What Role Does a Corporate Strategy Officer Play?

Your company is thinking about creating a new role: strategy specialist. This person should support the entire strategy creation cycle and help produce a strategic plan with impact. But what exactly should be that person’s responsibilities? What uncommon value should they add?

The challenge of filling this position is unique. Why? Strategy is the main job of the CEO or MD. They birth a new plan in a retreat or offsite, then ensure it gets implemented effectively. The effort is meant to define the future of the organization and accomplish outstanding results.

In many companies, the top executive is the only person who is consistently looking far ahead.

As such, strategy specialists are playing specific support roles. Here are some unique activities they should undertake.

  1. Manage and Change the Strategic Planning Process

The best practices for crafting a strategic plan are constantly in flux. For example, if you are still doing a SWOT analysis in your planning meetings in 2023, it’s a sign of outdated thinking.

The most qualified person to manage and update the strategic planning process in your company could be the strategy specialist. They can do the research needed to uncover improvements and test fresh technology. This keeps the process running efficiently, engaging participants along the way.

The truth is, it’s quite hard to create a great strategic plan with a bad process. Some may think it’s a matter of personality, but I differ. While a “strong” leader can make a difference, this is a group effort.

A strategy specialist recognizes this fact and knows that a top quality plan needs a wide range of employees to implement them. What holds them together is a well-defined process and skilled facilitation.

  1. Craft a Special Role During Implementation

When the planning cycle is over and implementation has begun, a strategy specialist needs to be wary of picking up the role of de facto project manager of “strategic initiatives.”

Instead, leave that role to the Project or Programme Management Office – PMO. This is, after all, their area of expertise. Alternately, focus on feeding the executive team with critical updates from outside. Here’s why it’s important.

Once a strategic plan has been completed, it’s not like adding another unit to a 1,000 home housing scheme. A carbon copy. Instead, it represents a compilation of brand new thinking.

As such, each strategic plan is built with a number of untested hypotheses, which themselves rest on a foundation of assumptions.

No-one can know for sure whether the hypotheses and assumptions are correct. But the strategy specialist must track whether they hold up as life unfolds.

In other words, long before an executive detects that there’s a huge threat to the current strategy, the specialist should have picked up early warning signs. In this sense, he/she is like a detective, scanning the horizon for bits of pertinent information which indicate a changing headwind.

It may be an industry trend. Or a fresh technology. Or a new government regulation. Perhaps a surprise competitor has emerged. These are all developments which threaten the foundations of the current strategy.

As such, they must be weighed and measured to determine if a revisit is necessary.

  1. Measure Implementation

At the same time specialists monitor the external world, they should ensure that the plan is taking root in the organization.

Most companies have past horror stories about strategic plans which were crafted, and sounded good on paper, but never reached implementation.

There are a number of pitfalls which can occur. Some have to do with a lack of accountability. There are difficult, feedback conversations which just don’t take place.

Part of the reason lies with a manager’s missing skills. But he/she also lacks data.

I recommend you use the Balanced Scorecard to measure how well your strategic plan is being implemented. It can also be used to test the assumptions and hypotheses within the plan.

In both cases, the company’s leaders can see at a glance whether implementation is actually taking place. But are they required to watch the numbers this closely?

Absolutely. Every single strategic plan is intended to move the needle in an organization. This change occurs at the expense of prior habits and priorities. The battle to make these changes is real.

The specialist ensures that this progress is being made. They also raise a flag when not enough is happening to ensure success.

In summary, the strategy specialist role is an unusual one that most organizations have not identified clearly. However, every serious organization must perform these functions. Even if they are all conducted by the CEO, they should never be allowed to fall through the cracks.

Has Your Vision Statement Lost Its Punch?

You want to engage your staff around a bright, hopeful future. At some point in the past, a two-paragraph vision statement did the trick. But lately, it’s gone stagnant. What should you do to restore the inspiration it once provided? Should you change the words, or try something different?

You aren’t alone. Most companies have vague statements which sound a lot like each other. With phrases such as integrity and world-class being thrown around, you could probably swap your statement with another company’s without anyone raising a fuss.

The truth is that traditional vision statements have lost their potency, like a drug which has reached its expiry date. Today, there’s clickable inspiration available on Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok, and your old statement just can’t compete.

But there’s a lesson here as well. In your next strategic planning retreat, you need to do more than build your vision of the future with a few flowery words. Here are some concrete steps to paint a vivid picture or end-vision employees find irresistible.

