2.cont. HOW TO DRIVE COHERENCE AND QUALITY - post 2/2
2.2 Strategy
The development and implementation of strategy is the most important accountability and responsibility of the leader and of leaders in general. Does this mean the leader does the strategic planning in isolation in their ivory tower? No! (except in very small organizations, and even then debatable) The strategic planning process should be consultative with the entire organization, and at minimum actively involve the leader’s immediate team.
Organizational strategy includes at a minimum the following elements:
Codification of values
Definition of mission
High level description of a goal and how you will get there. I love Tesla’s:
“to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
Detailing of vision
This includes a high level summary vision statement that will tend to be qualitative and a more granular and quantitative detailed description of the future.
Planning of objectives, goals and their supporting actions
Including planning and creation of supporting infrastructure
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One of the major contributing factors to a major positive inflection point about 10 years into our history was good strategic planning which started with codification of values and mission. There is a mountain of literature on this topic and commentary here will be limited. For the engineering services firm PSMJ’s “Ultimate A/E Strategic Planning Manual” is a must have resource (PSMJ, 2019, The Ultimate A/E Strategic Planning Manual (psmj.com)). The use of a skilled third party facilitator is extremely valuable in the strategic planning process.
Mintzberg provides a good critique of the more rigid strategic planning process that many organizations have adopted (Mintzberg, The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning, 1994). Mintzberg argues that vision should not be overly detailed and that strategy is a synthesis process that can not be “forced”; that strategy is in a way emergent from people’s creative energies. We had success in forcing this process through the collection of information by our facilitators from our staff and clients and consolidating this information into a required reading report prior to the formal planning retreat. The leaders at the planning retreat then had time to independently synthesize ideas around what strategies were available for pursuit and meriting planning. The synthesis of strategy is something that requires a rested mind that has time for reflection. A leader should regularly schedule themselves time to read and reflect. Going into a planning retreat the team should not be in an exhausted state.
The third party facilitator should be provided with the latitude to keep the leader in check during the planning session. The leader should be doing a lot of listening during the planning sessions but have veto power over things they are not in agreement with. Generally high performers like to have autonomy, and the leader letting the rest of the leadership team make their own goals will give them a sense of autonomy and ownership over those goals and a higher level of engagement. The emotional intelligence, humility and perseverance of the leader are important in striking the right balance in this process. Perseverance is needed to know when to reign in the supporting leadership team and impose the leader’s will in setting certain key directional elements.
The strategic plan should be a living thing adjusted and tweaked as time goes on with occasional full blown planning sessions to do a rewrite. The set of objectives and goals should be looked at like a battle plan, and “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy” (a distillation of Helmuth von Moltke the elder’s wisdom). The planning is essential in determining the field conditions and what tactics are at hand in order to achieve strategic objectives. The leader needs to read the changing field conditions and be prepared to make adjustments to the plan. The plan needs to include identification of who is accountable for what goals, and it is the responsibility of the leader to enable people to succeed by providing them the time and resources to reasonably achieve their goals, and then to hold people accountable. A balance needs to be struck in not making the plan too “realistic”, ie: not ambitious enough. In our experience the way to strike this balance is by assigning priorities to the objectives and supporting goals. A lower priority goal may have no effort assigned, but in the event of changing field conditions a reprioritization may be appropriate. The planning process is essential to this.
The best example of our strategic plan getting a major adjustment was when the COVID lockdowns started in March 2020. A major priority in our plan was to select and deploy a new ERP system. We were on the verge of launching the procurement effort having just completed defining our User Requirements. In 2018-19 we had been lightly experimenting with hybrid work from home and office. Figuring out how to do this effectively suddenly became THE priority, along with the creation of various infection control and compartmentalization strategies. We shifted gears and then when the dust had settled a year later we restarted the ERP procurement. The ERP procurement when put on hold was not at a high level of urgency, but we were anticipating that by 2022 our accounting, time sheet and project management systems would no longer be scalable. We ended up deploying the ERP in time to avert a bottleneck. Had we not done the original planning around the ERP we would likely have ended up in a painful crisis situation.
An essential part of strategic planning is the communication of the strategic plan to the team. This is a part of leading with clarified intent (Kish, 2018, BOOK | Eric Kish Author) and is key to empowering people. They know what the objectives are and possibly the broad strokes of how. They know what tools and resources are available, and they get it done without being micromanaged (ie: with as high a degree of autonomy as possible). This will then enable the entire team to identify opportunities that can be seized to facilitate the achievement of strategic objectives. This is one of Erik Kish’s three things that are needed to create and run a scalable organization:
Clarified Intent (discussed below)
Optimized Talent (see section 3.2)
Disciplined Rituals (very briefly discussed below)
His book “5 to 50 to 500” is a must read for the leader that wants to scale their organization up.
