April 1, 2020

Confidence can be defined as the ability to meet life’s challenges head-on with and inspire others to do the same. This same definition can be applied to the type of leadership we all need, not just from our leaders, but from our team members as well. 

Fear is often caused by the thought or feeling that someone or something is dangerous and can cause us pain or loss. In today’s environment, we can all choose confidence over fear, and if you’re a leader, you can help others do the same. 

For the past few weeks, I have been encouraged by significant leaders in my field of organizational health and growth, including Ken Blanchard, Les McKeown, and Patrick Lencioni, who have made themselves available during Webinars. I realized that all of these world-class leaders held one thing in common— confidence.

While talking with our clients, I have discovered there are several practical ways any leader can inspire confidence without reinventing the wheel. Innovation right now is probably not the best thing to work on unless you are leading a global corporation with contracts to do just that. But for the majority of organizations, here are three practical steps you can take to inspire confidence in yourself and your team:

1. Make sure your team stays on strategy. In this new environment, which is changing every day, your team must know what the “Big Goal” is for the next 30 days. To accomplish this understanding throughout your organization, you need to state what your strategy is and remind everyone of it continuously. And if we find ourselves in for another 30 days, create a new “Big Goal” that everyone can work on together.
   
2. Help your team visualize their work. The key to designing a visual roadmap is to bring total transparency into your meetings and ensure everyone can talk about the issues that are important to them. When people know what the priority is for their work, they work with a much higher sense of assuredness —confidence— and feel much better about what they’re doing. This transparency also keeps everyone on task as a team, which is more challenging to do while working virtually.
   
3. Over-communicate with your team. Let your team members talk about what is on their mind, even the negative things, and let some conflict develop to make your meetings learning experiences. Many people have never worked remotely for an extended period  and could quickly find it isolating and negative. Talking regularly throughout the week with your team as a group and individually can be incredibly uplifting to team members, particularly if they are encouraged to express their concerns. 

Eventually, we are going to come out of this Pandemic. We will find a solution to this situation. One encouraging thought is while we are all learning how to work remotely, these same insights and communication tools can be brought into our next more standard way of working. May you, your family, and co-workers stay safe and well throughout this time.

February 22, 2020

Jim Collins wrote about a bus that has been quoted over and over by many, and here I go, too! His quote first appeared in his best-selling book, Good to Great, “If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”  He wrote this in 2001, so it’s stood the test of time. 

More clients that we consult are moving away from budget-based planning. They have discovered just because their numbers work within their preconceived notion of what’s reasonable, does not mean they will have the necessary resources to remain relevant in the market. Continuous planning that is directly correlated to the company’s planned strategy creates the time to plan and integrate the strategy across the entire enterprise. This approach also allows for budget shifts when necessary that throws away the other notion that once a budget is established, “it can’t be changed until next year.”

To make a change of this kind requires rethinking how to get everyone on the same page of what you are trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, so many organizations operate in silos and miss out on the more innovative ideas that come their way.

To ignite this change of thinking requires more than just the right people, it also requires the right time. Here are a few blunt questions you can use to test your organization’s readiness for new ideas:

• Do you have an organization that knows how to conduct different kinds of planning, or do you use the same process for everything? 
• Do you involve everyone in your organization, or is the top-line strategy reserved for those at the top? 
• How do you deal with new ideas that come from the outside of your organization? 
• Are they typically shot down quickly by inside executives who feel the need to protect their status quo? 

These are the questions that require honest answers and corrections made to wherever and with whoever needs to make a course change. They will produce the business outcomes you are looking for when planned and implemented with openness throughout your organization.

February 21, 2020

The need to innovate is now a must-do for all organizations that would like a bright and positive future. The alternative is maintaining your status quo and hoping that no one finds your organization and decides to automate your business out of existence. 

Mainstream business analysts are currently writing that the future of business analysis requires both innovation and creativity. The primary thought driving this topic is, shift your focus from “functionalities” to “capabilities” moving past the project level of the enterprise, to the realm and mindset of the organization.

One reason this has become more difficult is that managing hundreds, or thousands, of ideas with spreadsheets and manual processes, is overwhelming to any team developing innovation. 

To evaluate many ideas in a short time takes both the talent to understand how to do it and the automation to collect, track, and separate the winners from the losers. To conduct this process effectively takes testing by many people throughout the organization, not just a few charged with innovation. 

