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Part 7 – Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

May 18, 2012 by Belinda Davies Leave a Comment

Strategic Influencing

In this series of articles on Strategic Leadership, I have discussed strategic leadership in general and have also explored the nature of strategic thinking. I then moved on to a consideration of strategic acting – or execution. The next important aspect of Strategic Leadership that I will explore is that of Strategic Influencing – the formation and nurturing of strategic relationships over the long term.

The key to the success of the strategic leader is his ability to exert influence with a wide variety of people, over many of whom he has no authority. This influence may be around such things as:

Getting people aligned in terms of the long-term strategic direction of the business;
Persuading people as to the wisdom of a particular strategic initiative so that there is real commitment as opposed to mere compliance (or even passive or active resistance);
Being able to create a significant shift in the way resources are allocated or invested so that this allocation of resources is congruent with the strategic intent;
Sharing information, insights, observations and opinions with more senior executives around issues relating to strategy formulation, execution/implementation of strategy or the ability of the organisation to respond to market or competitor moves.

The Strategic leader understands that without the ability to influence in all directions throughout the organisation, her long-term success in effecting strategic action will be limited. Real strategic leaders understand this long before they reach the top of the organisation. If you examine the career history of the most successful strategic leaders, you will find that they have cultivated rich, healthy networks in all parts of the organisation, as well as outside the organisation with key players. They understand that the key to real success is relationships – both professionally and personally.

You might find it interesting to explore your own strategic influencing skills by considering the answers to the following questions (perhaps rate yourself on a scale of
1 – 5). Bear in mind that in order to answer these questions honestly, you need to reflect on occasions when you have actually done what is described:

How well do you understand your impact on other people and how that impact affects the quality of collective work?
To what extent does your network consist of a rich variety of people who are outside your routine work?
How accurate is your assessment of the political landscape in your organisation?
How well have you been able to navigate the political terrain without negatively impacting on your credibility (without being regarded as a political animal)?
To what extent have you been able to develop a compelling and inspiring vision?
How well have you been able to engender enthusiasm and real commitment to a vision of the future in the hearts and minds of others?
How well have you been able to find creative ways for people to discuss the undiscussables?
To what extent do you explore the perspectives of other people in order to deepen your understanding of their point of view?
How well do you read and understand the needs, styles and motivations of others?
To what extent are you able to use that information to communicate with others in a way that is meaningful to them and that influences them?

Having given some consideration to these questions, you might ask yourself the following questions:

Which of these need some attention?
What has prevented you from being successful in these aspects in the past?
Who could give you some feedback on how you might become more effective?
What immediate action will you take?

There are two essential aspects of your personal trustworthiness that are central to your ability to build relationships that allow for strategic influence. The first is the extent to which you are absolutely clear about your passions, and the second relates to your credibility. As in all things, strategic influence starts with you. Your own passion is critical because without it how will you be able to infect others with passion? When you are clear about your passion, you know exactly what you are trying to achieve and have an infectious sense of excitement about it. You are also clear on your personal values – what is important to you about how people work together; how do you wish the business to succeed; what roles would you like to see people playing; etc.? Real passion for your work requires that you see a direct link between your work vision and your personal aspirations – there is something very powerful in it for you.

Your credibility depends on two important things: the first is your expertise – you are really good at what you do – and the second is your character and integrity. People with character and integrity are consistently seen to do the following:

Put the collective good ahead of personal gain
Be truthful, whether the news is good or bad
Fulfill their commitments
Step up to the plate and accept responsibility
Respect and develop other people
Celebrate the successes of other people
Confront unjustness
Forgive others readily
Put themselves out for other people

It is useful to examines one’s own trustworthiness against the following questions that explore how one might compromise one’s integrity:

To what extent might other people see you as a bit puffed up and arrogant?
To what extent are you seen as serving your own interests ahead of the greater good?
To what extent are you seen to shade the truth when it suits you?
To what extent might others have doubts about your dependability in meeting commitments and complying with agreed processes?
To what extent might your actions be perceived as unfair?
To what extent might others see you to shift the blame in order to avoid personal responsibility for problems or mistakes?
To what extent have your behaviours indicated a lack of respect for others?
To what extent might you be seen to be envious of other people’s successes?
To what extent is development of others seen as low down on your list of priorities?
To what extent are you seen as unwilling to stick your neck out on matters of principle?
To what extent are you seen as holding grudges and finding ways to get even?
To what extent are you regarded as someone who would not put him-/herself out for others?

These are tough questions, but we must stare them in the face. Remember that we judge ourselves by our intentions, but we are judged by our actions. We may intend to be a certain way, but if that does not translate into visible action then, at best, we are talking a good talk – but what about the walk?

In the next article, I will explore the kinds of relationships that are built by those who are really effective in the area of strategic influence.