  1. Give Your End-Vision a Deadline

When you announce a traditional vision statement, if it has no year attached to it, folks in your audience do something interesting. Some believe it will be reached within a year, at most. Others assume 100 years. And if you leave this discrepancy in place, you force staff to eventually ignore it altogether. Why?

They see it as a farce. A con job.

And don’t complain that this wasn’t your intention. The world has changed and expectations have risen. Now, a vision statement needs a year attached to bring the kind of accountability which makes people sit up and pay attention.

If you already have a statement, but it’s “timeless”, launch a new effort. Don’t simply tag on a cool deadline. The way you picture the future must keep up with modern norms if you want it to be noticed.

  1. A Vision Needs to Be Both Quantitative and Qualitative

Executives often make the mistake of believing that staff are motivated by financial results the way they are. Why? Most leaders’ rise up the ranks is a function of their ability to impact the bottom-line. Consequently, when they join the C-Suite, they are fluent in a certain language: the drivers of shareholder value.

However, employees aren’t interested as much.

Instead, a vision must be described in terms that do more than benefit the wealthiest 1%. Today, staff want to make a difference in the work they do and smart leaders develop empathy for this fact.

As such, the best executives describe holistic “visions” in detail. What do they look like? For a particular target year far off in the future, both quantitative and qualitative terms are used. They include as many as 20-40 descriptors and metrics. Together, these paint a rich picture of an end-game that pulls everyone in.

  1. A Vision Must Include ESG Goals

At the moment, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goal-setting is in its infancy. For most companies, it’s a response to investors’ complaints.

As such, organizations are adding a layer of ESG tactics on top of their profit motives.

But most of these efforts are reactive and will miss the boat completely. Why? The ESG movement is actually a revolt against short-termism.

How did it come about? By focusing only on 5-year results, corporate leaders forced organizations to be profit-driven only. As such, other factors and impacts were overlooked.

It’s an easy error to make. For example, many international companies doing business in Jamaica have ignored their surrounding communities. That is until their executives have to be airlifted and escorted from the compound in the middle of a violent strike.

But there’s a solution. Take your company through the process of developing a 15-30 year vision along with a strategy to accomplish it. This will return the balance. Why? When you plan far into the future, you are forced to consider all salient factors.

However, if you try to squeeze ESG concerns into your five-year plan, prepare for your staff to decry its stupidity. They may not complain openly. But their reaction will be to seek inspiration elsewhere, where they can find some authenticity, e.g. church or social media.

Not that this is easy. Big picture, long-term engagement is not taught in business schools.

But it can be learned and coached into existence. And it can be programmed into your business by following a sound long-term strategic planning process.

The world is approaching a time when only holistic visions, which are big, realistic and balanced, will gain respect. Investors have begun to notice and so have employees. Don’t let short-termism ruin your leadership.

Has Your Vision Statement Lost Its Punch?

You want to engage your staff around a bright, hopeful future. At some point in the past, a two-paragraph vision statement did the trick. But lately, it’s gone stagnant. What should you do to restore the inspiration it once provided? Should you change the words, or try something different?

You aren’t alone. Most companies have vague statements which sound a lot like each other. With phrases such as integrity and world-class being thrown around, you could probably swap your statement with another company’s without anyone raising a fuss.

The truth is that traditional vision statements have lost their potency, like a drug which has reached its expiry date. Today, there’s clickable inspiration available on Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok, and your old statement just can’t compete.

But there’s a lesson here as well. In your next strategic planning retreat, you need to do more than build your vision of the future with a few flowery words. Here are some concrete steps to paint a vivid picture or end-vision employees find irresistible.

  1. Give Your End-Vision a Deadline

When you announce a traditional vision statement, if it has no year attached to it, folks in your audience do something interesting. Some believe it will be reached within a year, at most. Others assume 100 years. And if you leave this discrepancy in place, you force staff to eventually ignore it altogether. Why?

They see it as a farce. A con job.

And don’t complain that this wasn’t your intention. The world has changed and expectations have risen. Now, a vision statement needs a year attached to bring the kind of accountability which makes people sit up and pay attention.

If you already have a statement, but it’s “timeless”, launch a new effort. Don’t simply tag on a cool deadline. The way you picture the future must keep up with modern norms if you want it to be noticed.

