Leadership, Strategy Execution
Congratulations! You just returned from your annual strategic planning summit. You gathered economic, competitor, and market data. You compared the strengths and weaknesses of your organization with external opportunities and threats. You decided where to tweak your services, how to reach new markets, and ways to generate higher profits. Now what?
If your strategic plan is in a 3-ring binder sitting on a shelf collecting dust until time to work on next year’s plan, it’s really no more than a theory. The sooner you can connect your strategic objectives with employee goals and rewards, the better chance you have of turning that theory into reality.
Here are three proven ways to keep your strategic plan from collecting dust:
Break it down. Many strategic plans focus primarily on financial metrics. Most employees don’t connect on a day to day basis with metrics like operating margins, net profit and EBITDA. They don’t see how making a decision about how to handle a customer leads to achieving a desired profit margin. And when employees get to see key performance metrics, the gap between when their performance occurred and the metrics is far too great to have any real meaning.
What kinds of metrics help people connect? Things like improving customer satisfaction, speeding up response times, reducing waste – just about anything that ties directly to the tasks people perform on a daily basis. When employees can see what winning looks like in ways they can relate to, they make better decisions in support of the plan.
Monitor progress.
Throw out the old paradigm of the annual Performance Review. That pattern traditionally goes like this: set goals, file goals, pull goals out after 12 months, beat employee about the head for not achieving goals. Instead, change the annual performance review process to one of continuous review and adjustment throughout the year. Why? You don’t want to save up negative feedback until the employee fails. Employee failure means organizational failure.
Link performance to rewards.
Employees should feel that when the organization has been successful, they share in the rewards. Conversely, when the organization has been unsuccessful, they should feel some of the pain. Incentive and reward systems should link directly to organizational and individual performance. Don’t be afraid to move all employee performance reviews to coincide with the release of annual performance results.
Strategy execution happens with true goal alignment from top to bottom, regular monitoring of progress, and linking individual incentives with organizational performance. Help your employees move from obliged to engaged to turn your strategy into reality.
Here’s a short parable to summarize the importance of true goal alignment:
There once was a Pharaoh who went out to inspect the progress of two pyramids. The first pyramid was a mess! The blocks were uneven, the ramps were unstable, oxen were milling about… The Pharaoh stopped a nearby worker and asked, “What is your job?” The worker replied, “I move stones from this pile to that pile all day.” At the next pyramid, the Pharaoh saw much greater progress. The blocks fit together perfectly. Teams of oxen were moving evenly up the ramps. This pyramid was really taking shape. When the Pharaoh asked a worker, “What is your job?” the worker replied, “I am building a pyramid!”
Bonus! Download our simple, FREE strategic planning template here – a framework to help you measure organizational performance beyond key financial metrics.
Question: How deep into your org chart do employees connect with the organization’s strategic goals?
Leadership
My team and I have delivered training programs to thousands of executives around the world. Some are in the form of lunch-and-learns. Others are delivered over the course of several consecutive days. While we love putting on “edu-taining” programs, we’re starting to push back on delivering these programs.
Here’s why. Global investment in platform technologies is expected to exceed $3.8 trillion in 2019 for things like enterprise resource management (ERP), customer resource management (CRM), and project management. Yet, when it comes to leadership training and development, most executives implicitly view their organization as an aggregation of individuals.
From silos to systems
Because of that logic, the $86.7 billion spent on global training last year was given to a disparate mashup of outside experts, coaches and consultants. Senior leaders have executive coaches who never meet one another. Offsite retreats are facilitated by a string of consulting firms. New training programs are launched from time-to-time for select cohorts of people, the lessons of which become lost. All of this leaves HR continuously chasing the answer to “now what?”
Unstructured training, coaching and consulting services can set people up to fail and cause unchecked organizational damage. Silos grow, communication gets bottlenecked, and cynicism sets in. This is why we designed triple loop learning programs. These programs offer more than a loose series of stand-alone training efforts with fuzzy ROI. Instead, they are based on an enterprise model that couples group training with team and individual coaching in a format that provides hindsight, insight and foresight to drive change that sticks. Here’s how it works.
