arrive at the wrong time, and important ones get buried by all the others.

But you’re not alone: everyone you know appears to be caught in the same trap. You derive some comfort knowing that some are even worse than you.

The only people who seem to be on top are the super-responsive. Apparently, they have nothing else to do each day but reply to email…within moments. But are they being effective? If they can reply to you immediately, are they actually doing any useful work?

You know you don’t want to become like them, but what are your alternatives? Here are some ideas you can use to be effective.

1- Email is not going anywhere

Whether you call it acceptance or resignation, your fate in using this technology is sealed. Asynchronous, digital messaging is a permanent fact of professional life. In other words, we aren’t going back to the days of paper letters, faxes, or telegrams. And time-consuming meetings, phone calls or Zoom won’t ever become a replacement.

So unless you’re retiring soon, take a deep breath and “hug up” this reality. And while you’re at it, stop complaining about your inbox being flooded. The fact is that email incompetence is afflicting almost everyone. The only ones exempt? The few who receive a trickle of messages each day…like less than 25.

Don’t aspire to be like them. Take responsibility now and in the future.

2- Your suffering is avoidable

Think back to the days when you were among the “exempt”. You didn’t have a problem. In fact, you were happy to be sent email. It showed that you mattered to other employees and friends.

However, your joy was short-lived. When 25 incoming daily messages turned into 150, you hit a threshold: your old techniques stopped working. For example, if you used to check email in the quiet intervals between tasks, meetings or projects, you probably saw this shortcut become impossible.

Instead, evening and weekend email became the norm. Plus, others began to complain that you are not returning messages fast enough. Your “time management” skills were questioned.

While this state of affairs is awful, there is an answer.

You need a different, new set of practices to address a high volume of email. Furthermore, this approach needs to scale so that you can handle double or triple the volume you receive today. Why? Not only is email unavoidable, its use is growing.

3- Instant Repair

The complex blend of habits and technologies we use means that fixing email is like plugging the leaks on a rickety boat. There are a vast number of things which can go wrong, all of which add to the overall burden. Tackling them all is beyond the scope of this article, but here is one basic concept. Set aside high-quality time for email by blocking time each day in your calendar.

With this technique, email transforms from a thankless chore to a prime activity. Here, you can give your full and undivided attention. Consider it to be an appointment you simply cannot skip. A professional requirement. For example, a surgeon would never skip washing her hands before an operation.

Why the high priority? The fact is, each email requires you to make a decision and this takes energy. Add in the fact that you must quickly switch mental contexts from one message to the next, and the challenge multiplies.

It’s as if each day’s most important choices are distilled into a single sprint. If you try to make them piecemeal, prepare to see your inbox turn into a bottomless pit of unmade decisions.

Setting time aside each day is the only way to ensure that the molehill doesn’t turn into a mountain. Unfortunately, it only takes a few days of neglect to turn a peaceful inbox into a ticking time-bomb.

The best method is not to respond like a firefighter. Instead, treat email as a priority that deserves its own time-slot, and mindset. Use a fresh head so that you can make a series of difficult, but high-quality snap-decisions.

Soon, it will become the heart of your job, rather than a nuisance. And you will be effective.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.