Category: Strategy

For years, HR Professionals have lobbied: they must have a seat at the strategic planning table. Now, many companies agree. However, HR’s impact in retreats has not matched those of other functions. What can your company do to ensure talent management isn’t an after-thought?

Today, most Human Resource units have evolved well past the old “Personnel Departments”. Almost all executives in your organization are in support.

But it’s not enough. In two decades of facilitating strategic planning retreats, I have noticed a trend. The least effective participants are often HR Professionals.

I don’t say this lightly. Nor would I apply my observation to every situation I have encountered. But there is definitely a recurring pattern of behavior.

For example, when the HR Director makes his/her presentation, colleagues regularly stop paying attention. To them, nothing earth-shattering will be shared. They relax, sometimes get bored and may even leave the room altogether for busywork.

Also, from start to finish, the HR manager is likely to be the most quiet person. Sometimes, he/she could come alive near the very end, but it’s too little too late.

Instead of missing the chance, how can you ensure HR steps up from the first minute?

1. Be Strategic Before the Retreat

In general, many executives bemoan the fact that HR is too reactive. While this is a criticism, it translates to a great opportunity for improvement. For example, HR can establish itself at the forefront of strategic questions between retreats, perhaps focusing on the potential of human capital.

The truth is, there is no such thing as a wildly successful strategy that doesn’t involve human creation and execution. It’s not luck. Ingenuity, data analytics, foresight, business modelling, backcasting, deep listening – these are just a few of the skills needed to produce a game-changing plan.

Also, most non-HR executives can’t assess the capacity of an entire workforce. But HR professionals naturally ask: “What specific future can this potential be used to accomplish?”

If you’re in HR, this is an inquiry to be led throughout the year, building an awareness of the organization’s human capability map.

While it’s obvious that talented thinking creates strategy, other executives struggle to articulate what this means operationally. As such, the company desperately needs HR to drive this conversation.

2. Be Data-Driven

Whereas a CFO is trained to think in terms of numbers, the same isn’t usually true of HR. As such, reviews of past financial results take up an inordinate amount of time. However, they are all about a history, telling stories about what has already happened.

By contrast, HR professionals can be all about the future. But you must use numbers to describe it.

Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment at a retreat, HR’s lack of data forces it into vague, qualitative measures which colleagues have a hard time grasping.

In a prior column in Nov 2021, I argued that CEOs and other executives are upset at this fact. They want HR to catch up to the analytics train, but it’s not for charity’s sake.

Unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of CEOs, Chairpersons and MDs have HR backgrounds. Even though most of their work involves people, these skills only become important late in their careers.

As such, they need HR analytics and dashboards, tools and summaries to appreciate what’s happening with their people. Sadly, most HR managers don’t give them what they want.

If you’re an HR Professional, consider becoming data-driven long before the retreat so that you can shine in the event. I have seen it done to great effect and the result was stunning.

In this context, a retreat is more like the grand finale – the finish line of a lengthy race.

3. Lead Analysis, Not Follow

The presence of data gives HR deep insights others miss. This would reverse the trend in which HR is the short discussion at the end of the retreat…the afterthought.

Instead, as an HR Professional, you can develop your ability to define different futures and advocate for them. With this information in hand, you alone can speak to gaps in staff capacity and the cost of filling them. In this context, HR is like the manager of a modern sports team, as depicted by the movie MoneyBall. It’s a baseball story, but a similar transformation has occurred in football and cricket.

If you had the detailed information top coaches have, every conversation about company strategy would start with such analytics. HR would be the chief interpreters of people’s capacity.

In these ways, HR moves from a back bench into the foreground, returning organizations to their original people power, altering the prior perception for good.

Your company is one which builds its strategic plan around an individual’s ideas. But even if the “Big Man” is a brilliant entrepreneur-founder, is it a good idea to include a host of other stakeholders in the process? If the current method isn’t obviously broken, why fix it?

Some argue: if a strategic plan is little more than words, who cares how they were written? This popular sentiment leads companies to assemble plans in a hurry, including as few people as possible. After all, “too many cooks spoil the broth”. And there’s always time to convince board members and staff that the soup tastes great…after the fact.

However, if you are interested in a more inclusive way, here are some methods. They promise a better product and a greater chance of success.

Missing Board Members

In some organizations, the board is excluded from strategic planning activities. Once the final product is completed, they are expected to offer cursory comments, if any.

This approach undermines advisors who have the time and wisdom to think about the big picture: the future of the organization. Untethered from the daily grind, boards are well-suited to consider PESTER forces: Political, Environmental, Social, Technological, Economy and Regulatory/Legal.

