The Phases of Strategic OnBoarding^©

By Ron Cox, CEO, Tailwind

When on-boarding a senior level player at the strategic level—it’s important to get them connected to the overall strategy as quickly as possible. They are being brought in to manage a key part of the business and drive results quickly. To accomplish this, they need to become strategically engaged and develop a strategic plan of action. The only problem is that they don’t really understand the company or the overall strategy well enough to independently drive key parts of it. No wonder nearly 50% of mid-career executive transitions don’t work out.

No matter how talented someone is, they typically need to build their own strategy within the context of the bigger picture. That’s why, when they first come onboard, the focus is to get them “up to speed” as quickly as possible. Corporate on-boarding programs are generally designed do that. But these programs almost always fall short of integrating the new executive strategically.

There is a natural rhythm that needs to be understood and managed in order for Strategic OnBoarding© to work effectively. We have identified four key phases that new strategic hires naturally transition through. A key point to remember here is that these phases will unfold in this order whether or not your company chooses to influence them. These natural four phases are:

1.   Intelligence—gathering as much information as possible about their new company.
2.   Insight—filtering the information to discern what’s relevant strategically and why.
3.   Analysis—analyzing their own situation to decide what changes they need to make.
4. Synthesis—building their own strategy that is aligned with the overall strategic direction.

Unfortunately on-boarding executives are often left alone to navigate these phases, reflect on their new situation and synthesize their actions with the strategic direction of the company. Strategic information is not readily available or in a format where it’s easy to understand and connect to. Early experiences in the new position are not always highly structured and sometimes opportunistic. Companies rightly try to take advantage of events and situations that are available at the particular time that the individual is coming onboard. This can result in a more stochastic approach to strategic integration that is not structured and predictable. Strategic OnBoarding helps newly hired executives critically think about their role in what the company is trying to do so that they can focus their individual contributions to that strategic effort.

No matter what the company wants to do, strategic integration has to happen for the executive on a personal level—they have to align themselves with the strategy, not the other way around. Our recommendation is to provide the on-boarding executive with a disciplined and structured process that teaches them how to successfully transition through the four natural phases.

Filed under Uncategorized. Comment

People Align Themselves

By Ron Cox, CEO, Tailwind

I recently read the book Fake Work by Brent Peterson and Gaylan Neilson and have been thinking about how much it aligns with basic, proven ideas that have been around for years.  That is, when you do work that is not aligned with the overall strategy, it is fake work.  In fact, the authors’ research indicates that 70% of employees don’t know what to do to support their company’s strategy—and, even more disturbing, that up to 50% of all work is fake work.  Kind of mind-blowing when you think about it.

Connecting people to your strategy is the key to execution, and the elimination of fake work.  Everyone I talk with today is busier than they’ve ever been before.  Every day is go, go, go.  Kind of makes you wonder –I mean, everyone is really, really busy…and 50% of all that activity could be fake work—stuff that’s not aligned with the overall strategy.  Hmmm.  So we could be more productive and execute better if we could align our people with our strategy!

But here’s the kicker, and it’s one of those nuggets that Brent and Gaylan shared in the book:  “Managers don’t align people, people have to align themselves.”  Connecting people to strategy is less about giving direction and more about engaging thought.  Everyday, your people translate the overall strategy at their level–they set their individual priorities on what they think will move the company toward its goals.  However, if the priorities they set are based on imperfect or incomplete translations of your strategy, then their work won’t be aligned.  In fact, there’s an excellent chance that they will be engaged in fake work: costing your company time and money, without helping it advance toward its goals.  Being very busy is not the same as executing the strategy.

Individual translation of strategy is the key to enabling people to connect themselves to the strategy.  It provides them with the opportunity to understand the overall strategy and how they fit into the big picture.  It also allows them to personally engage on a strategic level, thinking through their objectives and their work within the context of the overall strategy.  Done well, this results in something we call Strategic Literacy^SM…which is the collective knowledge of people in their own strategy.  This must be done with the full understanding that “people align themselves.”

Filed under Strategy. Comment

Getting Everyone on the Same Page

By Ron Cox, CEO, Tailwind

As we work to wind-up what has been an “interesting” business year and look forward to better fortunes in 2010, our minds naturally turn to things like improving performance, execution and growth. We’ve been working on our business strategy and making plans to gain strong traction at the beginning of the year—engaging our people and getting the new year off to a strong start.

We’ll all put a lot of effort and resources into “getting everyone on the same page” strategically, but how successful will we be? How well will your people be able to understand and execute your strategy?

Getting everyone on the same page in any endeavor is the key to its execution. Playmakers need to know both the gameplan and the plays. Increasing your people’s collective literacy in your company’s strategy will increase your results.

Three tips for getting everyone on the same page are:

1. Clarify and focus your big picture strategy–make it easy to understand.

2. Build absolute strategic consensus with your senior executives.

3. Make sure that your playmakers have translated versions of the strategy for themselves so they know both the gameplan and the plays they should run to make it happen.