Recommended Reading:

“Becoming a Strategic Leader” by Richard L. Hughes and Katherine Colarelli Beatty (ISBN 0-7879-6867-6.
“The New Strategic Thinking” by Michael Robert (ISBN 0-07-146224-4)
“Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done” by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan (ISBN 0609610570)
“Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” by Richard Rumelt (ISBN 978-1-84668-480-7
HBR 10 Must Reads: On Change Management
HBR 10 Must Reads: On Strategy

Filed Under: Featured, General Tagged With: engagement, leadership, strategic leadership, strategic relationships, strategic thinking, Strategy

Some Questions About Strategic Leadership

May 16, 2012 by Belinda Davies Leave a Comment

I love receiving responses to my articles – in the form of questions, observations, sharing of experiences and alternative views, as well as useful tools that I can share with my readers. We are half way through the series of 12 articles on Strategic Leadership, and I thought I would interrupt the series to answer some questions asked by one of my clients in response to these articles. My answers are based on my personal experience and my fairly extensive reading.

Perhaps it is useful to start by positioning my experience. I tend to work with executives and managers in medium-sized organisations – they might be part of a large multinational corporation, but locally would be regarded as medium-sized or even smallish. This means that they employ fewer than 1 500 people in South Africa, and they have no more than 200 people in every level of management. I do not work in very large organisations. This has been a choice based on the fact that I like to really get to know and understand the companies I do work for. In addition, I generally work alone or with a handful of associates so I prefer to work in organisations in which a small team can conceivably create change “tipping points” within a 3 – 5 year period.

1) Can one get so engrossed in strategic focus that the operational tasks get neglected?

Definitely. I have seen this in businesses of every size – from a small two-person business to rather large organisations. Of course, the smaller the business, the more obvious this is and the greater the damage it can do to the organisation. It tends to be only in the larger organisations – think of the likes of banks and power utilities as examples – that senior executives can be exclusively focused on strategic issues with no involvement in operational matters.

In the vast majority of businesses, leaders need to juggle strategic leadership with operational management – and if they err too much on the side of strategy, it can be just as threatening to the survival of the business, if not more so, than erring on the side of operational focus. My experience is that most of the leaders I work with are so immersed in the operation that they need to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the trees in order to even see the forest! And their businesses have survived – and even thrived – despite this lack of strategic focus.

The flipside is the person who is so completely absorbed in strategizing and thinking about the future that he pays scant attention to the day-to-day operational needs of the business. It is all very well looking to the creation and achievement of the long-term business strategy – but if that means that you are not generating the short-term revenues that will enable you to survive to even get to that future state, it is all somewhat meaningless. You can’t eat a strategy!

2) How do you find the balance between strategic and operational issues?

I have really enjoyed experimenting with the thinking of Stephen Covey around this. On www.audible.com I found an abridged audiobook called The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals. He refers to the day-to-day operational realities as “the whirlwind”, and it keeps whirling constantly anyway. Usually, the challenge is to ensure that you take time out to pay attention to the execution of your strategy even while the whirlwind is sweeping you along. In pursuit of this, Covey recommends four disciplines:

Get clear on your “wildly important goals” – which he calls WIGs. He makes the point that you CANNOT have a shopping list of WIGs (or priorities) – that if you think you have 10 priorities, then you don’t know what your priorities are! You can really only work on and achieve success in 1 – 3 WIGs at any one time. You will have to decide what to say No to while you focus on your 1 – 3 WIGs, and you must have a clear finish line for each of them.
Identify the key actions – Get clear on what needs to be done and what needs to be measured in order to achieve each WIG. What activities (lead measures) will produce the outcomes (lag measures) you seek? The lead measures MUST predict the outcomes you are looking for, and they must be activities that can be influenced by an individual. A sales example comes to mind for ease of explanation: in order to generate Rx of sales (lag measure), you need to phone x-number of people (lead measure) in order to see x-number of people (lead measure) and write x-number of proposals (lead measure).
Keep a compelling scoreboard – Once you have identified your lead and lag measures, you need to measure them at consistent intervals. These “scores” must be captured on a scoreboard that is fun and motivating, simple, easily updatable, complete (it reflects both lead and lag measures) and which guides the team’s planning and indicates any need to correct course. A BIG note here: the team must like the scoreboard if you really expect them to use it.
Create a cadence of accountability – Team members must account to each other every week for what they have done to move the scoreboard forward, and commit to the 2 or 3 things they will do this week to move the lead measures forward. Review if the predicted lead measures are producing the lag measures as predicted. If not, diagnose the problem and, if necessary adjust course or find a more effective lead measure.

In his book, Great by Choice, Jim Collins refers to “obsessive, neurotic freaks” (ONFs). In respect of the four disciplines described here, you need to be an ONF if you want to be consistently successful.

In addition to these 4 disciplines, I recommend having a period review in which you and your team ask and answer the following questions:

What did we set out to achieve?
What have we achieved?
What is working well?
What is not working well?
What have we learned?
What do we need to do differently going forward?

More on this in the penultimate article on Strategic Leadership, in which we explore strategy as a learning process.

3) Is it more a case of having a strategic thought process through all operational activity?

True strategic leadership means having the ability to attend to the short-term through a long-term lens. It means having a constant awareness of where you are going, despite where you actually are, and being able to make decisions about the short-term with the long-term in mind. This requires the ability to see when short-term sacrifices are in the long-term interest, and the courage to resist pursuing the short-term wins that will jeopardise long-term success – alternatively, accepting some short-term “punishment” in order to secure long-term victory. This may mean resisting the pressure to deliver quarterly results that make you look good, in favour of a disciplined and courageous execution of the strategy that is going to create real long-term, sustainable competitive advantage. This is not for sissies!

