In my experience, the management teams that lead the best performing businesses are those that incorporate at least three key strategic questions into almost every operational and status discussion.
What are Your Teams Talking About?
The gross majority of the dialogue in an organization is about How, and Who and When and the important What and Why issues are left for strategy meetings and other “high-level” discussions. While understandable in the hectic pace of the workday, the shortage of these important What and Why discussions reinforces a dangerous form of operational myopia, where the underlying and unspoken assumption is: If we simply get this done, we’ll be better off as a firm.
No disrespect nor trivialization intended for operations and execution. Getting it done is critical. However, my premise is that you can strengthen (without paralyzing) the quality of these discussions (particularly management and project team discussions) and potentially uncover new ideas or cross-check long-standing assumptions, with the regular inclusion of a few key questions.
3 Key Strategy Teams to Ask Your Teams Regularly:
1. How does this initiative help us grow/create power? (Power: new customers, new revenue in current customers, new revenue in new/adjacent markets, market share). If it doesn’t directly tie to or enable the creation of power, why are you doing it?
2. How meaningfully different is this to our clients? So many ideas are good in isolation…promoted by people passionate about their offerings, but ultimately, they are not meaningful enough to clients to prompt action (investment, change, trade-out etc.). While not all clients can articulate what they want (as Steve Jobs taught us most recently), your team must be able to substantiate that the initiative is one that will prompt action.
3. How defensible is our approach versus our most dangerous competitors? Too many “me too” and easily replicated initiatives is a formula for stagnation or decline. If you cannot pass this critical acid-test question, something is wrong.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
These are just a few of the important questions that must be regularly asked and answered in the course of forming, assessing and adjusting strategy. However, instead of saving all of the good questions for the offsites, start immediately incorporate these three in your management and status meetings, and you’ll dramatically increase the quantity of meaningful dialogue (and action) taking place every day.
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About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, 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. Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement or to inquire about being a guest on The Leadership Caffeine podcast.
Art, excellent questions. Asking them is important, having an environment where they can be honestly answered is also key. Too often, excellent questions are answered with what the questioner want to hear, not truthfully or honestly.
Asking the right questions is important. Creating a culture where people can answer honestly is just as important.
Go Pack Go!
You bet! Thanks as always for sharing your wisdom, Andy. And I’ll echo that Packers cheer at the risk of alienating some of my very good Bears friends! -Art
Outstanding strategic insight focusing on new business growth, providing customer value and achieving a competitive advantage. The Pack should be Back in the Super Bowl in Indianapolis. Go Pack Go!!!
We think the questions that focus on customer needs and wants in a differentiated way are the most important, sometimes getting out in front of customer wants. Most of Apple’s I-series of products are excellent examples of synthesizings customer wants into products, even though customers might not have known they wanted one. Ford’s development of SYNC in-car systems is another….who knew they wanted to do all those things in a car? Another interesting idea is that the I-series was catalyzed by Jobs, where the SYNC system sort of percolated out of the Ford division, so one is left to ponder the CEO’s roles in all this.
Art, what are your thoughts on these ideas?
John, I love your direction. With no intent to trivialize your important points, it reminds me of Henry Ford’s famous quote: “If we had asked our customers what they wanted, they would have said, faster horses.” I’m a huge fan of using the techniques of anthropology to identify unspoken needs and wants in comparison to starting down the innovator’s dilemma path of relying on just customer answers. The answers are in the context of today’s world and issues over solutions in place. The CEO or top leaders can and do profoundly impact a team’s/firm’s approach to next steps. Love your thoughts..thanks for reading and sharing. Great ideas from you for a follow-on post. Best, -Art
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