There are five criteria you can use to help you choose ideas that have the ingredients to become genuinely successful:

1. Winning ideas are always aligned with the organization’s business strategy. They are closely tied to the plan, so with every step of success the new product brings, the more successful the organization is in its marketplace.
2. Winning ideas always offer sizable ROI savings or financial benefit, or both.
3. Winning ideas implementation cost is within reach of the organization’s financial and people resources.
4. Winning ideas remain in the wheelhouse of the organization and reinforce the organization’s market position.
5. Winning ideas require the full commitment of the organization’s senior leaders.

These five criteria keep a company on track to what is truly important and create the most influence inside an organization and among its customers.

February 21, 2020

CEOs today know things move at the speed of light. They also know the faster things go, the more chance there is for mistakes and miscommunications if their organization is not well defined and aligned. Meeting goals remain paramount to every smart leader, of course. Here are some insights we have learned serving CEOs for the past few years.

Organizational transformation is your eventual destination, but your journey will last more than a few weeks or months. 

1. This journey always requires total buy-in from the C-Suite. Without a full commitment from everyone, gaining traction and creating improvement will not happen. 
2. This journey always involves alignment (through strategy) that works best if all levels of management develop it throughout the organization. 
3. This journey involves belonging (through shared values) developed by both saying what the organization believes in and putting these beliefs into action throughout everyday activities that everyone can feel and experience.
4. This journey involves becoming (through peer relationships) that allow each person to contribute their best thinking and watch their ideas grow in the organization. 

Great CEOs set the standard through how they interact with those on their team. People learn best by watching someone do something new that they feel drawn toward and believe they can do as well. This is why it’s so important for senior executives to make themselves approachable and observable. 

Today, we’re obsessed with speed, and on one level, that’s understandable given how technology has helped make this possible. For example, what once took our firm 50 to 100 hours of consulting time can now be accomplished in 20 minutes using our software program. We can conduct 1,000 online interviews in 20 minutes and produce a comprehensive final SmartPlan360˚ Program™ report with executive summaries and strategic recommendations. 

What’s not healthy is senior-level executives looking for quick fixes or shortcuts at the sacrifice of their people. All analysis, regardless of the gathering process, needs to point toward continuous improvement, and that takes time. 

Real organizational shifts and transformations are never the results of a unique experience, no matter how automated or robust the program. The best health and growth come more gradually and allows the organization to inculcate the values and new direction that senior executives desire. 

January 13, 2020

The way business is managed today and how much faster things are innovated has changed the type of race you need to run. While marathon thinking has been in place for decades, I think it has been replaced by sprints that allow an organization to rethink and test their strategies quickly.

Consider Chicago in 1981.

I find it amazing how much the business marketplace has changed since I first started my company in 1981. We officed out of One East Wacker Drive in Chicago’s loop at the corner of State Street and Wacker Drive along the Chicago River. The business climate was moody. I was advised by many not to start at that time because interest rates were at an all-time high, 21%, and business failures were quite common. But I was young and you know, thought those dynamics wouldn’t apply to me, so off we went!

During the early ’80s, the largest corporations led the market. IBM was headquartered across the river directly from our offices in their tall building, and whatever they said was reported in all of the Chicago and national papers. Newspapers were the place you got your news. The Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times were each located one block from our offices in their beautiful buildings. 

These giants, such as IBM, Motorola, Sears, United Airlines, and so many more, led and controlled the market by their sheer size and marketing muscle. There were the big guys and everyone else. 

Now Consider Today’s Market in 2020.

Fast forward to today, customers now lead the market. Being a large corporation guarantees you nothing other than the ability to lose millions or billions of dollars. Of course, there are still enormous corporations such as Apple, Amazon, Google and many others. The difference though, is at any time any of them could be replaced by a company that has something that’s never been in the market before. Here are a few examples:

• Uber is an excellent example of an upstart that changed the taxi business. 
• Netflix changed how people watch movies. 
• Email replaced snail mail.
• Twitter and Facebook replaced newsprint.
• Google replaced libraries.
• YouTube replaced product manuals and so much more.

Organizations that time their strategies based on a marathon will end up short-circuiting themselves because they won’t be able to innovate quickly enough to remain competitive. Some excellent examples are Motorola, Kodak, General Motors, Blockbuster, and so many others who found themselves at the bottom of their market. 

Tomorrow’s winners will be sprinters that continuously rethink their strategies and explore new ideas with the agility and willingness to switch plans quickly. 

January 11, 2020

All organizations, regardless of their size or type, need to rethink their market strategy to remain current with the marketplace. The reason rethinking is so important is simple. Without it, an organization can quickly fall out of pace with its key customers because the market moves so much faster today than ever before.