Filed Under: Featured, General Tagged With: leadership, strategic acting, strategic leadership, strategic planning, strategic thinking, Strategy

Part Six: Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

April 26, 2012 by Belinda Davies Leave a Comment

Article 6 of 12

Part Six: Strategic Acting

In this series of articles on Strategic Leadership, I have discussed strategic leadership in general and have also explored the nature of strategic thinking. I began the discussion on Strategic Acting by considering how we might more effectively reward appropriate risk-taking, and followed it up with a discussion on how we might make strategy a learning process. In this article, we will explore Strategic Acting further by considering how we might act with both the short-term and the long-term in mind.

It has been said that anyone can think and act with the long-term in mind, OR focus on the short-term imperatives, but it takes a special talent to be able to manage the tension between the two effectively. In fact, Jack Welch puts it best: “I always thought any fool could do one or the other. Squeezing costs out at the expense of the future could deliver a quarter, a year, maybe even two years, and it’s not hard to do. Dreaming about the future and not delivering in the short term is the easiest of all. The test of a leader is balancing the two.” All too often the focus of our energy is on the short-term performance markers – because those are the ones on which our performance is measured! And what gets measured is where the energy will be spent.

The key to enabling oneself and one’s people to manage the tension between the two is strategic clarity and focus. The strategy needs to clarify not only what we will do, but also what we will not do – to ensure that activities that address short-term imperatives do not cost us the long-term successes we seek. Only when we are absolutely clear on what we will do and what we won’t do can we bear the “stress” of those activities that only pay off in the longer term while having no short-term impact.

If we are clear on what not to do, we can easily make decisions about things we should not be getting into in the first place, as well as making decisions about things we should be getting out of. This tells us what investments we should be making, and which ones we should not be making – or pulling.

Acting with the short-term and the long-term in mind also enables us to make decisions about the assets that need to be preserved – this could include a really strong brand, product lines that are young and promising in terms of their life-cycle, or competencies that set you apart from your competitors. This makes it all the more important that we measure not only short-term operational results, but also strategic results – current performance and future capability. So what considerations should we bear in mind when deciding on the correct measurements? There are two main considerations:

It is better to have a relatively small number of measures – strategy is about making decisions, and the metrics should make this easier. Rather have 1 or 2 lag measures and their related 3 – 5 lead measures than sow confusion by measuring too much that appears meaningless. You are measuring to drive behaviour – you are not measuring to report!
The measures should be a logical expression of the strategy – that old principle that you must “inspect” what you “expect”.
The desired behaviours (lead and lag) must be measured very regularly (daily / weekly / monthly) and these measures made visible so that people get feedback as instantly as possible.
Preferably people should report on their own results and behaviours to each other – this way, everyone personally accounts for their contribution to their colleagues. For more on this Google “The Four Disciplines of Execution” to get Stephen Covey’s views on what it takes to translate strategy into action.

You might want to try the following exercise with your team:

Individually brainstorm the things you believe are critical to the organisation’s strategic success – the strategic drivers. These might include current capabilities or conditions that do not currently exist.
Each person should select the 4 or 5 drivers that are most critical to strategic success and put them on a separate Post-It.
Everyone should put their Post-Its on a presentation board, and then the team should sort them into logical categories – e.g. becoming the leaders in product development; or attracting and retaining the right talent. (This is not an exact science and you will find that categories get changed and things get moved around as a natural part of creating shared understanding – take your time.)
Once the team has decided on a set of key drivers, the team needs to assess the importance of each driver relative to the other drivers.
Once you have rank-ordered the list of drivers, you will want to identify methods of measuring success. It is better not to measure everything – rather select the 2 or 3 drivers that combine the highest relative importance with the lowest current effectiveness. It will be against these drivers that you will develop metrics to enable you to assess future capability.

If you are serious about becoming more strategic and enabling your team to do likewise, it is critical that your metrics give you information about your strategic drivers. If you continue to simply measure your monthly, quarterly and annual results, then that is all you will get – and nothing more strategic.

Over the next couple of weeks, why don’t you have a look at what you are currently measuring? Will your current scorecard give you the strategic success you seek? If not, what do you need to do to ensure that your strategy drives your scorecard and your scorecard drives the implementation of your strategy. And have a great fortnight.

Recommended Reads

If you are interested in reading more about strategic leadership we recommend:

“Becoming a Strategic Leader” by Richard L. Hughes and Katherine Colarelli Beatty (ISBN 0-7879-6867-6).
“Leading Strategic Change – Breaking Through the Brain Barrier” by J. Stewart Black and Hal B. Gregersen (ISBN 0-13-046108-3).
“The New Strategic Thinking” by Michael Robert (ISBN 0-07-146224-4).
“Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done” by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan (ISBN 0609610570)

Filed Under: Featured, General Tagged With: lag measures, lead measures, measurement, strategic acting, strategic leadership, strategic planning, strategic relationships, strategic thinking, Strategy, SWOT analysis, vision

Part Five : Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

April 23, 2012 by Belinda Davies Leave a Comment

Article 5 of 12

Part Five: Strategic Acting

In this series of articles on Strategic Leadership, I have discussed strategic leadership in general and have also explored the nature of strategic thinking. I have also begun a discussion on Strategic Acting by considering how we might more effectively reward appropriate risk-taking. In this article, we will explore Strategic Acting further.