If they aren’t capable of this analysis, uninterested, or not permitted…then ask: “Why bother with a board?”

In both private and public sectors, this hard question is rarely asked. Consequently, some board members take a passive approach, failing to show up at meetings and retreats. Their abysmal performance goes unchecked, hidden under a veneer of collegial “blighs”. Friendship trumps stewardship, to the detriment of all concerned.

Instead, have a board which exhibits the highest standard. Or have none at all.

Checked-out Executives

Your senior managers are probably the best result-producers in your company. Why? After all, their track records helped them climb the corporate ladder.

However, these skills have little to do with strategic planning. As such, they feel uncomfortably ill-equipped to think for the long-term. Also, organization-wide cause-and-effect relationships are hard to grasp. Plus, there’s never enough data to make easy decisions and set targets.

They would gladly skip this year’s retreat and leave the whole awkward business to the founder/Big Boss. She can do the heavy lifting. All they need to do is provide a quick blessing once the dust has settled.

In simpler times, with a small organization, this may have worked. Unfortunately, today’s complex COVID-era challenges require more. The full team, with its wide range of skills and experiences, must bring all it can muster to the activity.

Given the fact that your company should be developing a game-changing strategy for 2023, it’s folly to disengage the best minds. Instead, help stakeholders to embrace their incompetence in this area and start learning.

Uninterested Staff

Jamaican executives are often dismayed at their staff’s reaction to the announcement of their grand strategy. First there is silence, followed by a seeming lack of curiosity. No questions are asked, and most employees seem happy to delegate 100% ownership (and blame) to the organization’s leaders.

The conclusion senior managers draw is that staff is disengaged.

That may not be the best interpretation. Consider that the typical non-executive spends most of his/her time on daily tactics. Unfortunately, when faced with questions about the strategic future of the company, they flounder.

The general remedy might be the same for board, executive and staff: engage them all at the start of the process. Conduct open sessions defining the challenges the organization faces. Use PESTER to describe the environment. Ask for stories about competitors, especially if they are indirect, or based outside the Caribbean.

Arrange interviews, focus groups and online surveys to ensure these three levels consider the future and the cost of inaction. At one level, you are asking for their input. But at another, you are sharing responsibility.

Now, your planning retreat becomes more than a mere meeting. It’s a venue to place bets about the future of your enterprise. While it’s not as random as a casino, you need everyone’s best thinking to come together to make the most of your industry’s uncertainty.

This task is so hard that many organizations skip the exercise altogether. They hope that the status quo should suffice. By contrast, leading companies embrace the challenge. They don’t shrink away, but see their courage as a competitive advantage.

Winston Churchill said: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” You may not have a country to defend against Nazis, but your stakeholders will need to do some heavy lifting. It’s the only way to bring everyone onto the same page.

As a manager, you may find it hard to engage in fruitful discussions about the future. You are able to speculate informally over lunch, but be unable to plan strategically in a formal session. You sense that this needs to change, but how? Where will this new skill-set come from?

Few things are more distressing in organizational life than a manager who was good at his old job, but still tries to perform it after being promoted. While he was elevated based on his technical ability, these are of little use now that employees report to him. They expect something new: leadership.

The same applies to the executive suite, and in particular the role of a CEO. More specifically, newly minted executives often don’t think strategically. The truth is, they gained their reputations based on reaching short-term results and fighting fires.

While every company needs middle-level managers who can demonstrate these skills, as leaders they are entrusted with something different: the company’s future.

If they are lucky, mentors take them under their wings, and deliberately stretch their capabilities with well-designed assignments and training. But this is rare. In general, a new executive’s lack of strategic planning skills isn’t revealed until the situation desperately needs them. By then, it’s too late. Instead, here are three competencies you can proactively develop.

1. Thinking *about* the Future

I have met many CEOs and MDs who don’t talk about specific future outcomes at all. In their minds, all they need to do is react to stuff that might happen.

However, the best leaders don’t sit back: they create the future. For example, Facebook has a 15-year plan for the Metaverse which is intended to shape the way the internet is used globally.

By so doing, they confront the natural inertia of the vast majority who prefer to stay in their comfort zones.

As an executive, your job is to coach top managers to think about the future as a malleable object. They can become visionary. But you may need to do some convincing. In other words, you must educate, challenge and confront. And demote the unwilling or unable.

The fact is that as a member of the leadership team, you should develop the best long-term planning skills, and encourage others to follow your path.

