The arrival of a new leader at the helm of a department, division, or organization typically follows the same ritual. The leader benefits from a few months of relative calm, the honeymoon period, where he or she is not expected to have answers yet or be fully effective. The clock is however ticking and the leader feels increasing pressure as the days go by.  The mature leader will know that this is the period to withhold judgment and decisions and explore as openly as possible the new situation. Meeting people one-on-one ads up to hours and weeks of exploration. The leader collects the many views, often in conflict, and has to decide for himself what is real. We commonly see transition periods stretching out to 6 months.

This process is not effective; our experience is that with the support of the organization, the new leader can be have a fully operational team in a matter of 3 months. Join us as we discuss a different approach.

Every Day Team Building for Leaders

Team building must be an every day concern for leaders. Team building exercises at the annual retreat are potentially doing more harm than good; focusing on all getting along has often a chilling effect on the ability of individuals to express openly what is of concern to them.

Staying the Course Implementing Your Strategy without Fail

How to make sure that what has been decided and committed to gets documented, tracked and delivered. Teams need to keep practicing how to hold productive meetings that stay focused on what is needed to meet the team outcomes rather than getting lost in the minutia of what they have done so far. Leaders need support too to provide proper guidance: keeping the clarity of vision upfront, resolving the issues that no one else in the team can tackle, and holding regular accountability interactions. Too many leaders get busy on others issues right after the strategy setting, and fail to make accountability a clear priority.

At its purest, a strategy is what you want to accomplish as an organization and the steps you need to accomplish it. Strategy, therefore, is important to all organizations because it gives them a context for the everyday decisions that move the organization in the desired direction.  Michael Porter, the Harvard University strategy professor, states: “…strategy is completely useless unless the result of the strategy process… is understood broadly. The #1 purpose of strategy is alignment. It is really getting all the people in the organization making good choices, reinforcing each other’s choices because everyone is pursuing the common value proposition, the common way…”

To be an effective tool, a strategy must fulfill the organization’s major objective of remaining fully relevant to its stakeholders over the long run. What it comes down to is whether the combined efforts of leadership and staff can create sustainable economic value, that is to say, generate outputs that are greater than its inputs.

So how does a strategy help an organization create and sustain economic value? The main mechanism is to make clear to everyone how the organization is going to deploy its resources to tackle two of the most challenging questions an organization can ask: 1) how effectively does it currently operate?; and 2) how well does it adapt to changing conditions? At the end of the day, organizations are economically sustainable when they can integrate and manage the complexity of their own system while managing the changes in their environment in a timely manner.

Avoid the Train Wreck

Without a conscious strategy organizations drift away from economic sustainability. Often it is very easy to miss the signs, or at least avoid looking at them, until it is too late. In family businesses, the drift shows up in the deteriorating financial performance that often ensues as the business moves from first to second, then third generation. In the world of agencies and NGOs that are not performing up to par, the shock takes the form of sudden funding cut backs imposed on them.

The Search for Performance Improvements

The dilemma of most organizations, whether business, NGO, or government agency, is that although they work hard at improving performance, they are unable to reach a level where they deliver increasing value with greater ease and still have sufficient resources to adapt and innovate. What we see most are strategic expectations that go unmet, and repeated initiatives that seem to wither away before generating the expected results. What we call the Performance Theshold to sustainable economic value is as tangible as it is elusive to the frustrated leaders that keep trying to break through.

Although failure can sometimes be traced to an inadequate strategy, it is more often due to implementation issues. A deeper analysis almost always reveals that the performance breakdown had its roots in a lack of engagement of individuals and poor group dynamics.

Why is a lack of engagement the underlying cause of strategic failure? The answer is simple. Although variables like managing complexity and adapting to change drive long term success, they are not the levers for action.  During the long strategic cycle, from conception to implementation, it is in the human interactions that most breakdowns appear when a complex system is in flux. The only mechanism that can repair these tears in the organizational fabric is effective and meaningful conversation.