These, naturally, sound easier than they are. We recognize the high degree of difficulty associated with all three of these best-practices. If you’d like to explore some ideas for clarifying your strategy, building consensus with your senior team, or translating your strategy at the individual level, give us a call. We’d be happy to learn about your situation in more detail and make some suggestions to help you on your path forward.

Filed under Uncategorized. Comment

Separating the Vital Few from the Trivial Many

By Ron Cox, CEO, Tailwind

Dr. Joseph Juran developed the Pareto Principle–better known as the 80/20 Rule.  This rule, often applied in analysis and problem-solving, describes how often a small percentage of causal variables account for most of the results being analyzed.  Using Pareto Analysis is one of the fundamentals in business.  In the process of showing us the way, Dr. Juran coined the phrase, “separating the vital few from the trivial many”.

One of the issues with business strategy and planning lies in our inability to separate our vital few from the trivial many.  When working with business leaders in both large and small companies, our discussions always seem to center on the vital many.  There are often a dozen or more items in their “vital few,” and sometimes the number is over 20.  Getting it down to a core 5 to 7 items for your vital few is essential because the human mind and the business organization can’t simultaneously entertain and execute more imperatives than that.  Having too many imperatives impedes your focus and dilutes your intent. 

Whether you are managing a small unit, a department or division, an emerging growth company, or a large corporation, separating your vital few imperatives from the trivial many will make a big difference in your ability to execute your strategy.

Filed under Uncategorized. Comment

Making Strategy Happen

By Ron Cox, CEO, Tailwind

Yogi Berra said it well: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you just might end up someplace else.” This happens all the time with strategy, and I believe that the first half of the quote tells the story. Corporate strategy is often not well understood by leaders across the company who need to execute it. And, it is often a little unclear or unfocused for the few at the very top who developed it.

If you’re thinking about improving your ability to make your strategy happen, you might want to ask yourself three questions:

1) How well do you know where your organization is going?

2) How clear and focused is your senior team around where your organization wants to go?

3) How well do your leaders across the company understand where you want to go and their respective roles in making it happen?

To really make strategy happen, context is king. For leaders who are trying to synchronize their behaviors while still operating without a lot of direct oversight, the ability to be fully tapped into the larger business context is critical. Only when people understand the big picture can they can align their efforts and drive execution. We refer to this idea as Strategic LiteracySM, where the collective literacy of a group of people in their own strategy is a key determinant of their success as an organization.
Without Strategic LiteracySMyour whole organization just might end up someplace else.

Filed under Strategy. Comment

3 Benefits of Translating Your Strategy

By Chris Cox

Most executives or managers are unable explain their company’s business strategy.  They may own their function and fully understand their department, but in terms of the whole-business strategy, they’re in the dark.   A translated strategy is one that has been broken down so that every executive and manager in the company knows exactly what the company is trying to accomplish.  It also means that every executive and manager knows exactly how the decisions they make will drive the execution of the strategy. Clarifying your strategy is often a critical first step toward resolving a host of business issues.  Fiscal performance, excellence in execution, and key-player retention are all affected by the clarity of the strategy translation.

Benefit # 1: Money

When your key players’ understanding of the strategy is opaque, execution is imprecise.  Imprecise execution is often characterized by chasing the wrong opportunities and spending money on the wrong initiatives.  Chances are good that people who are spending money on the wrong solutions are probably not spending money on the right solutions.   The double whammy–spending money on the wrong things while the right things go undone–is a direct consequence of unclear strategy.

Benefit #2: Execution

From the perspective of informed leadership, there is always a hierarchy of importance.  When faced with big challenges–like opening new stores, updating distribution networks, focusing the sales team on a particular market, or integrating IT assets—something has to come first.  Without insight, well-meaning executives and managers often take on work assignments that are not essential to the company’s realization of its strategy.  Sometimes this can be known as, “the urgent driving out the important.”

Benefit #3: Retention

Nothing is as frustrating as not knowing why you failed.  Employees want to contribute to their company’s success.  The more people understand the big picture, the better they will feel about their individual contributions to its success.  But when people are unaware of how their contribution is making a difference, they toil in obscurity, are easily frustrated, and often become cynical—completely disconnected from the meaning of their actions.  Fortunately, the opposite is also true.  When executives and managers understand how their decisions at the margin are affecting the company’s trajectory, they are more fulfilled by the work they do everyday.  They understand the meaning of it all, and they are more likely to stay with their company over the long haul.

Filed under Strategy. Comment

Connecting People To Strategy: Doing Your Own Version of God’s Work

By Ron Cox, CEO, Tailwind

When talking with a CEO about how aligned his people were around his company’s strategy, he commented, “Everyone is doing their own version of God’s work.”  What he meant, of course, was that his people were hardworking and dedicated.  They were pursuing their work with a missionary-like zeal.   They were, however, totally unaligned with the strategy and instead working on what they thought were the most important items.  There were passionate and focused, just not on the right strategic priorities.  This represented the total opposite of “Getting everyone on the same page” and is pretty common in large organizations.

