21 Do’s and Don’ts to Optimize the Annual Strategy Offsite
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Organizational Transformation, Strategy
As predictable as the change of seasons and the swooning of the Cubs in the Chicago-area, I’m starting to hear whisperings about plans for upcoming strategic planning offsites.
And while I spend a lot of time preaching to anyone that will listen that STRATEGY IS A PROCESS NOT AN EVENT, I’ve come to grips with the fact that many organizations and leaders relegate their strategic thinking time to these annual events.
If your organization treats strategic planning this way, I’ll offer a few of my hard-learned lessons on how to optimize results and possibly even catalyze a more robust process that sustains beyond the once-a-year event.
The Annual Offsite:
For many organizations, the annual Strategy Offsite is the primary or only occasion during the year when key managers gather to talk about market and competitor issues and to discuss directions and opportunities for new investments and programs.
And while a single event is not a substitute for an on-going strategy process, if designed and managed properly, the offsite can help to get people thinking and talking about the right issues.
After many years of sitting on both sides of these events—participant and leader -, I’ve compiled a list of Do’s and Don’ts that if followed will help you optimize this valuable use of time and avoid some morale and meeting killing mistakes.
The Annual Strategy Offsite List of Do’s:
1. Choose the attendee’s carefully: incorporate key managers, individual contributors and thought leaders in addition to executives.
2. Start the planning for this event several months ahead of the actual date by developing a strategy team consisting of an executive sponsor (CEO is fine) and a representative from each of the functional teams. I encourage clients to go one layer below VP for these team members to provide others with developmental opportunities and to infuse fresh ideas into the process.
3. Carefully define the scope of the event along with key goals and outcomes for the session and then develop the agenda along with roles and responsibilities. Also, identify advance work such as data gathering and dissemination that will educate and arm people on key facts and issues before the meeting. This is a great opportunity to identify advance work teams and begin building collaboration around strategy issues.
4. Encourage the participants to educate their associates/teams on what the meeting is about and even to engage their help in advance data gathering or idea generation.
5. The CEO needs to recognize that many people approach these events with different attitudes: concern, cynicism or plans for subtle defiance should the outcome require change. It is the CEO’s job to get everyone on the same page. Build the vision!
6. Consider the use of an outside facilitator to ensure that the meeting stays on track and on topic in pursuit of the established goals and outcomes. It is extremely difficult for participants to objectively facilitate this process—especially if they are content/idea contributors. It’s nearly impossible to do both effectively.
7. Practice effective meeting management techniques, offer ample breaks, incorporate activities and movement (breakouts, mini-groups, report backs), ensure that there is a scribe and a timekeeper and recognize people’s limitations to be creative on command.
8. Your goal is not necessarily consensus on any one key issue—so don’t focus on driving every topic down to the agreement level. This event is a great opportunity to motivate lateral thinking.
9. If managed properly, you will come away with a current view on the market, key market forces, competitor strategies and opportunities for your company to exploit, defend, adapt and improve. Recognize that all of the “ideas” will require additional fleshing out and establish ownership and follow-up commitments (what, who, when).
10. Realize that if you do a good job with 1-9 above, you are creating a strategy process not just conducting an event.
The Annual Strategy Offsite List of Don’ts
1. Don’t expect everyone to be excited about this event—you have to provide context and build interest.
2. Don’t expect people to “innovate on command” around complex issues. Starting the meeting by asking, “What business should we be in?” is a guaranteed disaster.
3 Don’t drive for consensus—you invite the tyranny of mediocrity to have a seat at your table as you force people to compromise around half-measures.
4. Don’t take the group through a death march of composing mission or vision statements at these sessions.
5. Don’t forget that everyone else in the company knows this meeting is going on and they think you are talking about them.
6. Don’t over-invite: it’s not a company town hall.
7. Don’t limit to just executive members—there are a lot of smart people that make executives look good.
8. Don’t let the meeting end without planned follow-up.
9. Don’t make the offsite an operations update by burning a lot of time covering results and key metrics—that should be handled ahead of time.
10. Don’t use an internal facilitator that has an agenda—it will be visible to everyone and destroy meeting morale and credibility.