2. Thinking *from* the Future

While a good facilitator can drag any executive team through the creation of a specific vision, it’s not enough. Once it exists, the participants must take charge of the vision. Inhabiting it means thinking from the future, while they implement it in the present.

Some reduce this to a matter of project management, but it actually requires far more. Great leaders carry out special practices to help people think from the future. Examples include regular strategy updates using current information.

They also have a knack for bringing up the vision in everyday conversation. Each time, they create the specific future as the context behind every decision. By recalling its importance to stakeholders, they bring the future closer one step at a time.

Finally, they help staff see that Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) must be translated into projects, then tasks. This connection is easily lost. Why? Daily emergencies hijack people’s attention, along with the distractions of social media/Netflix. To keep people on track, you should repeatedly bring the vision alive.

3. Speaking from the Future

Unfortunately, very few executives know how to inspire others on demand. Call it a recurring failure of organizational life: the few who are inspiring often leave to start their own companies. Those who remain learn to survive the corporate grind by keeping out of trouble, rather than leading.

If this fits your story, you may be annoyed. Now that you have been promoted, you are asked to inspire staff. But where would you have learned to do so?

If the workplace doesn’t offer them, seek out other opportunities. Volunteer in your service organization, church or alumni association. Allow the discomfort of vision-filled speaking to become the norm. Experience the thrill of filling others with the hope of accomplishing remarkable things by working together.

In these challenging times with a pandemic, recession, and war ever-present, the natural human tendency is to withdraw and see performance fall. Great leaders realize this and put themselves at risk. This is your avenue to accomplish the extraordinary.

Start by telling the truth. If, as a CEO or MD, you have never been trained in this dimension, some honesty will help. Embrace this fact, and propel yourself forward with experiments which take you outside your comfort zone. Use the results to learn what works and become someone who can connect the future with the present. Your people are waiting.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.

Do your managers complain about key strategies their predecessors failed to craft? It seems as if they have all the answers, but you suspect that they may be kidding themselves. The truth is, they may not be very different. If so, how should you intervene so they don’t handicap future generations with more poor decisions?

Hindsight is 20-20 vision. After the fact, it’s easy to be an expert. On Monday morning, after the contest is over, you can say exactly what the coach and players needed to do.

The same applies to your company. If it’s been around for more than a few years, then your firm is benefitting (or suffering) from strategic plans created and applied by prior executives. They made some decisions (and failed to make others), forcing your organization into its current position. Like the Monday morning experts, it’s tempting to sit back and criticise them. With disbelief, you wonder out aloud: “What were they (not) thinking?”

However, as a leader, you could be committing the same mistake. In other words, you and your colleagues may be so engrossed with today’s issues that you are “kicking the can down the road” i.e. setting up traps for the next generation of managers. Essentially, you are abandoning them to a future they can’t influence today.

It’s a perpetual cycle which will only continue until your company is blindsided by a new competitor, technology, pandemic or other disruption. These occurrences are ones you wanted prior leaders to foresee, and prepare your company to handle. How do you break the cycle? What if you want to quit setting up new obstacles for your successors? Try these thought experiments, preferably conducted during a leadership retreat.

1) Imagine Your Organization Doesn’t Exist

In this thought experiment, ask yourself: “What if our organization didn’t exist?”

Look to the future and predict what would happen in your industry in regards to the products and services you deliver. What would customers and stakeholders come to expect as the norm? From whom? What new technologies or market realities would have an outsized influence?

Understand that your answers rely on present developments, maturing trends, and items becoming obsolete. In this experiment, you have no control – you can only observe.

The only real question to ask today is: What is your current relationship to these external forces? How are you preparing your company to deal with them? Unfortunately, many executives do little more than complain: “Someone should do something before it’s too late.” But they fail to act, only becoming victims. Don’t make this mistake.

2) Fast-Forward Far-Away Developments

Even if you can clearly discern market or technology trends, some managers won’t. They’ll pretend these threats can be ignored. Their inertia makes the company passive.

In a strategic planning exercise several years ago, we asked a leadership team: “When will a majority of Jamaicans prefer to use online banking?” After a long discussion, the group came to agreement: “2030.”

In today’s world, in light of COVID, we can see they were far off the mark. However, by back casting from 2030, they created a feasible course of action. As such, when the pandemic broke out, they could revisit their plan, have a laugh at their assumptions, and fast-forward their transformation. Instead of going into a panic, they made a tweak.

As you can imagine, future managers look back at this kind of exercise with gratitude. Even though it was inaccurate, it wasn’t incorrect. The same might apply to your industry and company with respect to inevitable changes that may arrive far more quickly than imagined.