  1. A Vision Needs to Be Both Quantitative and Qualitative

Executives often make the mistake of believing that staff are motivated by financial results the way they are. Why? Most leaders’ rise up the ranks is a function of their ability to impact the bottom-line. Consequently, when they join the C-Suite, they are fluent in a certain language: the drivers of shareholder value.

However, employees aren’t interested as much.

Instead, a vision must be described in terms that do more than benefit the wealthiest 1%. Today, staff want to make a difference in the work they do and smart leaders develop empathy for this fact.

As such, the best executives describe holistic “visions” in detail. What do they look like? For a particular target year far off in the future, both quantitative and qualitative terms are used. They include as many as 20-40 descriptors and metrics. Together, these paint a rich picture of an end-game that pulls everyone in.

  1. A Vision Must Include ESG Goals

At the moment, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goal-setting is in its infancy. For most companies, it’s a response to investors’ complaints.

As such, organizations are adding a layer of ESG tactics on top of their profit motives.

But most of these efforts are reactive and will miss the boat completely. Why? The ESG movement is actually a revolt against short-termism.

How did it come about? By focusing only on 5-year results, corporate leaders forced organizations to be profit-driven only. As such, other factors and impacts were overlooked.

It’s an easy error to make. For example, many international companies doing business in Jamaica have ignored their surrounding communities. That is until their executives have to be airlifted and escorted from the compound in the middle of a violent strike.

But there’s a solution. Take your company through the process of developing a 15-30 year vision along with a strategy to accomplish it. This will return the balance. Why? When you plan far into the future, you are forced to consider all salient factors.

However, if you try to squeeze ESG concerns into your five-year plan, prepare for your staff to decry its stupidity. They may not complain openly. But their reaction will be to seek inspiration elsewhere, where they can find some authenticity, e.g. church or social media.

Not that this is easy. Big picture, long-term engagement is not taught in business schools.

But it can be learned and coached into existence. And it can be programmed into your business by following a sound long-term strategic planning process.

The world is approaching a time when only holistic visions, which are big, realistic and balanced, will gain respect. Investors have begun to notice and so have employees. Don’t let short-termism ruin your leadership.

How to create and dominate business categories

In your company’s strategic planning activities, you hope to make more than incremental improvements. Instead, your team dreams of brilliant decisions and breakthrough results. But are these a matter of luck? While fortune plays a role, Digicel’s introduction to the mobile telephony market is an example of a new competency: “category design.”

Christopher Lochhead would be proud of Digicel. He belongs to a cohort of content creators who call themselves the “Category Pirates.”

Responsible for several best-selling books, they argue that companies should not compete with other firms in existing categories. Instead, they should create and dominate brand new ones.

While this is far easier said than done, consider the example of Digicel.

Back in early 2001, cell phones in Jamaica were reserved for the privileged few. One would drop off a handset at a Cable and Wireless office for a few days, weeks, or months. The duration was unpredictable, and you needed to visit the building to see if the job was done.

You couldn’t help but notice employees who appeared annoyed at the intrusion. To the company, this was a minor operation…a nuisance. Many believed the local demand for this service was tiny. As a result, cell-phone signals were sporadic, perhaps offered in just enough locations to keep customers from complaining too much.

Looking back, it may seem that Digicel’s subsequent capture of 70% market share showed the power of competition. However, the company was actually doing something else your organization should consider: crafting a new category of service where no competitor existed. Here’s how they did it in spite of considerable risk.

1) New Technology

If Digicel were just another adversary, it would have used the same TDMA/CDMA technology C&W was using. Instead, it made a big bet on an approach Jamaicans had never seen: SIM-based, GSM.

To sign up, people would not only have to buy a phone but also a chip. Consequently, there were more moving parts. With the island’s low literacy rate, some believed people could not manage the sequence of actions required.

2) Island-Wide Coverage

If Digicel were merely competing with C&W, it would have fought to steal away high-value corporate and individual accounts in Upper St. Andrew. After all, they were existing users who could afford another monthly bill.

Instead, Digicel defined a new market. It offered service to some 75%+ of Jamaicans, only excluding the handful in the most remote locations.

This was a revolutionary strategy, and there was no guarantee it would work. Could ordinary people cover the added expense? Would they travel to a store (sometimes far away) to purchase a SIM card? How many were willing to learn how to use this new technology?

3) Customer Non-Care

C&W was well known for the poor service it offered to Caribbean customers. As a former part of the government, it appeared to be staffed with the worst of the former civil servants.