11. Don’t expect one meeting to yield market dominating strategy plans—it’s a process not an event.
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Take the opportunity to catalyze a great process by running an outstanding event. Happy planning.
Life, Professional Development, Quality and the Art of Ceiling Painting
Filed under: Career, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
There’s a graduation in our house this week, so please bear with me if my blog post here has come down a few levels from the lofty topics that I enjoy writing about.
Our youngest son wraps up his high school career and like many families across the country, we are holding an open house for friends and neighbors to celebrate the event.
And like many husbands in similar situations across the country, I’m in charge of finishing up those chores that I put off all winter while I was writing Leadership and the Project Manager or teaching or delivering workshops or talking about performance excellence to industry groups.
Today’s chore is to paint the kitchen ceiling.
Joy.
Many of my colleagues have chastised me for not doing a better job valuing my time and hiring out these types of tasks. They are right on the value. It does not pay for me to paint my ceiling when I could be doing something of a client-service nature (translation: revenue generating activities).
Nonetheless, there is something cathartic about shifting gears, getting out of my chair and tackling a project as nefarious and diabolically difficult (to me) as doing a good job on a kitchen ceiling.
Additionally, I come from a long-line of do-it yourself types and it is tough to fight all of the genetic and environmental conditioning that require me to grab the tools when there is work to be done. I’m working on it, but I’m not cured yet.
Doing a quality job on the ceiling takes total concentration, a focus on detail (the edging along the wall) and well-honed technique to ensure good coverage without lines and runs. Add in paint with an eggshell finish because of the kitchen environment, and for me, this is no small task. Ironically, the painting is the easiest part of the job, yet it is the preparation that ensures a great outcome.
Like almost every job in life and in business, a successful outcome is a function of detailed preparation, a good plan and painstaking attention to the issues that potentially will impact the outcome. The patching, sanding, masking, cutting-in and thorough application of paint are all critical to the final product. Oh, and don’t forget the drop cloths to catch collateral spatter.
In the working environment, and in our own professional lives, our focus on learning, mastering our tools and techniques and ensuring that we place all of our energy and concentration on the task at hand are difficult qualities to learn. It’s easier to take shortcuts, but shortcuts never yield the quality we truly need to succeed and excel. We often have to learn these lessons the hard way, but the best professionals stick with it until they complete a quality job.
As my son ends up a great high school experience and heads off to college, the metaphor fits. I’m hopeful that he has started to understand the lessons of the painter and painting. He’ll probably have to redo a few ceilings of his own along the way, like we all do. Hopefully though, in the end, he will also paint a few masterpieces.
Now, I’ve stalled long enough. The roller awaits!
Fresh Voices: Management in the 21st Century
Filed under: Career, Fresh Voices, Innovation, Leadership, Leading Change, Leading the Generations, Management Innovation, Organizational Transformation, Social Commentary
Note from Art: While I am referencing a well-known leadership and management author here, the Fresh Voices come from the rich and thought-provoking comments and commenters to the author’s post.
If you are fascinated as I am about the evolution of management and its role, form and function in our current and near future world, I strongly encourage you to check out Gary Hamel’s blog post (Help Reinvent Management for the 21st Century).
This is a case where the post prompts a flood of great thoughts and ideas from some sharp people from around the globe.
As background, Dr. Hamel is producing a conference on May 29 and 30 in California, that will bring together 35 luminaries from business and academia to focus on reinventing management for the new century.
The four questions that Dr. Hamel and the brain-trust will attempt to answer include:
“1. What are the deep-seated impediments, or “design flaws,” that limit the capacity of organizations to adapt (to change without trauma); to innovate (to mobilize the imagination of everyone, every day); and to engage (to create environments that inspire extraordinary contributions).
2. Given these systemic impediments, and the new demands that will confront organizations in the years ahead, what should be the agenda for 21st century management innovators? That is, what are the “moonshot challenges” that must be addressed if we are to create organizations that are truly fit for the future?
3. Can we imagine, even in outline form, some potential solutions to these challenges, and if so, what sorts of experiments might be useful in helping us to test these ideas in real world settings?
4. More generally, what could be done to help accelerate the evolution of management in the years to come, that is, what is it that limits the pace of management innovation and how might these limits by overcome?”