3) Think in Terms of a Market Winner

Finally, imagine if all the competitors in the world were to disappear, leaving a single provider. Ask the retreat: “What did this team do to be the last one standing, serving customers, while others failed?”

Chances are, this is probably the company that invested early in some critical capability that others didn’t recognize.

Bring that thinking to your situation today. How do you ensure that you become more like Netflix/Apple/Fuji rather than their failed counterparts: Blockbuster/Nokia/Kodak? Can you stop postponing long-term decisions which guarantee your failure?

Arguably, there are few companies which arrived at their dominant position by accident. For example, Grace Kennedy’s competitors in the mid-1990s are no longer major players in their industries. Why? GK’s 25-year plan helped it surge ahead, via far-sighted moves some thought were foolish.

Don’t fall into that trap and inadvertently make your company obsolete. Instead, let future generations be proud of your decisions and willingness to set ego aside for the greater good. They may even thank you for your courage.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.

Have you ever been stuck in a strategic planning session, complaining to yourself: “This is nothing more than a continuation of old, tired thoughts?” You need to intervene and somehow shift the level of thinking. But you don’t know what to say, and you certainly don’t want to make things worse. Do you suffer in silence? Or attempt to provide some leadership?

The truth is, you may already be someone who has been looking ahead and wondering why your company isn’t seeing the future the way you do. If you are, realize that this is uncommon. Most of your peers are fine going with the flow.

Want to be different? Don’t sit back waiting for a juicy, post-retreat “I told you so.” Instead, harness your commitment by challenging your team to think strategically. Here are some ways to steer the ship.

1. Insist on planning for the long-term

Start by insisting that “strategies” are not the same as “tactics”. In this vein, there is no such thing as “short-term strategies”. Tactics should only exist to implement a strategic plan, which should always be long-term. While it’s entirely possible to engage in daily tactics without a strategy, it’s not likely to be sustainable. At some point, your lack of foresight will lead to actions which make things worse.

While some say they have a “long-term, 5-year strategy”, you should immediately object. Once again, there is no such thing. If asked, explain that a 5-year strategy is just a lazy extrapolation of past events, plus a few tweaks. It’s the easy way out – the path of least resistance.

However, this is the same thinking that dooms companies. There’s a reason GraceKennedy created a 25 year strategy in 1995 and subsequently left its competitors in the dust. Most can’t even remember who they were.

Remember Kodak? The reason Fuji (their arch-rivals) became a chemical company as Kodak went bankrupt is a case study in short verus long term thinking. In 2000, both were on top, but only 12 years later, Fuji’s pivot was paying off while Kodak was reaping the results of stale, tactical judgment.

The point of a long-term strategy is to future-proof the organization, and assure its ongoing success. That won’t come by restricting your thinking to the comfortable future, as Kodak did.

Instead, your company needs to look over the horizon and pick a destination. In other words, it must be like Columbus. Fellow sailors in the 1490s were afraid of sailing off the edge of the world. Today, managers are just as scared to craft plans too far into the future. Consequently, they limit their companies.

2. Emphasize the next generation

Short-term planning also tends to be a selfish exercise, by default. After all, it’s only human to care about oneself first.

However, a team which creates outcomes 15-30 years in the future instantly turns on a switch. As if by magic, it automatically focuses on the next generation.

For example, a Caribbean company that intended to enter Latin America crafted big market-share goals. However, via detailed planning, they discovered they would need a headquarters in Miami. Over time, the corporation would become American.

After confronting this fact, they decided not to permanently disenfranchise future generations of Caribbean leaders. To keep the company in the region, they scaled back the plan significantly.

But even in the face of such useful thinking, some argue that technology is moving so fast that you can’t plan for it. However, in long-term planning sessions, teams learn that customer’s core needs don’t change. The only question they need to keep asking is, “How will they be fulfilled?”

In this context, technology changes the way customers’ unmet needs are addressed, so emerging innovations must be considered. But the overall goal of serving customers doesn’t change from one generation to the next.

Therefore, the main question to ask now is “Where is our company headed in the long-term, and what technologies and human capabilities should we invest in…today… in order to get there?” Good answers are hard to find, yet executive teams have no choice but to embrace the struggle. Why? In part, they will always have limited information. And disruptions have become a fact of life.

In the face of these limitations, you must still employ long-term thinking. As Churchill said, “Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.”

The point of a long-term exercise is not to be correct. Or accurate. Instead, it’s to engage in the difficult planning and decision processes that can make or break an enterprise. As a participant in a session, it’s a worthy challenge to inspire your team to tackle.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.