Category: Strategy

I just had an article published in Trinidad’s Newsday newspaper that highlighted the reasons why poor time management skills routinely mash up the best made strategic plans.

How to Ensure a Lack of Time Doesn’t “Mash Up” Your Strategic Plan

As we enter the post-festival season, many local companies embark on fresh annual and quarterly strategies that just won’t succeed. Most executives will blame “the culture” but they are mistaken: it has more to do with their ineffective use of time.

If you are an executive you may relate to the problem. During the strategic planning retreat, brainstorming sessions generate a lot of new ideas. As the activities add up you feel a subtle but distinct discomfort, especially if you happen to be more experienced. You sense that everything on the list simply cannot get done. Furthermore, you mute your own objections because of the strong pressure to be a “team player.”

The best companies determine the cost of each strategic project plus the overall budget when they do their strategic planning. The rare few, according to McKinsey & Co.’s Bevvins and De Smet, will go further and complete a time budget. Why is it needed?

Most company executives focus on financial budgets first because they believe that cash is their scarcest resource. The new strategic plan must be made practical by selecting activities with the highest ROI – a widely accepted technique.

However, near the end of a retreat, tired executives rarely go the next step, asking themselves how much time needs to be budgeted for each new activity. In the months to come, they treat time as if it’s an infinite resource. This sets their strategy up for failure from the beginning, causing the discomfort I mentioned earlier. The problem isn’t a lack of time, however. It’s a deficit of skill.

Most will turn to “time management” skills for the answer, without understanding that it’s a misnomer: time cannot really be managed. Instead, they need to learn to manage a “time demand,” defined as an individual, internal commitment to complete an action in the future. This distinction is foreign to many executives in Trinidad and beyond, but it lies at the heart of time budgeting.

As a manager you may possess a secret – your methods for managing time demands are self-taught, starting around the time you took the Common Entrance or SEA. You did so early on, giving you an edge that has played an important role in your academic, career and organizational success.

However, being better than the average Caribbean person is no great accomplishment. The data I have gathered from regional workshops shows why individual productivity is low, even as the macro-economy might be growing. With respect to time budgeting, our skills are lacking at all levels of the enterprise, but here are four things that can be done to instill a new level of rigour in the C-Suite while executing your annual strategy.

1. Gain an appreciation of your current individual and collective skills at managing time demands. Do so by completing an informed self-assessment illuminating your methods and their relationship to world-class standards. You’ll probably find some critical behaviours you merely do each day, but have never thought about before. Your profile reveals the salient gaps.

2. Create improvement goals and a plan. These are easy to build based on the prior step. If you were well-trained in order to do a self-assessment then you should be itching to close the gaps. The temptation will be to try to change too many, too quickly. Resist it and go for small steps with lots of support.

3. Collect time data. Most professionals have only a gut knowledge of how long things take. The chances are high that you have never tracked your personal time as the McKinsey authors and also Peter Drucker, the management guru, recommend. For planning purposes, this discipline can be as important as tracking expenditures. Data should be collected on a programme basis also, so that teams in your firm can determine how to make successful project plans.

4. Manage packed calendars. The gradual removal of administrative assistants from C-Suite staff complements has pushed a number of new time demands into your lap. The problem isn’t about fetching coffee, however. Now, you are forced to manage the all-important activity of planning your time-starved calendar using technology that changes from day to day.

The McKinsey research shows that the effective executive makes full use of administrative assistance to coordinate demanding schedules. This helps them to preserve time devoted to “the flow state” – their most productive times spent alone doing their best work.

In the absence of this knowledge and the supporting mechanisms, it’s no surprise that many strategic plans amount to little more than overblown wish-lists. Unless local companies take their executives’ time demand management skills seriously, it’s safe to expect disappointments at this time next year.

Francis Wade is a management consultant and author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity. To receive a free compilation of past columns, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

Click here to read the article online.

The latest research is clear.