Loop 1: Hindsight – the ability to reflect and learn from the past
In the earliest stages of designing a leadership training program, we ask our clients a simple question: what, precisely, is this program for and how will we measure results? Once we are clear on the program objectives, we design and deliver full-day sessions that allow participants to identify “what’s not working” gaps and what 3-5 changes can be made in the next 90 days to improve. We infuse these sessions with videos, case studies, hands-on breakouts and action-taking templates. By the end of the day, participants have looked back at problematic processes to gain hindsight into what they can do to make improvement as senior or emerging leaders. We let them know that we’ll continue to get together in full-day sessions every 90 days. But, we don’t stop there. We break the group up into smaller teams to move into the next learning loop.
Loop 2: Insight – the ability to interpret and respond to the present
The full-day programs allow participants time to step back, assess reality, and plan action for improvement. However, research shows that even after very basic training sessions, adults typically retain just 10% of what they hear in classroom lectures, versus nearly 70% when they practice classroom training with real-world experience. Training participants, no matter how talented, often struggle to transfer even their most powerful classroom experiences into changed behavior. Not only do they not have enough opportunities to put theory into practice, but they also lack critical insight about how their behavior impacts results. That’s why we coach the smaller teams as they work on the 90-day action items to discuss breakthroughs and breakdowns. We encourage them to identify root causes together and have catalytic conversations about what changes need to be made and how to hold one another accountable for making change happen and locking it in. Then, we go a step further. We provide one-on-one coaching for each participant to achieve deeper learning and growth.
Loop 3: Foresight – the ability to predict and prepare for the future
Becoming a more effective leader means adjusting one’s underlying mindset to address the root causes of behavior. We use a diagnostic tool to assess how each participant behaves when things are going well and when faced with conflict. We coach each participant through the results of their assessment, then use those results to accelerates the participant’s ability to identify what is going on, why it is happening, and how to change. These monthly coaching sessions enable participants to experience real-time course correction when working on resolving real-world issues through teams to effect enterprise-wide change. Over time, participants gain the foresight to predict the future and make better choices.
Learning organizations have a competitive advantage in the 21st century. Unfortunately, we continue to rely on broken models and disparate, hot-and-cold running consultants to provide ineffective, one-off services that fail. The way forward requires a focus on an embedded enterprise-wide model that takes learning from in the classroom to behind-the-desk.
Question: Do your training programs leave you with that “now what” feeling?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
In my work as a leadership consultant, clients often tell me that they would welcome 360-degree feedback on their performance. 360-degree feedback is a process where not just the manager but peers and direct reports and sometimes even customers evaluate someone’s performance. The person being reviewed – typically, someone in a leadership position – receives an analysis of how he or she perceives themselves as leaders and how others perceive them. That analysis is used to find opportunities to close the gaps in perception, and improve performance.
Sounds simple enough. Yet, no matter how much my clients think that they would welcome constructive criticism, the initial results can feel like feedback by firing squad. Especially when they get it from multiple raters in a 360-degree review format.
In reality, most people process negative feedback by working through the five stages of grief. They react with the denial stage and try to cling to their preferred reality. Next, they move to anger and look for someone else to blame. In the bargaining stage, they consider ways to negotiate ways out of doing the work to assess reality correctly. This often leads to the stage of depression and withdrawal. In the final stage, acceptance, they recognize that there may be some truth to the feedback, and can resolve to deal with it.
This cycle is partly because leaders tend to have attribution bias. That is, we take too much credit for our successes and assign too much external blame for our failures. It’s a survival mechanism that helps to protect our self-esteem. Unfortunately, it also prevents learning and growth.
If you suffer a setback from negative feedback, you don’t have to get stuck in the grief cycle. Re-read the feedback carefully and mine it for nuggets to help you critically evaluate where you can improve. Talk with others who you trust to get their perspective on your feedback. Use this opportunity to do some serious discovery work, then act with renewed conviction. Move out of the grief cycle and onto a path that will allow you to grow as a leader and be the kind of model you strive to be.
Getting negative feedback about your performance from your colleagues can be an ego bruiser. But, successful leaders know that feedback can shed light on their blind spots, and help them assess reality correctly. Every setback can become a springboard to a comeback if you respond in the right way.