Another important aspect of strategic acting is the ability to make strategy a learning process. After all, the business’s strategy is just its theory of what it takes to be successful – and this needs to be tested with some courageous experimentation. In fact, this is something of a chicken and egg thing – learning can take place if strategic thinking precedes strategic action; but learning also takes place when strategic action occurs before strategic thinking.

Consequently, tactics have the dual purpose of both execution and learning. However, there is a strong tendency to completely overlook the latter. And in doing so organisations miss a huge opportunity – after all, “tactics are not only about implementing today’s strategy, but also about discovering tomorrow’s strategy” (Campbell and Alexander, 1997). Tactics provide feedback loops that speak of current performance as well as our future capability.

Think of it as conducting business experiments. Try this:

Identify a strategic initiative that might enable your business to capitalize on changing conditions in the market place.
Brainstorm this with your team and get really creative with the detail.
Now consider this as a business experiment:

Change just one aspect of the initiative.
Brainstorm what would happen if you made this change.
Now go back and change another aspect and brainstorm the scenario.
Once you have worked through each individual aspect, go back and change combinations until you have scenarios for each changed combination of aspects.

What lessons have you learned from this exercise?
Of all the scenarios you have brainstormed, which one would teach you most if it succeeded?
Of all the scenarios, which one would teach you most if it failed?
What data do you need to collect in order to decide which would be the scenario most likely to succeed and validate your experiment?

This kind of thinking occurs before taking action, but we also need to learn from our actions. It is vital to review the impact of our tactics. We need to ask the following questions:

What were we intending to achieve?
What actually happened?
What worked well?
What did not work so well?
What can be learned from this?
What do we need to do now?

Then we need to take the action and tell others what we have learned.

You might like to consider some business experiments you could conduct in order to learn. It might also be interesting to do a review of some of your more recent strategic actions to see what can be learned from them.

Recommended Reads

If you are interested in reading more about strategic leadership we recommend:

“Becoming a Strategic Leader” by Richard L. Hughes and Katherine Colarelli Beatty (ISBN 0-7879-6867-6).
“Leading Strategic Change – Breaking Through the Brain Barrier” by J. Stewart Black and Hal B. Gregersen (ISBN 0-13-046108-3)
“The New Strategic Thinking” by Michael Robert (ISBN 0-07-146224-4
“Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done” by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan (ISBN 0609610570)

Filed Under: Featured, General Tagged With: strategic acting, strategic leadership, strategic planning, strategic relationships, strategic thinking, Strategy, SWOT analysis, vision

Part Four: Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

April 20, 2012 by Belinda Davies Leave a Comment

Article 4 of 12

Part Four: Strategic Acting

In this series of articles on Strategic Leadership, I have discussed strategic leadership in general and have also explored the nature of strategic thinking. It is time, now to consider strategic acting and what that might mean in the life of the strategic leader.

Strategic acting is really about the execution of strategic priorities – and is a critically important part of the strategic learning process. In essence, strategic acting is not only about simply getting on with it – it is also about how we learn from the efforts or attempts we make in the execution of strategy. This highlights for us the “experimental nature” of strategic acting – it really is a process of learning how to get to where we want to be from where we are. And of course, there is no guarantee that the selected actions are the right ones or the best ones. This means being able to be decisive in the face of uncertainty. This is in addition to some other critical competencies that make up strategic acting:

Setting clear priorities
Creating conditions in which others can be effective
Making strategy a learning process
Acting with both the long and the short-term in mind
Being willing to stick your neck out for what you believe

Since these are the critical competencies, rate yourself out of 5 on the following questions (5 being excellent performance and 1 being below the required level):

How decisive are you in the face of uncertainty?
Are you able to manage the tension between the short-term measurables and the long-term success of the business?
Are you able to implement new tactics or actions that are consistent with the strategy?
Do you typically make decisions that are strategically consistent with each other?
Do you empower action by providing others with a helpful balance of direction and autonomy?
Have you found ways to reward appropriate risk-taking?
Do you adapt existing plans to changing conditions?
Have you developed the habit of reflecting on the consequences of action taken so that the learning might be used to inform future decisions and actions?
Do you explore mistakes in order to learn from them (rather than finding someone to blame)?

Now that you have rated yourself out of 5, I challenge you to give examples that corroborate your rating. Now be especially courageous and ask some trusted colleagues to rate you and give you their own examples.

All of these factors are equally important, but some merit special attention because they are so challenging. In my work as a coach, one of the challenges I frequently address with my clients is the issue of rewarding appropriate risk-taking. There is a pervasive tendency in many organisations to make punishments for mistakes more significant than rewards for success – hence a tendency to play it safe in setting strategic targets. If you set the bar sufficiently low, you risk little. Consequently the person who just missed a significantly challenging target is valued less highly than the person who exceeded a relatively low target.