While I’m certain that the event will generate some fascinating ideas, Dr. Hamel acknowledges what you are probably thinking about now: the solutions will not emerge and change our lives as an outcome of this conference. In his own words: “A few dozen braniacs are no substitute for a crowd of inspired and unconventional thinkers.”
He’s right of course, but the questions above are heady and invigorating topics for any collection of motivated management professionals.
A few of my favorite comments to his post include:
-The Professor who makes his case rather belligerently that all of our management problems would be solved if only we would adopt military style leadership. He is kind enough to include a link to a list of books that support his philosophy.
-The Open Teams approach to breaking down the traditional “monolithic hierarchy.”
-The many comments (almost essays) that attack traditional, ingrained approaches to leadership and management and offer glimpses into how these approaches must change.
-Several comments that support a Silicon-Valley approach to management and innovation and at least one that indicates the positive influence that will flow from the movement of the Millennials into the workplace.
-A fascinating and lengthy post from a doctoral student in India that challenges us to look hard at 4 invisible but evolutionary urges driving the evolution of human society.
and many others.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
If the future of management is of interest to you, reading the comments is certain to start your wheels turning. Feel free to join their discussion or start your own thread here. I plan on tackling Dr.Hamel’s questions in both locations.
Leadership Caffeine for the New Week: Your Message and the Chicken Salad Sandwich Test
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Professional Growth, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Much of what passes for leadership conversation in the workplace is filled with unnecessary and meaningless jargon that gets in the way of the true message. It’s time to de-clutter our conversations and choose words that are meaningful and actionable to our team members.
Dan and Chip Heath in the book, Made to Stick-Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, do a wonderful job of providing a framework for clearing up our core messages and they offer some great examples along the way.
Consider the oft-mentioned phrase, “We must strive to maximize shareholder value.” The Heaths compare this phrase to the mantra uttered constantly by Southwest founder and Chairman Herb Kelleher during his tenure, “We will be the low cost carrier.”
Both statements are positive in intent, but one is infinitely more actionable than the other.
The CEO and other top executives seeking to maximize shareholder value might very well understand that this goal will be accomplished through diligent pursuit of core strategies, selective, accretive acquisitions and managing core projects like a portfolio of investments.
However, if you are a front-line employee, it’s darned hard to know what maximizes shareholder value on a decision-by-decision basis or whether your action will be accretive, much less whether it is good to be accretive or whether that means that you need to see a doctor!
Alternatively, it’s relatively simple to process an issue through the framework of “Will this action support our goal of being the low-cost carrier?”
Do Chicken Salad Sandwiches Support the Strategy?
The example cited in Made to Stick of Kelleher’s “We will be the low cost carrier” message in action is a well-intended Southwest employee suggesting that based on customer feedback, the addition of Chicken Salad sandwiches on one of the longer routes would improve the customer experience.
Kelleher reportedly asked: “Will serving chicken salad sandwiches on that route contribute to our goal to be the low cost carrier? If the answer is no, “We don’t need no damn chicken salad sandwiches.”
The Bottom-line for Now:
The next time you are required to provide direction or are involved in setting or communicating strategy, ask yourself whether your messaging and your word choices will help people determine whether Chicken Salad Sandwiches are appropriate or not? If the answer is: “It’s not clear,” keep working to improve your message.
The U.S. Memorial Day Weekend
For most Americans, the Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of summer. This long three day weekend tends to be filled with barbecues, picnics and sporting events.
The soccer and baseball fields in our communities are filled with children playing and parents cheering. Many of us take to the roads and head “Up North” to camp and fish and boat. On this three day weekend in the Midwest, we rediscover our neighbors after a long winter and we catch up with friends and relatives.
It’s easy to forget the purpose and meaning of the weekend. Here’s part of the original Memorial Day Order:
“The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form or ceremony is prescribed, but Posts and comrades will, in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.”
The instructions are clear that there is no formal ceremony and that it is up to us as individuals and members of our community to remember.
Take a moment out of your activities and barbecues this weekend to live up to the spirit of the order and Remember. If you are so inclined, fly your flag and as you put it up and take it down, take a second and offer a silent thanks to those that served so that we might flourish.
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