Question: How do you use feedback to grow yourself as a leader?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
![10 Goals for the Manager as Coach by Michael J. Coffey, MA]()
Leadership
This week’s post was written by my friend and Center for Executive Excellence Senior Executive Consultant, Michael Coffey. Michael actually trained me in how to be a more effective leader before Center for Executive Excellence was founded. There are few people who I trust with delivering results for our clients more than Michael. He balances humor and humility with listening and learning to help our clients grow themselves and their team. – Sheri Nasim
Most managers are good technicians. They focus on the pragmatic planning and organizing to get the hands-on work accomplished through their teams.
Yet, many managers have deficiencies in “soft skills” – how to communicate, listen and empathize with those around them. There are important differences between managing and leading people. Leading others effectively requires a mastery of the soft skills necessary to inspire people to work at their full potential and take part in something bigger than themselves.
A symptom of a typical manager is that they take a “task with consequences” approach to their work versus inspiring their team to work for a greater cause. Coaching managers away from the “task with consequences” approach and toward a “boss as coach” model helps bridge the soft skills gap and create alignment. It’s an approach that goes beyond the “what” and “how” and toward the “why” to help team members discover how their individual values and professional goals align.
Here are 10 goals for managers to work on toward building their “manager as coach” soft skills:
1. Articulate the organization’s vision, purpose, direction, strategies, major goals and actions.
2. Involve/include team members to acquire understanding, connection, commitment, passion and ownership.
3. Align team member goals, actions and expectations with those of the organization.
4. Remove barriers and provide resources.
5. Follow up and hold people accountable.
6. Promote feedback, input and idea-sharing from team members.
7. Challenge and inspire team members to stretch for greatness.
8. Develop and grow people through meaningful work.
9. Increase work/career satisfaction and personal fulfillment.
10. Create a positive, productive community of team members who volunteer their best and fulfill their potential.
When the vision, mission and culture of an organization are in alignment with the individual’s values and professional goals, employees are more committed to the organization, more productive, and happier at their job.
Question: As a leader, how do you align individual goals to the organization’s big picture goals?
Our 5 Frame Coaching: Developing the Manager as Coach Program helps managers and senior leaders create a culture of organizational alignment and increased performance through coaching. Interested in learning more about our 2-day training for your organization, including your own copies of our 4 module workbook and reinforcement videos? Contact our VP of Client Engagement Danielle Aguas at daguas@executiveexcellence.com | 877-223-1428 ext. 703.
![10 Goals for the Manager as Coach by Michael J. Coffey, MA]()
Leadership
Looking for some titles to add to your reading list this summer? From brand new bestsellers, to stories that reveal the difference between power and true leadership in an increasingly complex, hyper-connected world, here are seven titles that are well worth picking up:
1. Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan
What it’s about: When fast-scaling startups and global organizations get stuck, they call Aaron Dignan. In this book, he reveals his proven approach for eliminating red tape, dissolving bureaucracy, and doing the best work of your life.
Why pick it up: To learn exactly how organizations are inventing a smarter, healthier, and more effective way to work. Not through top down mandates, but through a groundswell of autonomy, trust, and transparency.
2. The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates
What it’s about: This book calls on readers to support women everywhere as a means to lift up society. Gates pulls from her lessons learned through the inspiring women she’s met on her travels with the Gates Foundation, which funds projects to reduce poverty and improve global health in the developing world.
Why pick it up: “Melinda weaves together vulnerable, brave storytelling and compelling data to make this one of those rare books that you carry in your heart and mind long after the last page.” – Brené Brown
3. Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations by Admiral William H. McRaven
What it’s about: Following the success of his #1 New York Times bestseller Make Your Bed, which has sold over one million copies, Retired Admiral William H. McRaven is back with amazing stories of adventure during his career as a Navy SEAL and commander of America’s Special Operations Forces.
Why pick it up: For an unforgettable look back on one man’s incredible life, from childhood days sneaking into high-security military sites to taking part in some of the most famous missions in recent memory, including the capture of Saddam Hussein, the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, and the raid to kill Osama bin Laden.
4. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup By John Carreyrou
What it’s about: The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the one-time multibillion-dollar biotech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes—now the subject of the HBO documentary The Inventor—by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end.