It is important not only to reward appropriate risk-taking behaviour, but also to deliberately avoid punishing or discouraging reasonable risk-taking. To assess how your business is doing on this you might consider the following questions:

Are we encouraging an appropriate level of risk-taking to enhance our chances of success?
What examples do we have of appropriate risks that have been taken?
What examples do we have of appropriate risks that we did not take?
Do the previous 2 answers show up any patterns?
What kinds of risks do we need to be more prepared to take?
What criteria would be useful in enabling us to assess whether a risk is worth taking?
How do we handle mistakes? Is this likely to stifle even moderate amounts of risk-taking?
How much risk-taking occurs “under the radar”? Would it be better to bring that risk-taking into the open, and what would it take to do so?
When we achieve success, do we know what risks were taken to achieve it?
How effectively do we use examples of risk-taking with both positive and negative outcomes as opportunities to learn and teach?
How certain are our people that they won’t be punished for taking what appeared to be a reasonable risk, even if it doesn’t work out?
What barriers have we imposed on ourselves that inhibit appropriate risk-taking?
What can I (as the leader) do more of to encourage appropriate risk-taking behaviour?

Reflect on these questions and see if you can’t find some ways to encourage more appropriate risk-taking in the interests of strategic success. And whether they work or not – what might you learn?

Recommended Reads

If you are interested in reading more about strategic leadership we recommend:

“Becoming a Strategic Leader” by Richard L. Hughes and Katherine Colarelli Beatty (ISBN 0-7879-6867-6).
“Leading Strategic Change – Breaking Through the Brain Barrier” by J. Stewart Black and Hal B. Gregersen (ISBN 0-13-046108-3)
“The New Strategic Thinking” by Michael Robert (ISBN 0-07-146224-4)
“Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done” by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan (ISBN 0609610570)

Filed Under: Featured, General Tagged With: strategic acting, strategic leadership, strategic planning, strategic relationships, strategic thinking, Strategy, SWOT analysis, vision

Part Three: Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

April 18, 2012 by Belinda Davies Leave a Comment

Article 3 of 12

Part Three: Strategic Thinking

In the previous article I started to explore what strategic thinking is and what strategic leaders think about. In this article, I have some ideas that you might use in order to get into the discipline of thinking strategically in the interests of making you more deliberately focused on creating sustainable competitive advantage for your organisation.

Strategic thinkers are good at scanning the internal and external landscape in order to ascertain where the business is in terms of its Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (the good old SWOT). In considering strengths and weaknesses, they ask of themselves and others what internal capabilities give us a competitive advantage or put us at a disadvantage? They also consider how we meet or fail to meet the needs of key internal and external stakeholders. In considering opportunities and threats, they ask questions relating to current or possible future conditions in the external environment that might improve our chances of achieving our strategic vision if taken advantage of, or which might pose a risk if nothing is done to minimize their impact. Having done your own SWOT analysis, you might find it really useful to have SWOT conversations with someone significantly senior to you, someone in another part of the organisation, someone really creative and off the wall, and someone you regard as a really sound thinker. Compare your views with theirs and see what you have learned.

Having scanned the landscape, you have some good information on which to base a more creative process of visioning. The trick is to get out of a linear, logical, analytical thinking into a process that is more intuitive and visual and which somehow captures the emotions. There are many ways to do this that you could try. Here are just two examples:

With a group of colleagues, build a collage that represents your collective vision for the business. Then discuss it. Use this to help you to articulate a verbal vision that will excite and inspire.
Write a newspaper article that tells of your business’s success 4 or 5 years from now – something that might appear in the Financial Mail. As you read it, it should invoke feelings of pride at having been part of such a great success story. It should convey not only what the business has accomplished but also what kind of organisation it is and how it feels to be part of it. In the article, cite quotes, results and stories that encapsulate the company’s culture.
Have your peers write similar articles – then share the stories, discuss them and use the conversation as a springboard for developing a shared vision

So now we have scanned the landscape and are becoming increasingly clear on our vision – notice that even visioning is a process of increasing refinement and adjustment according to changing conditions. During this, and in other parts of the strategic process, strategic thinkers have a particular ability to examine things from different angles and reframe them when this proves useful.

Reframing involves questioning and testing beliefs and assumptions that prevail in the business, and finding new ways of seeing challenges, limitations and capabilities. In reframing, you might ask such questions as:

What could we be better at than anyone else in our industry? How might that change our business?
Have you ever seen a herd of cows? What if there was a purple, spotted cow in that herd? How could your business become the purple, spotted cow of your industry?
Is our business structured to serve our strategy, or are we crafting our strategy to serve our structure? What do we need to do differently?
What would happen if we turned the whole business on its head?
What are the biggest challenges facing us? How could we reinterpret these challenges more advantageously? What do we need to do in / with our business in order to make these challenges work to our advantage?