A key concept that Kish presents towards clarifying intent is that of the organization playbook and that there are essentially three possible playbooks as summarized in the table below. It is important that you know which one you will be dominant in your organization, and that you are only good enough in the other two. This fits well into the idea of bringing coherence to what the organization is pursuing.
Table 3: Organization Playbooks
Operational Excellence
Customer Intimacy
Product Excellence
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This table is extracted directly from Kish’s work.
As I have spent my entire post-university career in organizations that ran from the customer intimacy playbook this handbook will be most relevant to customer intimacy organizations.
A valuable tool that Kish suggests is the strategic map. A similar and simpler version is an objectives tree (Baird, 1983, Technical Manager: How to Manage People and Make Decisions: Baird, Bruce F.: 9780534979256: Books - Amazon.ca). An simplified one is shown below. These can be prepared at differing levels of granularity within the organization, or in organizational sub units. The strategic map and the plan overall should be incorporated into the onboarding of new hires at appropriate times and should be more than just a read and review; this is a key opportunity to gain alignment with new hires and for them to know and understand what the intent is. When managing by walking around a senior leader can and should ask people if they know how what they are working on fits in to the bigger picture. Each of the boxes in the strategic map shown below can be measured and key performance indicators or metrics collected. While metrics can be useful, as discussed later in section 3.2.4 be careful what you measure.
Figure 3: Strategic Map Excerpt
There are many rituals that are important and happen on a much higher frequency, as much as daily.
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Another form of ritual I engaged in as a front line leader was the micro-teach. When working with a younger engineer and coming across some detailed technical aspect that was new to them and initiating the gathering of other people it was new to in a meeting room for an impromptu lesson. Usually there were other tangentially related areas of knowledge relevant to the work others were doing and others would get an opportunity to contribute and speak publicly. The ritual followed the pattern of:
Identified knowledge gap
Identify others that need the lesson
Gather
Teach
Q&A
All no more than 15-20 minutes. This ritual reinforced the culture of knowledge sharing, leading by example in that regard. It works on building relationships with other people in the organization. Further elaboration on this topic will be presented in section 3.1.6.
A final element of strategy is the organization chart. In a truly servant leadership driven organization the leader should not envision themselves at the top of the heap. It is in fact the opposite. We utilized an inversion of the traditional org chart with the leader at the bottom. My mental image and conception of this in fact is that the organization is like a tree with the leader acting as a trunk, past leaders are the roots. The trunk of the tree supports branches who are the next level of leaders and so on to the leaves of the tree. The leaves of the tree are the ones collecting energy from the sun. Our customers are the sun, our source of life. Our job as leaders is to support them so that they can do their jobs. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it helped me.
Figure 4: Servant Leader Organization Chart
When doing strategic planning it is useful to not only look at the organizational chart of today, but of what you think it will need to be in five and even ten years time, taking names out of positions. Think of what structural changes will be needed as the organization grows. Then you can examine the talent pool you have for who may be good candidates for future needed roles, or you will have identified well in advance what some of you needs will be and can recruit and develop early for them. This allows you to avoid future bottlenecks and crises.
Another book that must be read cover to cover is Kotter’s Leading Change (Kotter, 2012). This work is essential reading in providing a framework for how to effectively lead change. Concepts in Kotter’s eight step model scale up (society wide change) and down (project execution):
Create a sense of urgency
Build a guiding coalition
Form a strategic vision
Enlist a volunteer army
Enable action by removing barriers
Generate short term wins
Sustain acceleration
Institute change
Rather than repeat more of the work here the reader is encouraged to go out and read Leading Change as soon as possible; if they already have, go and read it again.
2.2.1 Process Ownership
A lot of smaller organizations only create policies and procedures (ie: formal processes) when problems are encountered. I did this when leading our organization. Engineers are, believe it or not, creatives not just a bunch of block heads. Creatives do not like being under the yoke of overly proceduralized bureaucracy, hence the maxim of “as much policy as is needed and as little as possible.” In our early days we probably took this a little too far and the result was some processes that should have been formalized but were not resulting in a regular reinventing of the wheel, and undesirable friction between people constantly having to re-establish boundaries.
A fully developed Process Ownership paradigm is a if not the solution to this problem. Every organization will have a sub set of processes that are routine, mundane requiring little if any creativity to execute once they have been well defined. These processes in particular are the low hanging fruit to assign to process owners and to formalize thereby freeing up more energy for the creative work that is more transformative in delivery of products and services to customers.
Lets go back to a few definitions: A process is how things get done. It is the series of steps and actions taken on inputs to achieve a desired outcome or result. Appendix 2 discusses theoretical aspects of Process Leadership in more detail.
In Figure 3 above there is a band that refers to “Internal Business Processes”. These processes are formal and informal.
