The Importance of Strategy Fueled Leadership

September 9, 2010 By 3 Comments

soapboxI’ve written on the topic of Strategy Fueled Leadership several times, and fresh off of a great podcast interview with Gary Harpst, author of Six Disciplines Execution Revolution (stay tuned for my posting) and my recent interview with Jocelyn Davis for Strategic Speed, I am on my soapbox again.

It is critical to link leadership with strategy and vice-versa and the failure to do this is one of the root causes of strategy and execution failure in organizations.

Soft Soap:

Much of the writing and talking about leadership appropriately emphasizes the softer side of things. Creating a great working environment, building credibility, leading with fairness, providing motivation and even inspiration…all of these are important. There’s a good chunk of my half-million blog words tied to those issues.

Nonetheless, the tremendous energy required to develop as a leader and to develop leaders around you is an exercise in human relations if it is not intrinsically connected to the underlying purpose of the enterprise…solving vexing problems for others and making or generating money.

I’ll invoke Drucker’s view as to the purpose of an organization: “The purpose of an organization is to acquire and keep customers.” Choose his version or your own favorite form of  “maximize value for…” definition and the issue is still the same.

Leadership uncoupled from strategy might as well be counseling.

Unfortunately, We Kind of Suck at Strategy:

  • Year in and year out, one of the top concerns of global CEOs is the struggle that their firms face in executing strategy. McKinsey’s year-end surveys are a great source, and the recent Harvard Business Review research focused on this topic underscores this issue.
  • I regularly poll on my “walk in the door” test in workshops and consulting sessions. The question is simple: “How many of you can connect your own priorities to the strategic priorities of your firm?” You can be certain that less than half (sometimes way less) can pass this simple test.
  • In Strategic Speed, the authors identify some insane number of strategies that are abandoned due to the inability to execute. Their findings, “It’s the people, stupid.”
  • In Six Disciplines Execution Revolution, Gary does a great job of making the case that most small to mid-sized firms spend most of their useful time somewhere out of balance between strategy and execution, often getting lost in operations or fire-fighting mode while neglecting both the “what next?” and the issues surrounding “how do we execute, learn and improve?”

Strategy is Everyone’s Business:

It’s critical for everyone in an organization to be attuned to their firm’s strategies and priorities, and to be part of the execution and feedback/learning processes.  It’s doubly important for those managers making key calls every day on how people spend their time, to be attuned to strategy.

When suggesting this “everyone is involved” concept before, I’ve received pushback that it’s too cumbersome…and not everyone gets a vote. These points miss the point.  There are undoubtedly key calls that need to be made by the people operating at high levels.  However, the work of implementing happens below those making the big calls, and all of the rich organizational learning opportunities including customer feedback, competitor response and “Ah Ha” moments take place somewhere well below the C-Suite.

Leading with Strategy Creates Context:

People do their best work when they have context for the importance and relevance of the work. Strategy provides that context in the workplace.

What might be just an IT improvement project to one team charged with the responsibility for carrying it out, may well to another group be a critical enabler of strategy, that once implemented will dramatically improve the ability to engage, support and even sell more to existing customers.

It’s much like the old story of the two stone-cutters that were asked what they were working on. One responded, “I’m cutting these stones into blocks.” The other answered, “I’m building a cathedral.” Context plus inspiration!

The Bottom-line for Now:

Gary articulated the importance of getting all layers of leadership involved in understanding strategy and translating that into execution. Jocelyn and her co-authors build a compelling case that the execution problems that bedevil so many organizations, are in fact people and communication problems. I agree.

It’s time to put the strategy into leadership and start counseling and coaching with context.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Leadership, Performance, Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Leadership Caffeine: Learning to Adjust Your Altitude

April 12, 2010 By 14 Comments

A Cup of Leadership CaffeineWhile the phrase is most commonly referenced as attitude adjustment, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that one of the abilities that leaders must develop to be effective is the ability to adjust their altitudes.

Good leaders learn to scale institutional and intellectual heights with ease and comfort, quickly adapting to the audience and situation.

Examples of Frequent and Successful Altitude Adjusters:

  • There’s the CEO that’s built a career around being a brilliant strategist and an even better operator.  Watch him work a factory floor and you’ll see him descend from the lofty level of the boardroom to the critical issues of people and process.  He’s equally comfortable in the rarefied air of strategy and vision and market forces or as an observer and student on the shop floor where true value is being created.
  • The small business owner that serves customers all day long and drives home with an emerging vision for how her business must change in order to grow.
  • The college professor that translates the philosophical foundations and theories of her specialty into practical, relevant concepts and tools that clarify, stimulate interest and offer some form of sustaining value.  This professor offers knowledge and insight designed for use.
  • The Product Manager that is able to move seamlessly from detailed requirements discussions with engineers in the morning to a concise strategy discussion and competitive analysis with executives in the afternoon.
  • The Project Manager that pivots on one foot to resolve a team dispute and then pivots back to the work of helping his team learn to make better decisions.

Regardless of the specifics, these effective formal and informal leaders move seamlessly from the detailed to the general, from the tactical to strategic and from the confusing and complex to the simple and straightforward as easily as you are reading this post. Whether this is an innate ability for some or a learned skill for others, those that practice adjusting their altitudes are significantly more effective than others stuck at one level.

Of course, those that are effectively stuck at one level are requiring everyone else to adapt, and that takes energy and breeds stress and strife.  These less than effective leaders require both the proverbial attitude adjustment as well as some solid lessons in learning to adjust their altitude.