This ability to reframe assists strategic thinkers in helping others in the business to make sense of the environment, their challenges and how we need to face these together. Making common sense of a situation is really about creating some kind of shared understanding of what we are dealing with in circumstances that are complex and ambiguous. The creation of a shared understanding prevents some of the problems that come with implicit knowledge that is not clearly articulated. If you talk about the challenges facing the organisation and help people to understand them, they are better positioned to make their own decisions with these challenges in mind. This makes them better able to act appropriately and prevent or correct problems that can create confusion, such as when there appears to be contradictions between the priorities, policies and practices of different parts of the organisation – this becomes far less likely when there is a common understanding of the vision and strategy.

The creation of common understanding is the product of conversations with people in all parts of the organisation, such as:

Exploring the strategic implications of different future scenarios
Collaboration in creating visual representations of the vision
Using stories to make common sense of the strategy
Asking questions about how they see things and use this to deepen your understanding of their opinions
Finding ways to discuss undiscussables

Finally, strategic thinkers understand how systems work. They see complex interrelationships among different variables in the complexity of the business. They are able to pick up trends and patterns over time, and are able to test theories about what causes what, and the possible impact of various courses of action. They understand that there is a danger in merely seeking confirmation of what you already believe – so they purposely look for evidence that they might be wrong.

Try this:

Consider how your business is performing against targets and the vision.
What causal relationships might be at play in this performance?
How do you know you are right?
What evidence can you find that you might be wrong?
What can you learn from this that might inform your strategy?

Strategic thinking underpins all aspects of the strategic process. Perhaps you might try some of the tools and exercises we have shared with you in order to craft your strategy – you will discover how stimulating and fun strategy can be!

In the next article, I will begin to explore strategic acting. In the meantime, try coming at things from a completely different angle!

Recommended Reads

If you are interested in reading more about strategic leadership we recommend:

“Becoming a Strategic Leader” by Richard L. Hughes and Katherine Colarelli Beatty (ISBN 0-7879-6867-6).
“Leading Strategic Change – Breaking Through the Brain Barrier” by J. Stewart Black and Hal B. Gregersen (ISBN 0-13-046108-3)
“Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Chan Kim and Rene Mauborgne (ISBN 1-59139-619-0)
“The New Strategic Thinking” by Michael Robert (ISBN 0-07-146224-4)

Filed Under: Featured, General Tagged With: reframing, strategic leadership, strategic planning, strategic relationships, strategic thinking, Strategy, SWOT analysis, vision

Part Two: Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

April 13, 2012 by Belinda Davies Leave a Comment

(2 of 12 articles)

Part Two: Strategic Thinking

In my first article in this series, based on the book “Becoming a Strategic Leader” by Richard L. Hughes and Katherine Colarelli Beatty, it was clarified that strategic leadership is the sum of all of one’s thoughts, actions and interactions that are deliberately focused on creating sustainable competitive advantage for the organisation. This suggests something rather important – that strategic leadership is an iterative process, rather than a linear process of events. We have developed some unfortunate habits around strategy that has it as an “event” that takes place once a year, with a bigger “event” taking place every 5 years or so.

When we say that strategic leadership is iterative, we are saying that it doesn’t really have a specific starting point or a specific end point, and it is repetitive. In fact, if we agree that strategic leadership is really a learning process, then it starts almost anywhere in our holographic picture, and extends into the other places in the picture and back and around and so on. Strategic action begets strategic learning which begets strategic thinking, which may beget the creation of strategic teams, which may beget some new strategic relationships in which strategic influencing takes place, and this may beget a whole new line of strategic thinking. It is an alive, evolving, exciting process in which great people with great minds in good relationships think great thoughts which lead to great actions which create great opportunities for learning which result in new and greater thinking – all of which make the business stronger, and give it a sustainable competitive advantage.

Having said this, this series needs to have a starting point, so I have picked Strategic Thinking as the place to start. Of course, the big questions are “What do strategic leaders think about?” and “What kinds of thoughts do they have about these things?”

Most executives asked on their views of strategic thinking say it involves “vision” and good “long-term planning”. This may well be true – but more than that, it illustrates that strategic thinkers are good at two very different types of thinking. They appreciate that strategic thinking comprises both art and science. It has both a hard side and a soft side. The hard side of strategic thinking involves rigorous analysis of the external environment of markets, competitors, the industry, and governmental and social influences, as well as analysis of the organisation’s own capacity, products and services, market position, customers, systems and processes, leadership and culture. The soft side of strategic thinking is more qualitative. Carly Fiorina (CEO of Hewlett Packard, 2000) said of this balance “At any one moment in time you often can’t see where your path is heading and logic and intellect alone won’t lead you to make the right choices - won’t in fact take you down the right path. You have to master not only the art of listening to your head, you must also master listening to your heart and listening to your gut.” This gets to the core of the multifacetedness of strategic thinking. It uses analysis, but also requires synthesis; it is linear and non-linear; it is verbal, but it is also visual; it is implicit as well as explicit; and it engages both head and heart. All of these facets are brought to bear on the core strategic thinking competencies of scanning; visioning; reframing; making common sense; and systems thinking – which we will discuss in our next newsletter.