Digicel promised to offer a level of face-to-face service that was unprecedented. In the early days, it clearly delivered a stunning degree of customer care. Also, it undertook reward programs and prizes that gamified the business of mobile telephony for the first time. For several years, they offered cars as gifts for lucky customers during their annual Christmas promotions.

In retrospect, these three moves may seem to be obvious. But back then, it was a huge risk because each one relied on the other. Assumptions were made which could only be proven on launch day.

Yet, it still worked. Other islands in the region were envious as Jamaica rid itself of an unwanted monopoly…within days.

But this was no incremental improvement over C&W’s service…like yet another copycat pan chicken stand on Red Hills Road. It was a radical new strategy that combined fresh elements which had never been introduced to the Caribbean at scale.

Note that we Jamaicans love to “follow-fashion” each other, favoring the apparent safety of large numbers. It drove us to Olint and Cash Plus. Today it’s driving us to build high-end apartments on every available open lot.

It takes courage to bring about a new future, using only imagination and vision. But the good news is that this capability isn’t unique. This power is available to your organization.

But first you must understand that the essence of a breakthrough strategy is not duplication. Or competition. It’s “difference making” in which leaders define a new category in order to unlock fresh value.

Digicel did it, and so can your company in its next strategic planning session. I don’t intend to imply that doing so is easy. But there are proven methods for giving your creativity free rein that could lead to outstanding results.

This article was originally published in the Jamaica Gleaner.

Why People Analytics Isn’t Just for HR

Your company is aware of people analytics. It wants to use these techniques to increase productivity. But it’s not clear who should champion this transformation: HR or another unit?

In companies across the world, COVID has accelerated the call for data-driven innovation. Consequently, managers in your organization are concerned. Productivity has fallen due to work-from-home arrangements, but are they thinking about improving it in the best way?

The traditional approach to determine knowledge-worker productivity is borrowed from the factory floor. Put people together in tight quarters. Keep a close eye on them. Then, make sure their bodies are doing the right things.

However, COVID has blown a hole in that practice. Now, it’s obvious that, unlike physical work, knowledge work can be performed anywhere. But this fact hasn’t stopped your managers from campaigning for a return to “the good old days”.

Fortunately, stale, inefficient ways of full-time face-to-face working aren’t coming back. Also, companies which insist on treating employees as if they are manual workers will see their best people leave. Why? Top performers prefer to work with colleagues who trust them to do their finest work, regardless of physical location.

Case in point: a local colleague conducted a search for a remote job. His queries uncovered a company on the US West Coast. Consequently, this A-class worker quit his government position for an organization 3000 miles away.

If this transition is one your best people also wish to make, your organization should beware. Consider the growing use of People Analytics as a productivity tool to help workers and managers become more effective and engaged. Here are three steps.

  1. Retire Old Productivity Indicators

Before COVID, everyone knew a Chatty Cathy who talked a good game in the office. This polished extrovert speaks well. Studies show that her tendency to pipe up first is seen as a sign of leadership ability.

Some Cathys also make it their business to remain highly visible. They attend all meetings involving executive exposure. They never stay quiet, so their voices are known.

Finally, Cathys always arrive to work early and leave late. And on weekends, email threads never lack their input.

In summary, Cathys play into the weakness of managers who judge productivity visually. This lazy method of assessment promotes Cathys, even if their actual work is only average.

Unfortunately for them, COVID has changed the game. Gone are the visual cues Chatty Cathy used to wow managers. And the old flawed ways of measuring her productivity may never return.

  1. New Productivity Challenges Being Ignored

If you have never heard of “People Analytics” you may not realize that it’s an update to the notion of “HR Analytics”.

They are used everywhere employees can be found…not just in HR. For example, metrics are being gathered to reverse productivity losses in two nagging areas: email and meetings.

Both problems have become worse due to COVID according to research by Harvard Business School. In spite of the negative impact, companies treat them like rush-hour traffic – something we all hate but can do nothing about.

Today, rudimentary analytics tools are measuring both.

For example, your company could end each meeting with a smartphone survey of attendees. This should improve its quality.

Email effectiveness can also be surveyed manually, but that’s not all. Sites like emailanalytics.com measure an individual’s message volume and responsiveness automatically.

For instance, it helps you see that a manager who has 3,456 unread email messages is not just “bad at email”. He is a nuisance to his colleagues and an unproductive detriment to the bottom line.