On the surface, this may not sound so perilous, particularly if your organization is enjoying a triumphant wave of growth, but as we all know, today’s good times can change abruptly when some innovation disrupts a market. These disruptions catch organizations off guard and immediately push them into a reactive mode of thinking. This is dangerous.

Repeating strategies without rethinking them is a recipe for disaster.

Market changes don’t allow an organization the luxury to stay the course and continue by repeating the same strategies over and over. In fact, the “Stay the course” strategy is a terrific recipe for disaster because, at its heart, it tells the organization not to bother with anything new or different!

Rethinking organizations continuously and proactively consider alternative strategy scenarios, so they are far less prone to be negatively impacted by market shifts. 

Repeating organizations are too busy or embroiled in their ways to consider new ideas. New ideas are met with instant resistance for no other reason than because they are unique.

Rethinking organizations are always open to new ideas, even if they are contrary to conventional wisdom, and they pursue them with a vengeance.  

Repeating organizations have a tough time changing their mind and their organizational practices preferring to continue with policies that have worked in the past. 

This may sound like I’m suggesting an organization should change its mind regularly. This is not what I’m advocating. Instead, I’m suggesting that organizations that remain in a constant state of rethinking are the toughest and most resilient in good times and bad. Rethinking organizations are those that stay in front of their market in a leadership position versus continually running to catch up with leaders in their market who have successfully developed new ways to stay ahead.

January 10, 2020

Healthy organizations are growing organizations. This simple fact works very much like riding a bicycle up a hill. Once you stop pedaling your momentum shifts from up to down!

Executive leaders and team members who understand this principle never stop rethinking their organization’s strategy to create a healthy culture because they know sooner than later, their coasting is going to catch up with them. 

Four Steps That Produce Positive Cultural Growth:

Step 1: Care more about what you say to others.

Step 2: Commit to doing many small caring things to make a large difference.

Step 3: Concentrate on making yourself trustworthy and trusted.

Step 4: Create a caring leadership style by taking care of the people in your sphere.

When you put these four steps into a continuous development loop, they will produce the cultural growth in your organization that all leaders say they want. Be careful with these, however. 

Caring acts need to be offered with a genuine spirit, versus in an obligatory way.  A senior executive once told me the mark of a genuinely caring leader was when he asked someone on his team how they were doing, he listened carefully and actually cared about what they had to say.

This is the type of organization and leader that everyone wants to work for. The days of just having a job and making a living are pretty much over. Today, people are far more interested in working for an organization that cares and listens to them, and they place far less importance on the amount of money they earn than how they are treated each day. 

These four steps are foundational to all levels of leaders and team members. When they are fully implemented throughout an organization, tremendous positive feelings can be felt and that fuels positive cultural growth like no other recipe.

October 30, 2019

If you always see your organization in its present reality, you’ll never envision a new one!

There are six key insights we have learned that all successful leaders know:

Any asset brought to an extreme can become a liability. Products and services are a means to an end, they’re not the end goal, so the focus cannot be on them; rather, the focus should be on the prime benefit they bring to customers.

You can’t get to where you want to go until you know where you are now. Marketing strategies and campaigns are often based on a company’s current product offerings as opposed to where the organization wants to go and what it wants to accomplish. By solely focusing on present-day realities, you won’t create a new one that will produce the next big win.

You rarely make big decisions from a position of weakness. It’s always better to make decisions from a position of strength. Right now, your products or services may be in a position of power. But in time, this can change, and when it does, what is needed is a great idea that will take the organization to its next level.

Enormous enthusiasm is a powerful engine to produce success. Whatever your organization provides, if enthusiasm for it is missing from your organization, you will find it incredibly challenging to be successful. Enthusiasm is the fuel that energizes employees and customers alike. You really can’t expect a customer to be excited about something you’re not!

You can only manage what you Measure, Assess, Refine and Launch. The famous American Statistician W. Edwards Deming once said, “In God we trust, all others must bring data.” This is as true today as when he first said it. If you know what is causing your current success or failure, you can take steps to generate a new level of success. But these numbers make us vulnerable to risk if they are not measured regularly.

You can’t do everything yourself.  If you could, you would, but you can’t, so you don’t.  Pushing brand messaging into the market is a good thing to do if it’s part of a much grander idea. In other words, marketing is a means to an end, but it’s not the end.

By clarifying the organization’s overall goals, defining what success and failure look like, and then analyzing the current and future organization from these perspectives creates winning strategies to success. 

October 29, 2019

It’s quite common for organizational leaders to become so busy they don’t have time to think through their next organizational change. 