So, while you wait for the next in this series, become aware of your habits in terms of strategic thinking and try to incorporate the opposite as well – if your tendency is to be logical and analytical, tune into your heart and your guts. We can then engage your new awareness next time.

Recommended Read

If you are interested in reading more about strategic leadership I recommend “Becoming a Strategic Leader” by Richard L. Hughes and Katherine Colarelli Beatty (ISBN 0-7879-6867-6).

Filed Under: Featured, General, Uncategorized Tagged With: leadership, strategic leadership, strategic planning, strategic relationships, strategic thinking, Strategy, sustainable competitive advantage

Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

April 11, 2012 by Belinda Davies 1 Comment

(Article 1 of 12)

I have been re-reading one of the best books on strategic leadership that I have yet come across: “Becoming a Strategic Leader” by Richard L. Hughes and Katherine Colarelli Beatty (ISBN 0-7879-6867-6). The context is that so many of my clients are being challenged to think more strategically and be less operational in their focus – to become more than just leaders. They need to become strategic leaders! They need to think strategically and take their thinking “to the next level”. Unanimously their response is “Fine, but what on earth does that mean?”

I thought that I would share some of Hughes and Beatty’s ideas with you. They consider strategic leadership to be a holographic and therefore never-ending process that represents a way of looking at “the organisation-in-the-world”, and ways of acting in relation to “the organisation-in-the-world”.

Perhaps the most important place to start is with this question: “What is strategic leadership?”

In my view, you and your team exemplify strategic leadership if you think, act and interact in ways that are deliberately focused on creating sustainable competitive advantage for your organisation. It differs from “ordinary” leadership in that (i) it has broad scope even when it takes place in a fairly narrowly-defined operational division of the organisation; (ii) its impact is felt over a long time in the life of the business; and (iii) it often involves the creation of significant organisational change both inside and outside the organisation.

Strategic leaders are challenged to create focus in the business, to align tactics with strategy and to keep the long-term in mind despite short-term challenges. This is no small task given that the business environment requires increasing flexibility and resilience, while the internal “robustness” of the business demands increasingly complex, interdependent internal structures, systems and processes. It is the balancing of this tension that is the work of the strategic leader.

Strategic leaders understand that strategy is a learning process, rather than an event, and that effective strategic leadership involves a dynamic interplay between thinking strategically, acting strategically, building strategic relationships and influencing within those relationships with a view to the long-term, and constantly learning what we need to do to get there and how we might do it.

In this series of newsletters, I will explore each aspect of strategic leadership in a way that I hope you will find useful and practical. So as a starting point, consider these questions:

Where is your business right now?
Who are you (the business) and where do you want to go?
What will you (personally and the business) need to learn in order to get there?

Recommended Read

If you are interested in reading more about strategic leadership I recommend “Becoming a Strategic Leader” by Richard L. Hughes and Katherine Colarelli Beatty (ISBN 0-7879-6867-6).

Filed Under: Featured, General Tagged With: leadership, learning, strategic leadership, strategic planning, strategic relationships, strategic thinking, Strategy

COMENSA Research Findings – Coaching in South Africa

December 13, 2011 by Belinda Davies Leave a Comment

Article written by Megan Hudson, December 2011.

The results of a national survey that COMENSA conducted of coaching in the workplace in South Africa have now been published – the first ever conducted of the South African market, and one of which COMENSA is extremely proud. They intend to follow this up with bi-annual surveys.

The survey, conducted by COMENSA’s Research & Development Portfolio Committee from November 2010 to January 2011, encompassed coaches, coaching clients and organisations that utilise coaching in South Africa. The survey is unique in that this is the first time that the value, nature, perception and application of coaching has been investigated in a purely South African context, and not as part of a global study.

Participants included:

i. Small, medium and large organisations from the public, private, education and NGO sector, who utilise the services of both internal and external coaches;

ii. Coaches, either in their own practice, working for companies that provide coaching services to organisations or coaches who are employees of organisations and are providing coaching services as part of the work that they do;

iii. Individuals who have been coached.

Key findings:

The formal profession of Coaching in South Africa is largely dominated by coaches aged between 35 – 55, based in Gauteng and the Western Cape. This can be ratified by COMENSA’s membership demographics, which reflects a similar. A theme that emerged when asked what the biggest challenges are to the coaching industry in South Africa was the need for more black coaches although COMENSA is seeing a growing diversity in its membership.

Most coaches are self-employed and work alone or in coaching teams/panels with other coaches. It seems that most coaches supplement their coaching income with training, facilitation or some form of consulting.

There is confusion between the concepts of coaching and mentoring, and a general lack of clarity about the definition of coaching. Organisations seem to define coaching to fit their applications and requirements, and most participating organisations claim only to have embraced a coaching culture within the last 1 – 3 years.

Coaching is used most frequently with Executives, Senior Managers and High Potential Employees, and is used as a stand-alone programme rather than integrated into a training programme. Coaching in organisations is most often conducted by external coaches (81% of the time).

The research shows that 75% of organisations do not integrate coaching into the performance management system and yet coaching is most commonly used by organisations for performance enhancement (93%) and management development (90%).

The least cited reasons for utilising coaching in organisations were learnerships, addressing skills shortages and dealing with employment equity.

