Leadership Caffeine—Breakaway Leadership Part 2

The Leadership Caffeine series is over 200 installments strong and is dedicated to every aspiring or experienced leader and manager seeking ideas, insights or just a jolt of energy to keep pushing forward. Thanks for being along for the journey!

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In the first post in this blended, Leadership Caffeine/Art of Managing series, I focused on leadership and management behaviors that stifle or derail efforts to escape the gravitational pull of the past as organizations work to achieve what Geoffrey Moore calls, Escape Velocity.

In the words of that business pundit, Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” when it comes to building new on top of old. (For those too young to have met Pogo, he was a popular newspaper cartoon character from another era.)

In this post, we look at behaviors and approaches that YOU and your management counterparts directly control that contribute to success with this challenging endeavor of building something new while managing the existing legacy business.

8 Ideas to Help Improve Your Odds of Success in Building the Future:

1. Create organizational awareness and understanding of the new endeavor. Every day. Seriously. I’m invoking Kotter’s dictate that, “in times of change, you cannot over-communicate.” Every time a firm’s senior leaders stop working at this, the cultural storm clouds emerge. Take care of it. Daily.

2. Position the new and legacy efforts as two equally critical but very different endeavors. It’s true. The existing business pays the bills and funds the future, while the new endeavor strives to ensure a future. One is no more critical than the other. They are both critical. Share the over-arching strategy (or opportunity) far and wide; create an understanding of how the firm will execute on the opportunity and share results, good and bad. Help the entire organization become invested in the success of the new endeavor!

3. Share the cool new toys! New endeavors often introduce new processes or approaches to innovation, development and market testing. Find opportunities to cross-train and cross-pollinate new approaches with legacy teams where appropriate. I’ve seen this most often in the move away from waterfall development to an agile approach. Frequently, all teams can benefit from understanding and learning to apply the new techniques.

4. Recognize and manage the inertia of your legacy business in creating new opportunities to invest. Your product managers will naturally identify opportunities to improve existing products and introduce new offerings into legacy markets. Marketing associates will find ways to spend their budgets in pursuit of the business, and rarely do the volume of development asks or marketing opportunities shrink of their own accord.

Senior leaders must manage the incremental requests with a clear filter and a firm hand. See also points 1 & 2 and recognize that creating context for “No” on new requests is critical to avoiding a cultural rift over the team with the shiny new toys and the other team with yesterday’s retreads.

5. You get what you measure…use the right progress measures. Moore does a good job of reminding us in Escape Velocity that you cannot measure new ventures with the same metrics you apply to existing businesses. New ventures are about engaging innovators and early adopters, gaining feedback and step by step, increasing activities, pipelines and then dollars and profits. We expect our existing businesses to quickly translate activities into revenues and profits, but the new ventures have to grow into those measures.

In larger entities, particularly holding companies and conglomerates, there’s often little consideration for the meaning of the numbers in cells on a spreadsheet…it’s up to you and your peers to establish this understanding and ensure proper context for costs without revenue that occur in most new endeavors.

6. Be prepared for the “Stuff Happens” phase. I don’t care how well you define the project and anticipate risks, something always happens that the team did not anticipate. The unknown-unknowns bite hard, and it takes leadership to stand firm in the face of the onslaught of finger-pointing and second guessing, and prevail. A senior leadership divided against itself will not stand. (OK, sorry President Lincoln.) The firm’s senior leaders and the new venture’s executive sponsor must fight the knee-jerk reactions and guilty before proven innocent tendencies of others vying for resources.

7. We think, therefore we are prone to errors and traps. Be merciless about avoiding group-think, dodging escalation of commitment and side-stepping other group and individual cognitive decision-making traps. Use outside perspectives to challenge your strategy and your assumptions. Promote outside-in discussions with target audience feedback and competitor analysis. Ask others to frame your perceived opportunity in a different way and challenge them to identify alternative approaches. And importantly, cultivate the leadership team dynamics needed to ask hard questions about insights, direction and strategies.

8. Avoid starving the new endeavor. One of my favorite managers often intones, “We’ve been doing so much for so long with so little that we can now do absolutely anything with nothing.” He always gets a laugh, but it’s no laughing matter when promising ideas die on the vine due to lack of care and feeding. If you’re making a courageous leap to push into a new arena, back it with the people, equipment, tools and organizational support needed to improve the odds of success.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

This is a big topic contained in a couple of small posts. Many organizations never move beyond the business that made them successful. They are yesterday’s name brands and tomorrow’s answers to trivia questions. The effort required to add something new in an environment of existing (or old) is not to be trifled at. Use the ideas here and in post #1 as prompters and engage in the hard discussions and invoke the courageous leadership it takes to move beyond the gravitational pull of your firm’s past.

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For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check out Art’s latest book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.