When executives are allowed to openly disagree about important issues, they are likely to truly buy-in when consensus is finally reached.

I took that finding and applied it to the strategic planning process in an article in the Trinidad Newsday entitled Start a Fight at Your Next Strategic Planning Retreat.

You can find the entire text of the article here at the Guardian Life website.  Thanks to them for sponsoring the column.

Here is the article in full:

Start a Fight At Your Next Strategic Planning Retreat

Strategic plans are often accused of being little more than a mish-mosh of disparate ideas thrown together in a single document.  When they are disjointed  and incoherent, it makes them difficult to implement, let alone remember.  When critical opportunities pop-up in the year to implement them, they are lost.

 

The best strategic planning retreats, however, avoid this trap by encouraging confrontation and honest dialogue.  Unfortunately, most executive teams don’t have the discipline or ability to have these conversations, and for the sake of speed and “tranquility,” they avoid confrontations.  Instead, they rely on their colleagues who have that rare Anil Roberts combination of intelligence and “talky-ness” to drive the process home, leaving most others in the room as disengaged, bemused, observers.

 

The strategic planning process simply becomes an extension of day-to-day conversations… conducted instead “down the islands.”

 

A simple way to change the discourse from everyday concerns is to take the long view, and to use the planning process to define a future that is usually ignored:  one that is 30 years away.

 

Sometimes, I hear complaints.  Why should we care about a future that is that far away?

 

The fact is, an executive team is always shaping the future, whether it realizes it or not. The best teams do so consciously, while the worst only concern themselves with immediate issues.

 

Take the simple example of a company that wants to enter Latin American markets in a big way, with a goal of having 50% of its business coming from that segment.

 

The executive team realizes that it would require the creation of a bi-lingual workforce, while facing the fact that there are no Spanish-speakers on staff today,  When HR estimates that some 75% of the workforce would need to be bi-lingual to assure success, it becomes obvious that the goal won’t be achieved in a year, or even ten years.  A much longer-term plan must be crafted.

 

Something magical happens when executive teams of (usually middle-aged) professionals start to consider a long-term future.  The discussion stops being about them, and their department’s agendas, and the concern shifts to future generations, and what legacy is being left for them to manage.  They quickly realize that an executive team that crafts, for example, a bi-lingual future could be hailed for their brilliant vision in 2041.

 

By contrast, the company that suffers from a lack of new markets in 2041 will look back at prior executives with disdain, and blame them for mortgaging the future for short-term gain.

 

From our company’s work with executives around the region, we have observed that a certain kind of business altruism comes alive when they grapple with long-term futures as a team.  They come to realize that they often have very different visions of what the company will look like in 30 year’s time, and how their different points of view have led them to make different decisions.  When these decisions are in conflict, they sometimes end up working at cross-purposes, wasting time and money, but without knowing why.  In the retreat, it’s possible to get these views out on the table, and lead them to craft a single defined future.  It’s OK in this controlled setting to fight for one vision or another, with an understanding that consensus only comes when all the personal visions have been aired.

 

In one retreat I facilitated,  an executive was fully convinced that the company should become the largest in the Latin America /Caribbean region.  He fought for this vision with others in a useful way that illuminated a key reality:  they would have to move the corporation to Miami from Port of Spain to realize it.  That, they realized, was something no-one wanted.

 

Once a single picture of the future has been aligned upon, the battle isn’t finished.  After the future is translated into hard numbers like market share and profitability, these metrics must be connected back to today’s historical results in a way that makes sense.  This is normally done in a spreadsheet that shows the key turning points required to achieve the final results,

 

It’s not just a matter of filling in numbers, however.  Underlying each result and turning point are some powerful assumptions about how the company operates, and what can or can’t be done to move key indicators.  Listening to marketing, human resources, finance, IT and operations managers as they share their views, and struggle to come to consensus, is often inspiring, even when it gets heated.  They demonstrate the value of a good, fair fight for the future, and how it can lead managers to define a future that is much, much bigger than themselves.