Only effective conversation can ensure that everyone involved understands and agrees with the desired outcomes. In situations of rapid change, it is critical that people understand their roles, feel safe to contribute to the whole picture, and take on assignments from a place of knowing and sincere commitment. It is in the quality of the daily interaction of people, in how they show up and how they behave with each other that change and complexity are mastered and performance improved.

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© Business Advisors Network

Converting your Strategy into a Blueprint for Action 03/01 by Business Advisors | Blog Talk Radio.

In this episode, we discuss a simple proven approach to convert your strategic decisions into a blueprint for action rapidly. This is a critical step because for a strategy to be implemented, it needs to be understood by those that are to implement it. Why certain choices of direction have been made must be clear.  Yet if you leave it at that, most people will have a hard time reconciling how to get from where they are to where you want them to be. The high ideas of strategy will die on the “messy” realities of everyday issues. For everything to come together, the high level strategy has to be articulated into a blueprint for action drawn with the participations of implementers. The blueprint will identify initiatives in detail: what, by whom, when, milestones, etc. and check those tasks against the organization’s ability to deliver them with existing capacities.

Join us as we explore what a well conceived strategy can do for any organization whether business, agency, or NGO. From its conception to its implementation, what gives impetus to a strategy is whether participants are fully engaged with it. A strategy cannot simply be a document that people read for information, it has to be a common agreement that makes it clear to all involved what the ultimate objective is, what each one will do to contribute toward that outcome in their day to day decisions. As Michael Porter, the Harvard University strategy professor, said: “The #1 purpose of strategy is alignment.”

What is Rational Leadership 02/02 by Business Advisors | Blog Talk Radio.

What should a leader focus on? Sticking to the facts? Avoiding emotional time-wasters? Keeping on task?

Many family businesses fail to achieve that potential, however, because they stumble over a few predictable issues that are very hard for boards and especially their leaders to overcome alone.

The Achilles Heel of Family-Controlled Boards

Combined with pitfalls common to all boards (such as rubber-stamping management’s decisions), family-controlled boards have particular challenges:

• Conflicting individual perspectives and priorities arise as the business progresses into second and third generation leadership;

• “Clannishness” appears as more nuclear families are involved; and

• Economic setbacks bring distrust of those family members most directly involved in executive management.

These issues are nearly impossible for family members to address directly because of strong family loyalties and respect for the elders that create a culture of collective censorship.

Although few will admit to it in meetings, most board members grow to believe that a family business is more burden than advantage. Indeed, when boards of directors cannot openly discuss core sensitive topics, the consequences may be severe in two respects:

1. The family-controlled business loses its competitive advantages in terms of speed of execution and long-term strategy.
2. Incomplete or non-existent board conversations create blind spots in reading business opportunities, fatal errors in judgment, or inertia in the face of rapid change.

Leading Right Business Practices While Preserving Family Relations

Leaders who want to change their board’s practices and preserve family relationships must overcome these behaviors that block progress:

• Passivity, disengagement and silence on important issues;

• Controlling, over-speaking, micro-managing, and losing focus on high impact issues; or

• Paralysis, lack of decisiveness, and weak commitments.

The warning signs that a family-controlled board is under-performing are the tensions among family members arising from differences in business and personal priorities, and the ongoing avoidance of these differences for fear of upsetting the delicate balance of family relations.

The Choices for Action

When boards are stuck, it is tempting for leaders to keep looking for new technical solutions about governance, marketing, auditing, etc. that will resolve the stalemate and spare board members the discomfort of looking internally at the dysfunctional behaviors mentioned above.

Without exception, this approach provides no lasting relief and only distracts from finding real solutions.

In our experience, family boards that are successful in reconciling the results/relationship dilemma are those whose members are committed to holding the very crucial, “missing” conversations.

