Building Blocks for Better Strategies: Build Energy
BUILD ENERGY: Engage for sense-making and aim for co-creation
Research shows that more than 70% of strategies fail to reach their desired objectives. Digging deeper into the numbers, a key driver behind this truly disappointing finding proves to be “a lack of alignment behind strategy.” In our experience, this insight unfortunately leads many business leaders to believe that getting alignment is a matter of convincing the organization to act differently. The tools typically used are persuasive presentations, brilliant storytelling, instructive guidelines and motivating incentives. All of the tools surely play an important role but they all rely on “selling and telling” tactics that consistently have proven to be ineffective compared to other approaches.
From “selling and telling” to “explaining and helping”
When we are “telling” someone explicitly to act in a different way, we often unintentionally ignite a large amount of skepticism and inner resistance at the receiving end. Why? We implicitly state that we are more knowledgeable than the person we expect to change behavior. We have the answer - just listen. We ask the person to suppress own ideas and thereby we eliminate a sense of autonomy and of being in self-control. We challenge the status quo and the comforting certainty about doing more of what the person was already doing. Altogether, we do not create a flow of energy and build momentum. We drain it.
Once again, the metaphor of strategy as choice-making proves to be helpful. Making choices is not something abstract that happens at some theoretical organizational level. Organizations do not really accomplish anything. Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved and the explicit choices that everyone is making every day. In that way, broad choices made at corporate level are connected in a close-knit cascade down to the very concrete choices employees make at the front-line. That is why, a starting point for improving our ability to make strategy work is to go from a “selling and telling” approach to an “explaining and helping” approach.
Instead of asking people what to do, business leaders should rather respect the autonomy and expertise of their employees and explain the choices they have made to help employees frame their own choices so that they fit into the overall choice cascade. Further, it is key to be responsive so that feedback on choices is captured and reviewed. The goal of the business leader must be to support the choice-making process flourish at all levels.
From “explaining and helping” to “listening and co-creating”
Taking a closer look at the strategy process, a key insight is that to build energy in the organization, strategy development and strategy implementation should not be separated. Actually, implementation starts from day one. This might seem counter-intuitive from a purely rational point of view. If we have not made any choices yet, how can we start to think about implementation? However, strategy is not a purely rational undertaking. Strategy-making is all about the people. And people are all about emotions and relations as well as rational thinking. Therefore, every interaction and every touch point in the strategy development process holds the potential to make or break the energy needed to create a tipping point towards a new strategic direction.
To bridge development and implementation, it is clear that our odds of success improves significantly if we are able to act even more proactively than described above. That means shifting from “explaining and helping” towards “listening and co-creating” throughout the strategy process where possible. In this way, everyone is appreciated as valuable contributors and important players that can give inputs to shaping the strategic choices. Ideally, we should at all times aim for turning strategy into a real, engaging and authentic dialogue-based process. If we succeed, we will strengthen the common sense of purpose and ignite a burning desire for supporting the new direction.
Consider a market leading building materials producer that was facing rapid market changes due to the financial crisis and increased market focus on energy-efficient buildings. The situation called for change and a new strategy. A pivotal part of the strategy development process was early involvement of both the top management team and the extended management team in co-creating the new strategic direction. Through large-scale workshops, more than 160 global managers were invited to contribute to the process to establish shared ownership of strategic choices. Furthermore, the events were also leveraged to work on new corporate values and to discuss the leader’s own role in making strategy happen on a very personal level. According to the CEO, this ensured a high degree of momentum and feeling of empowerment throughout the organisation as mid-level managers took early ownership.
The top management team of a high-tech company started a corporate strategy process by openly inviting all employees to suggest major investments that they would like to be made in order to radically accelerate growth. What would you do if you could decide on your own right here and right now? All suggestions were collected, analyzed and used as an important input in the strategy process. Almost all employees participated. Some suggestions were brilliant strategic ideas. Other suggestions were less noteworthy. However, everyone expressed a true commitment and interest from day one in strategy-making.
Both cases show that developing the strategy and building energy for implementation were closely connected from day one.
Obviously, we cannot involve everyone at all stages. Hence, the job of the business leader is to design a process that carefully handles the trade-off between building bottom-up momentum and letting a key stakeholders set direction top-down. However, the starting point for managing the trade-offs is for every business leader to perceive herself as a facilitator of sense-making and choice-making at the individual level - and not to be a heroic visionary who enthusiastically tells the organization about what to do.
Based on Implement Consulting Group’s experience from working with some of the best performing companies across Scandinavia and close collaboration with management thought leaders, we have gathered a collection of building blocks that we believe will help all organizations become more proficient at developing strategies that create real impact. Putting the building blocks together, they constitute the foundation for a new way of strategizing. Individually, we hope that the blocks will provide you with food for thought.
This is the fifth article in a series of building blocks for better strategies. See the previous article here.