25 Jul 2012
No doubt about it: an outside expert can help you bring your strategic conversation to life, refocus your efforts, introduce useful concepts and fresh ways of thinking to your firm … and shift your strategy from good to great.
So surely if you’re going to take time out for this vital discussion with your top team—and spend whatever it takes—it’s worth getting the pivotal element right. In other words, your facilitator.
All too often, though, organizations leave this critical decision to last. They block time in their executives’ diaries and book flights, venues, meals, and even magicians and comedians … and only then wake up and think about a facilitator.
Result: while they want someone with an “outsider’s perspective” and experience—someone who can challenge, provoke, inform, and advise them—they all too often wind up with a mere “meeting manager.”
But that’s not all. They also give their facilitator too little time to prepare well—to learn about the company and its needs, think about the specific challenge and how it should be dealt with, and prepare any materials that may be necessary.
Choosing the right person to help you craft your strategy is a lot more important than choosing a venue, agreeing on tea-times, or deciding whether to include a round of golf. It’s a make-or-break decision that should be made early and with great care. The job is not for fad-merchants or amateurs. Don’t expect a motivational speaker to morph into a strategy guru, or a sales trainer to make the high-level inputs you need!
If you want real impact, be sure to get someone with 1) the ability to cut to the core of complex issues and identify the few drivers of your success, 2) in-depth understanding of the latest thinking on strategy design and implementation, leadership, and change management, 3) loads of experience with major organizations in virtually every sector, and—oh, yes—4) professional facilitation skill too!
IN OTHER WORDS, HIRE A HEAVYWEIGHT STRATEGIST WHO WILL PROVIDE REAL MEAT TO GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR TEAM … NOT A LIGHTWEIGHT WHO MAY KEEP TIME AND TAKE NOTES BUT IS OUT OF HIS OR HER DEPTH WHEN IT COMES TO OFFERING INPUT OF ANY SUBSTANCE.
It may cost you more, but having a pro help you design and run your strategy workshop takes you a big step closer to getting the results you want.
What are your objectives for the meeting—i.e., what do you want to walk away with? What preparation is necessary? What should the process look like (presentations, discussions, frameworks, concepts, etc)? What should be on the agenda, and how should it flow? And most importantly, what comes next, when everyone is back at work?
Get this stuff wrong, and you’ll be sure to head down the wrong path. Get it right, and your time, effort, and money will be well spent. But make no mistake: this is where you need real competence.
And by the way, you may think you can facilitate your own meeting, but that’s seldom the best path. When you’re part of a team, it’s hard to stand outside of it; when you’ve been party to decisions and you’re involved in the politics of corporate life, you can’t easily be as objective as you should—and anyway, no one will believe you are.
So hire someone you can trust, brief them thoroughly—and early—and watch the meeting work!
Print This Page
25 Jul 2012
The proof is everywhere: companies are better at talking than doing. They know strategy is important, and put a lot of effort into it, but then just can’t get the right things done. For all their action lists, KPIs, KRAs, compacts, dashboards and scorecards, their wheels keep spinning.
Tom Peters says 90% of strategies don’t get implemented and Kaplan and Norton, authors of the balanced scorecard, say the same. A study from Ernst & Young, cited in the December 2004 issue of Harvard Management Update, says it’s 66%. Research by Marakon Associates says firms lose about 37% of the financial potential of their strategies.
Precisely which number is right doesn’t matter. What does matter is that across the world and across companies there’s a yawning gap between good intentions and hard action. Almost every management team I’ve worked with in more than 25 years as a consultant has told me the same thing: “We’re good at creating strategy, but not at execution.”
Closing the gap must be a priority for any firm wanting to get ahead and stay there. The best ideas and plans of little value if you can’t turn them into reality. The costs of slippage are colossal. Besides, in a world of sameness, where it’s increasingly difficult to sustain a strategic position and avoid commoditization, operational effectiveness—also known as execution—might be your most important advantage.
Because execution is so hard, it’s tempting to look for a system, process, model, or other formula that might help. There are plenty of them around. Some are costly and most are complex. You’ll find one or more of them in most firms. But the fact that so many smart executives point to execution as a problem tells you something is wrong. The tools being used are clearly not working as they’re supposed to.