I mention these two areas because they are relatively easy to measure. All it takes is a serious commitment to productivity. Plus a willingness for managers to use data to identify their lack of efficiency.

  1. HR’s Capacity to Lead People Analytics

Your HR Department may not be thinking in this way yet. It may not even have tools or skills available. The truth is that few are ready to lead their companies in this area.

Instead, HR has earned a reputation for being numbers and technology averse. This is a bigger problem than ever given the growing requirement for managers to use People Analytics. They want to impact every aspect of worker performance, not just productivity problems.

Eventually, managers will find the analytics they need even if they must do the search themselves. But this isn’t the best solution.

The revolution in your company’s People Analytics needs to start from HR Departments who understand how and why workers work. The future beckons professionals in HR to stay abreast and get ahead if they intend to remain relevant.

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.

Learning Long Term Planning from Tennis’ Williams Sisters

You know your company should be crafting long-term, post-COVID plans. Why? The pandemic has created once-in-a-lifetime opportunities waiting to be exploited. But you have been so busy just keeping the organization alive that you either have half-a-plan, or none at all. Should you make the investment in strategic planning now even though the times remain turbulent?

When Serena Williams won her first Wimbledon title, an interviewer asked her what surprised her about the experience. She answered – “Nothing.” When pressed, she added, “It was exactly what I had envisioned…since I was four years old.”

The casual listener would think this was mere chutzpah. Except that she was no ordinary tennis player. She was actually fulfilling the 20+ year, 78 page plan her father wrote before she was conceived.

But it wasn’t just a sport plan. The document covered Venus and Serena’s education, faith, family, responsibility, money…all aspects of their lives. It even inspired Naomi Osaka’s Haitian father to coach his daughter to the number one spot decades later.

Remarkably, the three champions have earned over US$180 million in their careers on the court. While some consider it to be all a matter of talent, the two coaches disagree. The success their daughters enjoy is due to advanced planning.

Like GraceKennedy’s 25-year plan and JMMB’s 23-year strategy, they were able to programme and accumulate small gains over time. While others focused on surviving the short-term, they were seen as crazy to create targets with dates so far into the future. Why did this unpopular approach work?

  1. Back from the Future

It takes skill and a dose of tenacity to stake a claim far into the future and make it stick. Even as Richard Williams had ribs broken and teeth knocked out by Compton gang members, he never relented.

Neither did Norman Manley and other heroes, each of whom lived “from the future”. This approach helped them sidestep creature comforts, sometimes putting them at risk.

Quote: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” The Prince, by Machiavelli.

But those who do come from the future inspire themselves to make changes. They declare a stated vision and live from it. This makes them two-headed: able to live today, and in the future at the same time.

  1. Detailed Planning in Reverse

If your organization’s executives shy away from putting themselves in harm’s way, it could be a lack of courage. But it may also come from the lack of detailed planning.

While most teams know how to spout vacuous vagaries to be “world-class,” they rarely have a 20-year plan to do so. The shortage of specificity lets them off the hook.

But the truth is, there are numerous ways to craft detailed multi-year plans which work, even without a shred of college education (i.e. like Richard Williams.)

One method successful companies use is to:

a. Convert the vision for 15-30 years away into details to be accomplished by a set deadline.

b. Translate qualitative details into an array of metrics.

c. Backcast metrics from the target year to today.

d. Schedule staggered projects to drive the metrics.

These techniques are challenging to employ during an offsite meeting. But the detailed plan produced can galvanize an entire company because of its credibility.

  1. Stand Alone

In retrospect, Williams argued that he needed a meticulous plan due to the uncharted waters he was navigating. No-one had ever done the impossible.

Furthermore, the role models in the sport at the time were succeeding wildly following the traditional approach. He refused to follow their lead, causing many to accuse Williams of ruining his daughters’ prospects. “Stop being selfish,” they said.

In retrospect, his wisdom is apparent. Countless others have entered the women’s tennis circuit and burned out. Only a tiny handful have played as long as the sisters have.

Some say it’s all a result of the Williams’ “character”.

Again, he argues differently. While his family has lots of it, he says that having a clear plan helped them weather and repel the criticism of experts who publicly questioned his sanity.

In other words, a good plan helped the family to stay the course. They found it easy to decide next steps – simply stick to the plan. After all, it was easier to do so than develop the “character” needed.

