The Conversations You Are Not Having Are Killing Your Business
I work a great deal helping people and teams improve their conversations. Whether the focus is on framing, feedback or process, most teams and most individuals are able to relate to and adopt new tools and approaches that help immediately. However, the most important issue that most leaders and teams face is not in what is being said, but rather, it’s the important topics not being discussed.
10 Popular Discussions Not Occurring in Your Organization Right Now:
1. The much overdue “crucial confrontation” with the toxic team member.
2. The brutally honest assessment of your firm’s situation in the marketplace.
3. The fact that you have no visible sort of strategy…you’ve never had one and now that times have turned tough, the absence of this strategy is visible to everyone but the boss.
4. The reality that last year’s pet development project from the CEO is sucking the resources and morale out of the company, when everyone but the CEO knows this project just sucks.
5. How your “goals” and “metrics” connect to what’s important for the firm. Heck, you would settle for goals.
6. What you really think about an employee’s performance. The coating of sugar “sandwiched” between the bread of your watered down feedback is choking off the real message.
7. The painful reality that the last 243 “brainstorming” sessions you’ve participated in, have resulted in just one outcome…hiring the hypnotist for company holiday party. It was darned funny, but you find yourself wishing you could be hypnotized to forget the painful reality that there’s little that ever changes in this slowly eroding business.
8. Why the boss spends her entire life flying around “meeting with customers” but nothing ever seems to come of it, other than the postponement of the already much postponed critical discussions.
9. How the latest reorganization plan, engineered from the top, actually improves anything for anyone who works with people who send money to your firm.
10. Anything resembling a development discussion where you have a chance to share your ambitions and aspirations and the boss actually does something to help you move in that direction. The only direction you feel like moving now, is out.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Chances are that the silence from at least a few of these conversations not happening in your firm is deafening. Feel free to print this out, highlight the “missing” conversation and pass it along to the silent parties. Or, better yet…pick one and start the conversation rolling.
Words, carefully constructed and artfully executed are still the best way to start a revolution.
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About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, will be announced during the last week of September, 2011. Initial copies are now available on Amazon.com and via the author for team/group orders.
Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.
From Strategic Planning to Strategic Conversations
Filed under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Strategy
The McKinsey Quarterly (subscription required) just released the results of its latest survey on corporate strategic planning activities in an article entitled: Strategic Planning: Three tips for 2009.
Key results include:
- 47% of executives surveyed indicated that their strategic planning practices will be different this year than in prior years. 34% indicated that the activities would be “extremely different.”
- The differences tend to focus on increased emphasis on scenario planning, conducting a broader range of analyses, and as you might expect, focusing on more of a short time horizon.
- In what is likely good news for the malady that I described in my recent post, “Too many projects chasing too few resources,” one of the more widely reported changes for this period is an increase in the rigor of evaluating and approving capital projects.
- As for monitoring execution, 50% of respondents plan on scrutinizing their firm’s/unit’s performance against the plan somewhere between weekly and monthly.
The survey’s conclusion offers a cautionary tale on the potential for too much short-term focus, with the following:
“Important as these adjustments may be, their nature also raise a major question in the minds of many strategists: is the crisis atmosphere undermining focus on all but the immediate future? More than 50 percent of executives, in fact, express worry about not striking the right balance between near-term challenges and long-term strategic priorities. The perennial challenge of striking this balance has become particularly acute this year.”
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From Planning to Conversations
You can set your watch by the fact that just as opening day in baseball rolls around, the articles on strategic planning start appearing. I continue to rail at the notion that this is a seasonal activity, and am actually encouraged by the large number of firms that are planning on evaluating performance against plan monthly. Hopefully, this evaluation is more than a distribution of reports, and involves opportunities to truly gauge progress, capture lessons-learned and make real-time adjustments.
While there is no doubt that strategic planning done right is a valuable management process and tool, in my opinion, we need to change both the vernacular and the approaches to move from strategic planning to conducting strategic conversations. Frankly, I want everyone in my firm thinking, talking and relating their work activities to the firm’s strategies for creating customer value and thumping competitors.
There are many potential pitfalls and poor practices that can derail even the best of intentions for strategic planning, and one of the most fatal is restricting the involvement in this process to a select few.
And while I am neither naïve enough or idealistic enough to think that it is practical to have everyone actively involved in all planning sessions, I do believe that good leadership practices open up multi-directional dialogue about strategy and performance.
The best run companies that I’ve worked around ensure that employees pass the “Walk In the Door” test…they can connect their priorities to the firm’s priorities every day that they walk in the door. They also ensure that there are ample opportunities for employees to share ideas, capture lessons-learned, reflect on Voice of Customer and suggest adjustments to execution or even to strategy.
The people in these environments engage in strategic conversations that ensure that the emperor knows if he has no clothes on and that challenge potentially bone-headed ideas or the poor execution practices that derail good ideas.
Charan and Bossidy call this Robust Dialogue. I describe it as a healthy feedback culture, filled with leaders at all levels that get the fact that their chances of success are enhanced if they park their egos at the door and promote and encourage widespread involvement.
Realizing a culture where strategic conversations are prevalent and effective takes hard work on the part of those that lead. Of course, no one said that being a good leader was easy.
How healthy and frequent are the strategic conversations in your firm?
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