Executing strategy is not a once-off job. You’ll never excel in it by just instructing a few people to “do it.” It’s an all day, everyday activity that involves everyone, one way or another. It demands a simple, sound and practical approach, the involvement of key people, and enormous commitment. Above all it demands tough, determined, “in your face” leadership.
The good news is that with common sense and proven principles rather than fads and flashy answers, you can escape the execution trap. You can improve your organization’s ability to turn plans into action so you consistently get more done, faster, and possibly with fewer resources, than you do today.
GET A HEAD START
The time to think about how to execute your strategy is when you first think about making it. Not after the event when you have something on paper and need to make it happen.
The starting point is to recognize that your overriding challenge as a leader is to to take your people with you. Your brilliant vision is worth nothing if they don’t buy it and give it their all. Here’s where execution gets a kick-start—or failure gets baked in.
To help you win support, think about these two questions:
- WHAT MUST YOUR PEOPLE KNOW, SO THEY’LL BE ABLE TO DO WHAT THEY NEED TO DO?
- HOW SHOULD THEY FEEL, SO THEY WILL DO WHAT THEY NEED TO DO?
While the focus of these questions is different, they are inextricably linked. It’s almost impossible to effectively deal with one without at the same time dealing with the other.
To get your people on side, you have to ensure they understand what you’re trying to do, why it matters, what must be done altogether, who will be responsible for what—and what they personally need to do. So you need to provide a point of view (which may or may not yet be completely clear) about how you see the future. You need to ensure that they have access to whatever information will help them. And you need to solicit their opinions and ideas, and embrace those that improve your strategy.
At the same time, you have to inspire and energize your people to actually do the right things rapidly and well. And here’s good news. The very fact that you give them direction and information, and involve them in shaping your strategy, goes a long way towards winning their hearts and minds. The reason? People seek meaning in their work. They want a sense that they matter, they’re respected, and their opinions count.
GET THE RIGHT PEOPLE IN THE ROOM—AND THAT MAY MEAN EVERYONE
When I’m asked, “Who should be part of a strategy conversation?” my automatic answer is, “Everyone.” And I’m serious. (And yes, I do understand that it’s not always practical, may not be affordable, and you might need to talk about some particularly sensitive matters.)
It’s common practice for small teams of top people develop strategy, then pass it down for others to action. While there may be good reasons to confine initial choices and decisions to a just a few people, there are equally powerful arguments against doing so.
Here are some of them:
- When you invite anyone to a meeting, and particularly to one of high importance, you send them and everyone else a signal: “You matter; your contribution is valuable; we respect you and need to hear what you have to say; we trust you.” Not inviting them sends exactly the opposite signal—not an encouraging one!
- The top people in an organization may have a broad perspective of the world and the challenges they face, but they’re unlikely to know in detail what’s happening down in the trenches or out in the marketplace. First-hand insights from where the action is may be crucial to their decision-making.
- You never know where the best ideas will come from in an organization. Often, it’s from the unlikeliest people. But that only happens if they’re given the chance.
- Communicating a strategy is always difficult. The simpler a presentation, the more gets left out of it. The nuances of the conversation in which it was developed are lost. As a result, you may do a reasonable job explaining the “how”, but not the “why.” And it’s the why that helps people understand the significance of their efforts.
- Participation increases the likelihood of buy-in. Exclusion is a sure-fire way to make execution difficult.
Only by involving the right people early, and in a positive and constructive way, can you hope to either develop the best possible strategy or execute it effectively. For this is when your strategic conversation begins. The first discussions set the tone for all others. By focusing your attention here, you can sharpen your competitive edge and give your firm new advantages for the future.
We all know that strategy is an intellectual process, involving logic, analysis, decisions, and trade-offs. But that’s only part of the story. It is to a far greater degree a social process, involving people with all their strengths and weaknesses. Ignoring this reality, firms set themselves up for failure.
Without the insight and imagination of a critical mass of your people, you’ll never get the best strategy. Without their spirit and commitment, you’ll never execute your strategy. And the time to start work on getting their buy-in on Day 1—right up front.
Print This Page