Only 7% of respondents claim that coaching interventions are “not successful”. Benefits of coaching for the organisation include increased productivity, better quality, better customer service and a more questioning culture. Individuals benefit from increased self-awareness, better communication skills, better relationships with others in the workplace, increased empowerment, a better quality of life and an improved ability to set goals.

The most important criteria in the selection of a coach are track record/credibility, professional training and professional knowledge. The survey did not show a clear correlation between a coach’s qualifications and the rates that they charge. However, most coaches who participated in the survey held some form of qualification whether or not it was coaching related.

The biggest hindrances to coaching within organisations were cited as employees being unsure of what coaching is, and budget constraints.

With regard to coaching clients (those participants who had experienced coaching), most had self-sourced their coaches for personal development or growth. The majority of coaching sessions took place face-to-face (96%), every two to three weeks. An alternative method of conducting coaching sessions was telephonic or via Skype.

If a coaching intervention was terminated early, it was more likely due to financial or time constraints than to any other factor, with only 3% of all respondents scoring poor in response to the question regarding how they would rate their coaching experience in terms of achieving their coaching goals.

90% of coaching clients rated their relationship with their coach as having been good to brilliant, with 61% rating their coaching experience as “invaluable”.

There is a definite correlation between the number of years that a coach has been in practice and the coach’s perception of the success of their business. Those who had been in business for 6 – 10 years rated their business as very successful, and were charging higher hourly rates for their coaching.

Executive coaching, coaching for leadership development and business/entrepreneurial coaching were the three leading coaching applications mentioned, followed by coaching for performance, personal development and life coaching.

A key challenge mentioned by coaches and organisational participants was the need to educate the SA public about coaching, what it is, the different models, what to look for in a coach, the impact and value of coaching. It is necessary to educate the public in general on the broad definition of coaching versus mentoring.

Participants highlighted the need to upskill unqualified practitioners through the introduction of some form of regulation/accreditation of coaches into the industry, to introduce quality control through professional supervision, and to ensure on-going professional development.

Article written by Megan Hudson

Filed Under: Featured, General

Another Axe to Grind: Managers Joining the Pity Party

October 27, 2011 by Belinda Davies Leave a Comment

Okay, so I have another axe to grind – is that anything new? It’s about people in leadership positions joining the pity party with their complaining and disengaged team members – sharing the gripes they have with their company and with their managers with people who report to them or are junior to them.

This is just not okay on any level. When one takes on a leadership role, one becomes a role model. It’s not something you get to accept or decline – it goes with the job. Your people watch you all the time, and what they see you do becomes what they do. Managers are part of the management team – they represent the management of the business. This means that they need to represent that team in a mature manner. When managers gripe and complain, the impact is far greater than one might assume:

It ramps up any feelings of dissatisfaction more junior team members might have about the organisation – so minor irritations become major issues;
It legitimizes any unreasonable gripes team members might have;
It drags down the energy of the team;
It causes previously satisfied or neutral team members to join the pity party too;
It costs managers the respect of their team members. In a sense, because the manager is sharing too much, it becomes a form of “familiarity breeding contempt”;
It makes it difficult to get the work done because of the low energy and general disengagement.

So what is a manager to do when she is hacked off with her boss or her company? Am I saying that there is nothing you can do? Absolutely not. There is always something you can do. I remember the words of a mentor from many years ago. She said “We always have three choices. We can change it. We can live with it. Or we can get out.” Here’s my take on those three choices:

Change it. Discuss your issues with appropriate people in an attempt to change the situation and recommend improvements. Appropriate people might be your peers, your manager or another decision-maker or influencer in the business. If this doesn’t work, perhaps you could change the way you think about the situation. Test the assumptions you are making. Are they accurate, or are they completely untested assumptions about other people’s motives or intentions? Could you make another assumption that would enable you to look at the situation in a different light? Could you offer team members another way of looking at things so that they are not dragged down by their own untested assumptions? Could you encourage them that “this too shall pass”? What can you do to improve things?
Live with it. In this case, you are choosing to do nothing. If you choose to do nothing, then stop whining!
Get out. If the situation is costing you your happiness, your sanity or your marriage, get out. Find another job – in another company or in another division.

Regardless of which choice you decide to exercise, it is better for a manager to keep his own counsel than to share his gripes with his juniors. Just because it passes through your mind, doesn’t mean it should pass through your lips! Your job is to keep people focused and energised. How can you possibly do this if you have joined the pity party?

Filed Under: Featured, General Tagged With: emotional intelligence, engagement, leadership, role model, setting the example

Part 7 – Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

Some Questions About Strategic Leadership

Part Six: Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

Article 6 of 12

Part Six: Strategic Acting

Part Five : Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

Article 5 of 12

Part Five: Strategic Acting

Part Four: Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

Article 4 of 12

Part Four: Strategic Acting

Part Three: Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

Article 3 of 12

Part Three: Strategic Thinking

Part Two: Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

Strategic Leadership … the route to sustainable competitive advantage

COMENSA Research Findings – Coaching in South Africa

Another Axe to Grind: Managers Joining the Pity Party

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