Strategic Awareness: The Second Leg of the Emerging Leader’s Three Legged Stool
Filed under: Career, Current Affairs, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Professional Growth, Strategy, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
One of the things that I truly love about this time we are living and working through is the front-row seats that we all have to some fascinating experiments in strategy. Things happen so quickly and with such widespread coverage in today’s world, that it often looks and feels like a strategist’s living laboratory on Miracle Gro.
A quick scan of the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on my remarkable e-book reader, Kindle, indicates that Google Plans to Launch an Operating System for PCs and that Kodak’s CEO is Betting Big on Printers. Take a second and comprehend the strategy issues and implications of that last sentence. At least two out of three are staggering (Kindle and Google) and one is either the last gasp of a dying giant or a brilliant move to disrupt an entrenched industry.
There’s more:
As a consumer, I’m in the process of switching phone service providers for two of my family members and the one that I’m moving to cannot get the newest iphone in under a week. Sold out.
Just yesterday, my oldest son approached me about a new application for the iPhone that converts it to a true navigation device like those we buy in our cars from Garmin and Tom Tom and others. Hmmm, wonder how that meeting is going inside those device makers.
We live in an era where the platform is King. Think iTunes and the remarkable and industry-disrupting ecosystem that has sprung up around it. Consider Twitter and how it has revolutionized interactions and network building and how it supported a near-revolution in Iran.
The Three Legged Stool of the Emerging Leader/Senior Contributor:
I make no secret about my belief that emerging leaders…the executives and senior contributors of tomorrow must develop remarkable competence in three areas: leadership, strategy and communication.
Effective communication skills can be taught and with practice mastered. Learning to lead is difficult, and experience is the only teacher, but individuals armed with good philosophical underpinnings and supported by good mentoring and feedback can develop and improve their leadership skills.
The remaining leg: developing a sense of strategy and ultimately developing the ability to see and pursue strategic vectors is the most difficult to cultivate. It’s abstract, it’s creative, it’s often risky and there is little in the way of developmental support for emerging strategists.
Business schools tend to treat strategy as history lessons (cases) or as a sterile simulation game. Both are interesting and even fun, but of little use in my opinion in fostering the type of thinking, experimentation and action that leads to winning strategies.
The strategy events and processes inside corporations are often so dysfunctional and poorly managed that an invitation to be involved can seem like a ticket to the county lock-up. The best outcome is getting out.
Guidance for the Emerging Leader on Developing a Sense of Strategy:
While I’ll stop short of offering a “how to” prescription on developing as a strategist, there are certainly some actions and steps that an individual can take to increase their strategic awareness.
- Study and monitor the many strategic experiments occurring in real-time right in front of you. Is the Kindle the spark that rewrites the publishing business, like iTunes was to the music business? Can a floundering old giant regain its footing on a technology that consumes resources in the electronic and green era? Is Google’s move to an operating system brilliance, arrogance or just plain futile in a Microsoft dominated world? And for that matter, can Microsoft…the strategy giant of two decades ago reinvent itself?
- Think about your business and your products in the context of the most compelling and uncertain experiments occurring in front of you. Do you have a mini-platform option in your industry? If you truly understood your customers needs, what business and products would you create from scratch?
- Quit thinking about your competitors from a mimicking mind-set. In fact, quit preoccupying on their every move. It’s healthy to monitor but it’s better and even to battle, but save some gray matter for rethinking the business in a manner that ensures your competitor is obsolete.
- Beware the Innovator’s Dilemma. If you don’t know what that is, read the book!
- In addition to Innovator’s Dilemma, read: Tuned-In and Inside the Tornado and Crossing the Chasm. You could do much, much worse than base your strategic thinking on the principles espoused in these great works.
- Get involved in shaping, executing and monitoring strategy in your area of influence.
- Ask questions of those around you to better understand your firm’s situation in the marketplace and its strategic objectives.
- Work hard to ensure that your activities connect to the firm’s core strategies.
The Bottom-Line:
The world and the workplace are filled with people going through the motions, taking orders and executing and acting without really thinking. Strategists on the other hand are constantly striving to connect ideas and patterns to needs and value creating activities. Great leaders have a strong sense of strategy. Take responsibility for developing your sense of strategy and for supporting that development in others. You might just find that life and work are a lot more fun and rewarding this way.
In Search of the High Performance Team
A special note: today is Veterans Day
While we may struggle in business to consistently produce high-performance teams, our soldiers in service of our country live this on a regular basis. Thanks to those who have served, those who are serving and to all who have sacrificed. Our gratitude has no end.
In Search of the High Performance Team
I regularly poll my seminar participants and MBA students on their team-focused experiences in the workplace and I am consistently surprised when very few report ever being part of something that they would classify as a “high performance” team.
The results of my unscientific polling are all the more surprising given that we live during a time when involvement in short-term projects with individuals across functions is a part of the regular work experience of most professionals.
The business literature is filled with articles and interviews from leaders and pundits on topics tied to innovation, business execution and team heroics. Of course, the same companies tend to be the focal point of these articles. It seems like we cannot get enough of the stories of heroics pulled off in companies like Apple, Ideo Google and the few others that seem to make the short-list for the popular business press. It’s curious that those companies got the memo on creating high-performance teams and the rest of us are relegated to reading about their successes.
When I ask about involvement on high-performance teams, there is invariably someone in the audience sharp enough to ask me what I mean. Admittedly, my definition is one of those kind of squishy, you’ll know it when you experience it answers. It’s also a multi-part answer that goes something like this:
- A high-performance team is a group of people that have figured out how to work together to knock down and succeed in pursuit of audacious goals. They’ve learned to leverage their respective strengths, compensate for weaknesses and tap into the power that a group of people uniquely focused on a goal are able to generate.
- High-performance teams thrive on challenges, revel only momentarily in successes and mostly seek the next big challenge. They tend to be paranoid about becoming overconfident and in general, they don’t seek significant public recognition.
- The working environment on this team is comfortable for collaboration, encouraging of disparate opinions and singularly focused on turning ideas into actions. High-performance teams are
self-policing. Values and accountabilities are clear and there is an explicit expectation that membership requires honoring the values. Membership on this team is a true privilege.
- The leader on a high-performance team recognizes that his or her role is teach, to knock down obstacles and to constantly focus on creating the environment that allows others to succeed at high-levels. This leader may be tough, but this leader tends to be quiet, letting actions talk. You generally won’t find this leader to be loud and boisterous, although they may be a great cheerleader as well as a stern disciplinarian behind team walls.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Effective leadership is a pre-requisite for the creation of a high-performance team. Perhaps if more leaders focused on their responsibility to empower others, I would see some more hands raised when I ask about whether your employees have been part of a high-performance team. It’s not too late to start working on this.
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