Why pick it up: “The story is even crazier than I expected, and I found myself unable to put it down once I started. This book has everything: elaborate scams, corporate intrigue, magazine cover stories, ruined family relationships, and the demise of a company once valued at nearly $10 billion.” — Bill Gates
5. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
What it’s about: David Epstein, author of the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene, studied the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. While computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.
Why pick it up: Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency to prepare the workforce for jobs in a complex, interconnected, rapidly changing world.
6. Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall
What it’s about: Strengths guru and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham and Cisco Leadership and Team Intelligence head Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies—distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking—that we encounter every time we show up for work. Nine lies, to be exact. They cause dysfunction and frustration, ultimately resulting in workplaces that are a pale shadow of what they could be.
Why pick it up: Nine Lies About Work reveals the few core truths that will help you show just how good you are to those who truly rely on you.
7. It’s the Manager: Gallup finds the quality of managers and team leaders is the single biggest factor in your organization’s long-term success by John Clifton and Jim Harter
What it’s about: While the world’s workplace has been going through extraordinary historical change, the practice of management has been stuck in time for more than 30 years. The new workforce—especially younger generations—wants their work to have deep mission and purpose, and they don’t want old-style command-and-control bosses. They want coaches who inspire them, communicate with them frequently and develop their strengths.
Why pick it up: Packed with 52 discoveries from Gallup’s largest study on the future of work, It’s the Manager shows leaders how to adapt their organizations to rapid change, ranging from new workplace demands to managing remote employees, a diverse workforce, the rise of artificial intelligence, gig workers, and attracting—keeping—today’s best employees.
Some of the principles in these books are about new ways to approach today’s leadership issues. Others can give you the inspiration you need to tackle your greatest challenges of 2019.
Question: What leadership books would you recommend reading this summer?
Download our infographic with descriptions of these great summer books. Happy reading!
Leadership
Father’s Day is coming up on Sunday. This is an excellent opportunity to show appreciation for the men in the world who take the role of dad to the next level. Here are five leadership lessons we can learn from the endearing dads of the world.
1. Be okay with not always being in charge. Having children teaches you to let go of thinking that you’re in control. According to Freud, infants are all id. The id is the impulsive part of our psyche which responds directly and immediately to the instincts. Babies demand to have their needs met, and now. They don’t care how much money you make or how many people report to you. Dads humble themselves before their newborn infants and marvel at how their new baby dominates the household. LaGuardia Cross documents this power struggle in an interview with his 3-month old daughter in New Father Chronicles.
2. Show your team what fun looks like. A 2019 study published by the University of California Riverside looked at the emotional health of 18,000 people and compared traits like well-being, happiness, episodes of depression, and stress. The conclusion? Dads, more often than moms, report playing with their children while providing care. When dads put down their work and engage with their children in play, their signaling that the world is full of adventure and work/life balance is important for mental and physical health. No one can introduce those adventures to a child better than dads like the ones in this video showing awesome dads raising awesome kids.
3. Trust your instincts. Of course, adventure comes with some inherent danger. Dads who play with their children also keep their radar open to save the day while their children explore the boundaries of their physical abilities. When kids start to take a tumble, dads are awesome at letting their amygdala take over to respond just in the nick of time. The amygdala is the part of our brains in charge of reacting to danger. Dads at play with their children instinctively save the day when there’s no time to debate.
4. Yank the tooth. Change can be scary. Whether you’re unsure that a product is ready to launch or fear the pain of losing a baby tooth, sometimes you need a push. Dads are geniuses at finding creative ways to distract kids from the fears that come with growing up. They show kids that fear and change are normal, and that you can control your fear to achieve results like this father/daughter duo who enlisted the help of a squirrel to deal with a dangling tooth.
5. Talk it out. At the end of the day, children want to know that you are interested in their thoughts. No matter how stressful your day was, your children want you to know about their day too. According to the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, children make 700 new connections every second until they reach the age of 3. Those connections help children to acquire the social, physical, emotional and cognitive skills needed to navigate life’s experiences. When dads sit down at the end of the day to chat about the world with their children, they acknowledge the importance of their child’s opinions, and show respect for their ideas, like in this video of a dad having a conversation with his babbling toddler.
Happy early Father’s Day to all the dads who help to grow the future leaders of the world.
Question: What leadership lessons can you draw from dads?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