The better approach involves working on the important practical responsibilities of the board, and the internal board dynamic simultaneously. This means actually talking about how members really work together, and in particular calling out the passive, overbearing and frozen behaviors that reveal themselves when conversations are uncomfortable.

When board members have more complete and honest interactions, they can develop a shared reality of the situation. They can move forward very quickly and substantively because technical solutions now have a foundation to rest on. They can agree to take new actions that produce:

1. More productive board meetings;
2. Better strategy;
3. Better accountability.

How to Lead Change

Leaders invariably struggle to initiate these “missing” conversations and lead them to success.

Our work first ensures the readiness of the leader to engage difficult topics from a place of clarity, conviction and courage. We then guide the board in getting beyond “good intentions” to having the right, face-to-face conversations that are complete, thorough and deal with the concerns of all present.

Within two days of our engagement with a board, interpersonal dynamics change and alignment develops around a plan of action to implement and a standard of behaviors to practice.

Fear and Self-Protection the Seeds of Team Failure 01/16 by Business Advisors | Blog Talk Radio.

We sometimes hear that fear is a powerful motivator. It may be so on the battlefield, but in organizations, fear, and the accompanying need to protect oneself, is actually what brings teams to fail or under-perform.

Leaders, in their desire to see results and to get things done fast, invariably drive team meetings to focus on technical discussions and how things are going to get. Yet things are not going to get done if individuals commit to tasks that they know they cannot deliver or team members cannot coordinate their actions properly because they have not been able to speak truthfully.

Leaders need to foremost create the space where individuals feel safe to talk openly about what they think should be done, or what is preventing them from completing what is asked of them.

1. Keep checking into what the group’s mindset is about the situation they’re working in at the moment;
2. Check for shared reality on the work tasks;
3. Keep checking for true agreement on assignments in as visual a manner as possible.

What makes these areas worth attention? Teams that act along these practices can quickly address most of the problems they face when planning and taking action together. They typically can bring the needed changes to take hold within a few weeks vs. months, if ever, for other teams.

What do these practices look like in day-to-day team life?

1. Checking the team mindset — Teams introducing changes into their routines frequently face tension, confusion or apathy, and this can have an immediate and dismal impact on their productivity: they then cannot make decisions and when they do, decisions do not stick for long. At these moments it’s critical to rapidly identify and address topics often uncomfortable to address for fear of undermining the trust and consensus that the team has achieved so far. The trick here, if trick it is, is for someone to take the lead to shift the group from discussing the task at hand to dealing with what is draining productive, positive energy from the group conversation. Often just acknowledging what is of concern to one person is enough to make it safe to talk about what concerns everyone. Once negative changes in mood have been handled the team can revert productively to the business topic.

2. Checking for shared perspective on the task — There’s also a strong tendency for team members to have entrenched positions on how to approach a particular task and solve issues. This gets to be a stumbling block when they ignore checking ideas and assumptions against the realities of the system within which they operate. Instead of attempting to convince others of the ‘right’ way to do things when others disagree, what is called for is collaboration on a shared assessment of the possibilities and limitations of the particular situation. Without a sense of a shared reality, important elements are likely to be missed, leading to erroneous assumptions and blind spots that will slow down the team and agitate team members against each other for not understanding the situation correctly.

3. Checking on true agreement on assignments using visuals — We see time and again teams attempting to keep all their decisions and follow-up agreements solely in their heads. While it sounds too obvious to mention, a key team practice is to frequently check on the strength of the group’s agreements. It saves time and frustration to use flip charts, mind maps, flow charts and other means to visually display what team members believe they are agreeing to when it comes to problem-solving or decision-making. When used repeatedly for checking agreement or disagreement it becomes an easy way for teams to come to a more grounded sense of reality on key points in their complex work tasks.

Stress is always prevalent around change. The practices described here prevent negative mindset and misunderstandings from taking root in team dynamics and ensure that high cooperation can bring action plans to fruition with minimal delay and frustration.