In this context, families are just like organizations. There’s no plausible reason to put off long-term planning if your company is committed to high performance. Instead, take the challenge seriously and accomplish the impossible.

Strategic Plan Implementation Reset

Your company is considering its next strategic planning retreat. But the last real one, held just before COVID, didn’t anticipate a pandemic. So, the plan had to be shelved. Now, attendees are reluctant to schedule a new session. Do you give up on the idea?

As a past attendee at strategic planning retreats, you have seen both big plans and grandiose commitments. However, you may never have seen these goals realized. Now, you remain a bit cynical.

“Take the same resources and invest them elsewhere”, you argue. But you harbour doubts about this idea. Here are three elements of strategic planning to consider so that implementation improves.

#1 – Big Decisions Don’t Make Themselves

In order to resolve a difficult strategic issue, there comes a critical moment when an executive team must make a final decision. The live occasion must include all the organization’s top leaders, armed with the best information possible. It’s the point of no return. “Argument done.”

The bigger the decision, the more intense the discussion, and the longer the deliberations can take. Why? The risk involved amps up expectations and fears.

Unlike lifesaving announcements to close offices to reduce infections, these big strategic decisions don’t make themselves. They require proactive, collective courage.

In this context, you shouldn’t use past failures (such as pre-pandemic plans) to avoid making critical decisions today. Why?

Consider the biggest, scariest decisions you don’t want to confront in your next retreat. For each day you delay, you make things worse for future stakeholders. In fact, they’ll probably look back and regret your indecision.

On the other hand, even a strategic plan which isn’t implemented fully can benefit the organization. Why? It represents a brave step closer to ultimate success.

#2 – Support New Micro-Behaviors

All strategic plans comprise both single actions versus slow, steady behavior changes.

For example, a single action may be the purchase of a new machine. This investment is relatively easy to implement.

However, slow, steady changes in habits or routines are much harder. And those which require a new mindset are even more difficult.

For the most part, organizations approach these behavioral changes as if they can be bought with financial incentives. Research shows that this is true, but only for a subset of work. In fact, more money leads to more output for simple, physical tasks.

However, knowledge workers don’t become smarter or more creative with better bonuses. A big raise does not foster better decision-making.

When these slow changes are called for in the strategic plan, it’s time for HR professionals to step up. Usually, they understand the culture of the organization. Using the latest change management theories, they can help teams craft realistic tactics…the kind which actually can be implemented by motivated people.

#3 – Tactics to Overcome Inertia

However, the strategy will require more than sound planning. Starting the day after the retreat, when the excitement has worn off, things will be tough.

By definition, attendees return to a world which does not support the new vision. Instead, it is filled with inertia, such as past email messages, which still need to be answered. Plus, each person’s calendar still reflects old priorities.

Finally, attendees are surrounded by folks who weren’t in the retreat and have old habits. They were perfectly tuned to meet the demands of a prior age and a now-obsolete performance review system.

Consequently, the change required at the individual level to support the new strategy is considerable. In fact, the likelihood of success can be predicted. Just look at the support provided to help individuals make the transformation needed. If they are left to their own devices, the inertia will lead to failure.

At this point, this isn’t an HR problem: it belongs to the entire organization. If this fact isn’t embraced, you can expect more of the same: a strategic plan which sits on the shelf, alongside all the others.

Taken by themselves, the three ideas I have provided are not big. But if you bring them together, they become a foundation strong enough to forge a new direction.

Such is the nature of game-changing strategic plans. They are painstakingly slow to put in place, but become an unstoppable force that employees in the distant future will see clearly, in retrospect.

As such, this isn’t about COVID-era, short-term survival tactics which are in such vogue today. Instead, it’s about future generations and the legacy they are left to contend with.

Herein lies the motivation needed to implement the most challenging changes and the most outrageous strategies. While success isn’t guaranteed, they’ll help your organization move past prior failures to accomplish a brand new future.

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.

On Boring Your Staff with Small Goals

You’re a corporate leader who wants to inspire your organization. But you aren’t naturally charismatic, nor are you famous. Is there a way to energize and motivate stakeholders who must play a part in the transformation you envision?

A startling number of CEOs forget what it was like to be inspired in a manner that leads to hard work. They think of themselves as unicorns, born to lead. It’s a mystery to them why everyone doesn’t wake up with the energy they have, excited about the chance to accomplish great things.