5 Suggestions for Learning to More Effectively Adjust Your Altitude:

1.  Seek first to understand and then be understood.  I love that saying for its wisdom.  I observe many leaders that engage with their team members on issues for just a few moments and then cut them off mid-stream, with an opinion, a decision or an order.  Teach yourself to clamp your jaw shut and listen and process on all of the verbal and non-verbal cues that are so generously placed in front of you.  The time you invest in focusing and listening and then thinking about the issue being presented will give you time to adjust your altitude to the right level.

2.  Plan your message. Knowledge workers and individual contributors should redouble their efforts to plan the messages for exchanges with executives.  While you may be personally fascinated by the details of your project or product, it is critical to recognize that those in executive roles want you to give them the time…not to tell them how to build the watch.  For unscheduled, hallway or elevator exchanges, condition yourself to move into time-teller mode, again resisting the urge to showcase your in-depth command of every detail.  Your overall work and results will showcase whether you have command of the details.

3.  Recognize that context is key to motivating action.  Assume that no one else has thought through the issue in as much depth as you have.  Management teams that vigorously debate strategy for weeks and then become satisfied on a direction and choices must recognize that no one else in the organization has any context for either the direction or the choices.  This common communication gap is actually more like a grand canyon of misunderstanding, both in expanse and in height and depth.

4. Learn to see patterns in problems. In your daily work life, develop the habit of identifying recurring problems and patterns and then suggesting and implementing ideas that eliminate these problems and improve organizational practices.

5. View your role and tasks in the context of a long value chain.  Instead of thinking about what you do as discrete and separate from people in other groups, recognize that your work impacts the performance of others along the chain.  Seek to understand how and why others depend upon you and better yet, develop an approach that emphasizes constantly measuring your own performance against how well you are meeting the needs of others that come after you in the organizational value chain.

The Bottom Line for Now:

For your own professional development, challenge yourself to understand issues from all levels.  The best leaders and the best employees connect their work to creating value for customers or solving vexing internal issues. These effective professionals learn to scale heights from idea to implementation, from problem to improvement and from understanding to new direction.  They strive to become effective communicators at all levels and they constantly focus on understanding what is reality to individuals at all layers of the organization.

While the vertical metaphor of altitude may grossly simplify what is really going on here, it’s simple and comprehensible enough to grasp and apply.  For today and everyday, make certain that you are challenging yourself to adjust your altitude.  You might just find a lot more enjoyment and success in your work, in the process of scaling the issues.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Improve Strategy and Execution Planning with Project Management Practices

November 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I’ve danced with this topic before (Struggling with Strategy? Think Project Management), and the more experience that I gain helping clients improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their strategic planning and execution program development activities through project management practices, the more sold I am on the approach.

In my experience, many of the biggest gaffes in strategy and execution planning processes occur because the common-sense steps of the Project Manager are ignored, often because a functional leader or worse yet, an executive is charged with running the project.

Just a few areas where I’ve observed complete strategy project derailment because good project management practices were ignored:

  • The meetings grind down in a never-ending sea of fact-finding, debate and then more debate.
  • Instead of focusing on strategic issues, the discussions quickly shift to short-term operational issues.
  • Tools are misapplied.
  • The deliverables are a powerpoint deck and a bunch of disgruntled participants that realize that they will never get the time that they just wasted back again.
  • Insular groups that practice strategic planning like it is a combination of Voodoo and a secret language, complete with a secret handshake for entry into meetings.
  • Ideas are generated, but there is no mechanism to turn them into actions.
  • Actions take place but there are no mechanisms to evaluate relative success and gain lessons learned
  • A strategy is created but the organization’s employees are not tuned in to the strategy well-enough to understand how to connect their priorities to the strategic objectives of the firm.
  • The Voice of the Customer is never heard.

And so on…

Enter the Project Manager armed with skills required to improve the odds of success. I encourage management teams to treat a strategic planning cycle as a series of projects, and to engage a senior-level project manager to run the process.

Suggestions to Improve Strategy and Execution Program Effectiveness include:

  • Creation of a Charter and the assignment of an executive sponsor that is responsible for the success of the initiative.
  • Identification of core Strategy Team members, and their responsibilities/accountabilities in the process.
  • Development of a clear scope document that defines priorities and deliverables.
  • Communication of the Charter and Scope materials by the Executive Sponsor and Project Manager to the broader organization to promote understanding and to gain support for involvement in data gathering and brainstorming as well as future sessions on execution.
  • Project Manager working with the core strategy team to define up-front data needs, to help identify the project’s work breakdown structure and to coordinate scheduling and resources for upfront data gathering.
  • On-going monitoring of work teams that are handling early phase data gathering, market assessments, customer interviews and competitor analysis.
  • Monitoring and control of the project to ensure that it moves relatively smoothly through the phases from definition to data gathering, assessment, options identification, options analysis, options selection and execution program definition.
  • Once options are identified and selected, these define logical projects, and the Project Manager and PM team are already in-place to hit the ground running in helping to move ideas into actions.

The Bottom-line for Now

The application of professional project management practices to the strategic planning and execution program development cycles of an organization can eliminate many of the common pitfalls that derail these programs.

While the Project Manager cannot guarantee that the insights and actions developed during strategy are the right ones, he/she can take away the organizational-risk that so often rears its head to doom the best intended initiatives.  Instead of shooting yourself in both feet while running a footrace, let the Project Manager shoulder the weapon and leave you free to run fast and hard towards creating value for your customers and stakeholders.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,