In Figure 2 there are actions; the same actions we talk about in the sense of a process. For a process to yield the desired result, the people doing the process actions need to be competent at those actions and have enough capacity to execute all the necessary actions in the process.
Process Ownership is where people are identified to voluntarily own a given process. Owning a process means they are in control of it, meaning they have the authority to see that the process is followed. They have the authority to define it, improve it. Ideally a process owner has intimate familiarity with the execution of that process. They are accountable for the outcomes of the process. The process owner can be empowered to decide on the level of formality that is needed to define the process. It could be a standard operating procedure (SOP), a work flow, a policy, a combination, or something else. The process owner will bear in mind what play book the organization is running. An Operational Excellence organization will probably lean towards more tightly defined processes whereas a client intimacy organization may define things a little more flexibly for some processes to allow for more client customization.
A key process used in process leadership is process mapping. Process Mapping done well is a facilitated by someone who stays out of the content of the mapping exercise and helps to get a group of people to define the process. Improving a process starts with defining it…mapping it.
A well defined process will define the desired result, the necessary inputs, the context it is executed in, and especially the interfaces. As discussed in section 3.1.4, interfaces are a source of friction and by having processes with minimal and well defined interfaces they will have less friction reducing the generation of negative energy.
Having in house facilitators is good. We invested in training our project managers on facilitation and found that this made them more effective as leaders. Facilitation training is also great for instilling the servant mindset. The facilitator is essentially acting in service to the group and successfully facilitating a group is a very satisfying experience.
Organizations that are not running an Operational Excellence playbook should not get carried away and overdo it with respect to process mapping and definition. As in all things finding the right balance is essential.
Process ownership can serve another important function: it allows a leader to test their future leaders, to see if they are ready for that promotion. It provides an incremental increase in authority, responsibility and accountability for the future leader. This also helps in building competency. Ideally as a leader you will make a call to adventure for some future leaders to voluntarily take on process ownership. It can come with additional perks such as recognition at certain company functions, bonus money, or additional salary. Make it clear that for those seeking to grow and advance in the organization process ownership is a key step. Top-down assignment of process ownership is unlikely to yield the desired results and may even breed resentment. A voluntary approach will yield people in these leadership positions who are engaged and excited about the trust you have in them.
2.3 Lead by Example
Leaders at all levels in the organization need to know the company values intimately and live them out. Like it or not, as a leader you are being watched constantly and how you behave will be emulated by the people around you. Your energy will be emulated. The Gold Standard is recommended reading (Cormier, 2001). If you are being pessimistic, angry, chaotic this negative energy will percolate out from you and infect the people around you. If you are bringing hope, optimism, joy, orderliness, and supportiveness this positive energy will infect the people around you. The world has become increasingly chaotic and people are looking for sources of stability. The leader should provide shade in a thirsty desert and shelter in a storm.
Success in leading by example is critically important in providing a sense of coherence to your team. If you as a leader behave in ways that are inconsistent with the organization’s values the team will notice and it will erode their respect for you. YOU are the model of behaviour for people to follow.
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The leader must behave consistently with very high ethical standards. A commitment made is a commitment kept.
A leader is not immune from criticism. You must be open to constructive criticism from subordinates, welcoming it with a spirit of gratitude as an opportunity for improvement. This should be formally incorporated into the performance review process where the subject of the review is provided an opportunity to give feedback on the organization and leadership. This is not hard to do if the prerequisite behaviour of gratitude for critical feedback on the part of the leader has been observed: a simple request for feedback on the part of team members during performance review is a good place to start. A behavioural inventory can be used as a prompt for this kind of discussion.
Leading by example is HARD. Recognize and accept your flawed human nature (humility + emotional intelligence), but do not be complacent about it (perseverance). The leader should strive to be on a trajectory of improving their competency as a leader, building on strengths, reducing and eliminating flaws, knowing that perfection will never be attained.
Leading by example is critical to building:
Coherence
Cohesion in your team
Connection between you and the team and between team mates
Competency of your leadership skills and technical skills
Success in leading by example will start a positive resonance that increases energy levels.
Collins makes a great metaphor: The Flywheel (Collins, 2001). The idea is that by incrementally adding momentum and velocity to a flywheel eventually breakthrough velocity can be achieved. Leading by example is essential to these incremental increases in momentum.
2.4 Closing
In conclusion there are a few things that simply must be done to drive quality of action:
Getting people on the bus
Codification and communication of Values, Mission, Vision
Leading by example with respect to values and mission
Strategic Planning: Planned actions that are consistent with Values, Mission, Vision
Part of the value in planning is being prepared to change with the situation changes, making adjustments in real time.
Appendix 1 and 3 present models of generative aligned action and some of the big ideas above fit into these more abstract formulations. There are two direct outcomes from the above:
High quality planned action (Q) (see Appendix 1)
Highly engaged team members (E) (See Appendix 3)