Don’t bother trying to plan when…
June 9, 2009
Every now and then, a client comes to us asking for a strategic alignment process and we know within a few minutes that it’s the wrong thing to do. Many factors can lead us to that conclusion. Here’s a dead ringer: sometimes the leadership team can’t have a productive conversation, much less a strategic conversation. Sometimes they don’t know each other well enough yet. Often, they know each other too well – and they just plain don’t like each other.
Leaders often chalk this whispered fact up to all sorts of things – “chemistry,” personality, whatever – but a little more digging usually leads to deeper causes. On the path from being a group of individuals to becoming a peak performing team, leadership teams may hit one or more of these predictable landmines:
- Interpersonal landmines: Let’s face it, sometimes there’s good reason not to like each other. Leader A may just prefer to interact differently from Leader B and that may rub both of them the wrong way. Add to that the amazing capacity we humans have for being thoughtless - for saying and doing things that are (sometimes) unintentionally crazy-making for our colleagues. Cap it off with the typically poor ways we handle conflict and (gasp!) hurt feelings at work, and it’s a wonder we get along with anyone.
- Systemic landmines: I worked a while ago with a team who believed that they were all to be stack-ranked at the end of the year and assigned bonuses, raises, and promotion opportunities based on their rankings. Then people wondered why they didn’t trust each other. Hmm… Another classic systemic landmine, especially for technical/staff groups: competing and misaligned stakeholders. Executive 1 tells them to pursue one course of action while Executive 2 advocates another. That can make any team look fouled up.
- Cultural landmines: And here are the sneakiest ones of all – those unwritten rules of behavior some call culture. Just try to create a collaborative plan when the unwritten rules say that you should “salute up” or “compete with peers at all cost.” You could spend days, weeks, or months on the plan, but the back-end execution will be seriously hampered.
Of course, the presence of landmines doesn’t absolve leadership teams from responsibility. Their job is to see the landmines, call them what they are, and de-fuse them. Then they can get on with the productive work of planning the future and bringing it to life.
Success Personified
June 4, 2009
I met up with a former client a few days ago. He has recently taken over operational leadership of a company that until recently had struggled to make a profit. In the last year, it has turned around – despite sailing into the teeth of a lousy economy.
Naturally, I was curious how he did it. Maybe you are too.
Here are a few summary bullet points from our lunchtime conversation. They are simple, but consistent with our experience.
- Get the right people aligned: This leader said something important about his leadership team: they’re all smart people. But just as importantly, they’re all good people. There are few interpersonal turf wars distracting the team. They work hard, debate well, and get on with decisions. He notes that he had to move a few people out when he took over.
- Get focused: My friend’s company is not small, but they aren’t gorillas either. They only have so much time and energy. So after charting a direction, they figured out the few things that would move them along the path and they put real resources behind them.
- Assign nagging rights: This leader assigned a competent leader to keep the overall strategic system moving forward. The group gave that person nagging rights – and he made sure that initiatives got reviewed, timelines got met, and results were achieved.
- Create a winning culture: This one seems soft, but my client talked about it passionately. He insists that one key to their success was a culture that works hard and is supportive at the same time. The company neither grinds its people down, nor does it coddle them. Like most such things, the soft stuff is the hard stuff.
I couldn’t resist a follow-up question as we finished lunch: What was challenging about creating that momentum? I wasn’t surprised by his response: “Just keeping the focus on these few things in the middle of everyday work is a big challenge. It’s easy to get distracted.”
How would you answer that question for your organization?