We interview employees and customers of our clients’ organization and often hear how hard and how much everyone is working, but at the same time, no real change is being accomplished. Something is not right when you put these two insights together. 

After decades of organizational research, we have discovered it is the unintentional things that have the most significant impact on how well an organization can change, and what makes it so difficult for them. By understanding the areas of dysfunctions, as Patrick Lencioni calls them, this will help your organization avoid this problem in the future.

Reason 1: Projects become more important than people. Once an organization has established a pattern for managing projects, it can easily slide into the internal mindset that projects are more important than the people carrying them out. This occurs in a particularly rigid organization where authority is deemed far more important than fresh new ideas. This authoritative mindset tends to diminish or even crush new thoughts to maintain expected company-line thinking. Over time this stamps out the ease at which an organization can contemplate change, let alone make one.

Reason 2: New products and services are regularly added, but older ones are not discontinued. While consulting an institute of a major university, we discovered they had 75 program offerings, but only 15% made up 85% of their revenues. With a more in-depth program audit, we also found that one-third of the programs had not been used in over three years! With this data, it was evident to us they should select the popular programs and discontinue the rest, but this took a good amount of convincing before they could take what they called drastic steps.

Reason 3: Programs are rewarded solely on their merits. As long as ‘their group’ is doing well, there is no incentive to care about the rest of the organization. As a former boss of mine once told me, “You usually receive the behavior you reward.” A compensation program that is based upon the efforts of their particular group sounds fair on the surface. However, when you analyze it from 30,000 feet, you recognize this encourages the organization to break up into hardened silos that don’t want to work with the other parts of the organization. 

Senior executives have to be courageous when looking at their organization and make tough decisions about what to add and delete. Many leaders prefer to not “Rock the boat” and take a safe, non-confrontational path. These leaders are those that most often experience organizational growth issues because they are forever falling behind other organizations that are more spirited and creative in their decision-making.

October 28, 2019

Leaders help an organizational transformation succeed by putting into action a new direction, creating a model that others can follow to implement the desired changes, building stronger team cohesion, and owning the process. 

Today’s business environment present companies with unique challenges on how to drive change. They can’t settle for incremental or periodic improvement because that’s not enough to produce desired transformational results. Within all of the articles and blogs that have been written on the subject of organizational transformation, surprisingly little addresses the critical role corporate structure plays. What precisely an organization does is directly proportionate to its organizational structure. So what’s the best structure today?

Based on a substantial set of organizational assessments and research we have conducted with a dozen organizations over the recent years— as well as our own experience working with organizations— we have concluded there is no single organizational structure or strategy for all. Also, the organization’s leadership shapes the culture and thereby the results their organization produces, and either constrains or accelerates its capabilities. Often, the personal style of the senior leader has the most significant influence on the success or lack thereof.

These dynamics have been analyzed by us using thousands of data points we have gathered during organizational transformation efforts over the past decade, and we have found there are four key insights that create success for an organization in a transformation:

1. Make the transformation meaningful to everyone within your organization. People will go to great lengths to achieve extraordinary results when they believe the transformation aligns with a cause they personally believe in. If the change is based on a compelling story, this creates and reinforces their commitment. The ultimate success of the organization’s story largely depends on the leadership team’s alignment and personal commitment to it. This engages everyone when they openly show what needs to be done, versus telling others what they need to do.
   
2. Change your mindset before asking others to change theirs. Leaders shape an organization’s culture. When an organization’s health and growth are stalled, it takes a transformation to reignite its brilliance. Successful transformations are led by a leadership team that is willing to make it personal. The actions they take need to be visible to their teams to encourage everyone to support and put into action the new journey.
   
3. Pick strong and committed leaders who will take up the charge and move aside leaders who resist the change. Sometimes, tough decisions need to be made about who has the necessary interest and talent to lead the team, and who are comfortable in engaging in constructive, open conflict with team members, and who can make the journey.
   
4. Don’t give up even if the transformation doesn’t immediately catch on. Making change happen is analogous to losing weight. It takes time to become overweight, and it takes as long or longer to lose those extra pounds. Organizational change is often quite similar. The number of years the organization has been in a “Stalled Health and Growth” position is a good indicator of the time it will take to create real change throughout an organization.

Successful organizations don’t lose sight of the ultimate goal they are pursuing, and they don’t change direction in light of difficulties or challenges. They stay the course and drive the desired success by holding themselves accountable first, and others second. They don’t ask others to do things they are unwilling to do themselves. They live and breathe the actions necessary, and this increases their chances of success. Taken together, leaders and team members can generate the energy needed to achieve a successful transformation when they are fully aligned.