Recently, a senior executive with a large company commented that her company becomes unaligned at the first level across the top of the organization.  She remarked that each senior executive forms their own interpretation of the overall strategy, and this interpretation strongly influences how they develop their strategies for their respective parts of the business.  Predictably, the various moving parts don’t always add up or come together as expected.

Getting everyone on the same page is about having a strategy that is clear and focused, where the strategic imperatives are understood by all.  It involves building consensus around your company’s strategic intent and ensuring that everyone fully supports the direction.   It means having executives and managers across the organization who can effectively and accurately translate the company’s strategy.  When they can do that, they are able to synch their daily decision-making with the imperatives of the overall gameplan.  Getting everyone on the same page is a first, necessary step that allows your leaders to share a common vision of the future, understand the needs of the business as a whole, and synchronize perspectives horizontally on the overall priorities for your company. 

Filed under Strategy. Comment

Strategy Translation

By Ron Cox, CEO, Tailwind

Many senior leaders across different businesses have shared with me that their executives and managers aren’t strategic enough.   In their words, “they don’t get the strategy and aren’t aligned with what we’re trying to do.”  This sometimes causes leaders to face an approach/avoidance conflict.  On the one hand, they need to engage executives and managers at all levels in executing the strategy.  On the other hand, if they don’t understand the strategy, they’ll put an operational spin on it and, in their words, “drive it in the ditch.”  No wonder senior leaders are frustrated!  Their strategic execution is being held hostage by a lack of strategic thinking skills across the organization! 

Or is it?  Strategy translation is a very different process from strategic thinking.  It’s more like problem-solving, which is straightforward and can be taught at any level.  When I was head of OD for Xerox, we taught problem-solving skills to 100,000 people around the world—basically everyone in the organization.   This training rolled out globally in a number of different languages.  Every person was involved…including presidents, security personnel, administrative assistants, custodians.  And every level used these skills and approaches to improve the business from where they worked.

When you reframe the discussion and shift from strategic thinking skills to strategy translation process, it redefines the issue and makes it easier to close the gap.  Using a structured approach, strategy translation can be done well by executives and managers at any level of an organization. 

Filed under Strategy. Comment

Connecting People to Strategy: OnBoarding

By Ron Cox, CEO, Tailwind

Transitioning key talent from one company to another is challenging, and the results are much poorer than you’d expect.  Depending upon what research you look at, failure rates of new executives will average as high as 40 to 50%.   Think about the expense incurred—both in terms of hard costs and soft costs.  The monetary costs of losing a key hire are pretty straightforward, however, the costs of lost opportunity can quickly overshadow them. The strategic impact of starting over when a key hire doesn’t work out can have a much greater impact on the organization, both in the short term and long term.

Many companies are working to mitigate this issue by adding structured on boarding processes.  These processes help formalize and accelerate the assimilation of the transitioning talent.  In looking at these programs, what seems to be missing for me is strategic integration.  Key talent needs to be strategically connected to the new company and strategically relevant as quickly as possible.   They need to be synched up with the company’s strategy from the onset, in addition to the more classic on boarding processes.  This includes accurately translating the company’s strategy at their level.  Strategic integration of the executive, done right, can make a key difference…not only in whether they effectively transition and become part of the team, but also in how quickly they’re on the same page with senior leadership and driving the results you brought them in to achieve.

Filed under OnBoarding. Comment

Connecting People to Strategy

By Ron Cox, CEO, Tailwind

Excellence in execution has been the number one issue put forth by CEO’s worldwide for several years running. People execute strategy,

yet many companies struggle with connecting their people to their strategy. Is it just me, or is there a strong correlation here?

In a recent article, we identified four key barriers to connecting your people to your strategy and made recommendations for how to overcome them. The four barriers we identified are:

1) The strategy is not clear, focused and “connectable”

2) There is a lack of consensus across senior management

3) Strategy is not translated at the individual level

4) The organization is not completely aligned around the strategy.

These four go hand in hand, but the long pole in the tent is number 3, translating strategy at the individual level. It is the key enabler for connecting people to the strategy. It is also the bridge between the strategic intent at the top and the alignment in the rest of the organization.

The interesting thing about translating strategy at the individual level is that your people will do it, with or without your help. In some cases I’ve heard senior executives refer to this as, “…doing their own version of God’s work,” where their people are nowhere near being on the same page.

Translating strategy is a process that can be planned and managed to consistently deliver quality results. Done well, it enables executives and managers at all levels of the organization to convert the strategy into their own plans that are both clear and focused. Our experience has been that, with the right tools and support, managers at any level in the organization can do a great job of translating the company’s strategy so that they can connect to it, personally own it, and drive its execution.

Filed under Strategy. Comment