Some give up. Their secret sauce cannot be replicated, so they don’t try. The best they can do is threaten, trick, or bribe staff into compliance. That’s “the only way to treat these people”, they convince themselves.

However, you may be different. Inspiring others is a leadership skill few possess, but you should be interested in learning what it takes. One of the critical elements is BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), as articulated by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. How can you use them to lift workers to better performance?

  1. People Want More Than Business as Usual

The easiest way to disengage staff is to send a signal that “there’s no need to pay attention.” This probably isn’t what you intend. Instead, you want board members, executives, managers, and employees to be sitting on their edge of their seats. In this mode, they bring their best ideas, maximum energy, and highest creativity to every task they do.

Recently, COVID-related emergencies have infused organizations with a kind of fake vitality. However, as the pandemic wanes, everyday operations resume. People are drifting back to ordinary standards.

If, as a leader, you don’t replace this temporary intensity with something more durable, expect your staff to be disappointed. They want to be like Apple and Netflix – companies which are moving forward. They enjoy using their products or services. Plus, the people who work for them are proud.

Meanwhile, some of your employees refuse to wear company uniforms in public.

But don’t see this as a rebuke. It’s a natural regression to dull, humdrum, mundane, corporate life. Daily work becomes a vision-less routine if you fail to disrupt it with your BHAG.

  1. People Want to Believe

However, you must be careful. Some leaders specialize in inspiring themselves…in isolation. Others may inspire a few colleagues – the ones they work with directly. But this should be an organization-wide game.

To communicate, lazy executive teams try to get by with traditional vision and mission statements. Unfortunately, times have changed. The usual saccharine bromides no longer work – they are just too vague. If your statements can be swapped with that of another organization without anyone noticing, consider them to be stale.

Instead, you need far more details to make your plan credible and worthy of an emotional investment. Skeptical staff need to see metrics and milestones stretched out over several years. They want a concrete bridge between today and the final outcome. Something they can trust. After all, their future careers are on the line. Why should they bet on your company? And your vision?

  1. People Want to Act Now

Ever had a conversation with a child who wants to become a surgeon? They are probably two decades or more away from realizing their dream.

But one benefit of their public commitment is that there are clear and immediate expectations. For example, wherever they are on their journey, academic excellence is required. “Are you studying hard right now?” This clarity orients the child towards daily priorities and choices.

Contrast this with the corporate world, where the opposite tends to happen. A CEO announces a BHAG. Then employees go back to whatever they were doing before, safely knowing that it’s the path of least resistance.

The fact is, no-one translates the vision into everyday action. Between retreats, the BHAG flops.

The solution? Craft game-changing projects. Then, enlist sponsors and participants who understand their importance and believe in taking action.

They’ll probably need to set aside other projects and delay competing commitments. But this is exactly what you want. If this is important, other efforts must cease so that you can focus people’s attention.

Fail to do this and you’ll be dismayed to see people going through routines which should have been eliminated. They’ll waste time on email messages and meetings simply because of inertia. You’ll fail to make progress as people sit on the sidelines…bored…waiting for something interesting to happen.

Instead, gather your leaders together and lead from the front, with BHAGs which inspire everyone. You’ll tap into discretionary effort which has remained dormant and assure a sustainable future for your organization.

Email: Not a Nuisance, It’s Your Job

You are forced to deal with email every single day, most of it arriving at odd moments. At the same time, you need to be effective, but it seems that there’s invariably a slew of messages getting in the way. You want the problem to go away so that you can just focus on doing your job. This is a common sentiment, but is this frame of mind a help or hindrance?

It’s fashionable nowadays to complain about email. Why? There are always too many messages. They arrive at the wrong time, and important ones get buried by all the others.

But you’re not alone: everyone you know appears to be caught in the same trap. You derive some comfort knowing that some are even worse than you.

The only people who seem to be on top are the super-responsive. Apparently, they have nothing else to do each day but reply to email…within moments. But are they being effective? If they can reply to you immediately, are they actually doing any useful work?

You know you don’t want to become like them, but what are your alternatives? Here are some ideas you can use to be effective.

1- Email is not going anywhere

Whether you call it acceptance or resignation, your fate in using this technology is sealed. Asynchronous, digital messaging is a permanent fact of professional life. In other words, we aren’t going back to the days of paper letters, faxes, or telegrams. And time-consuming meetings, phone calls or Zoom won’t ever become a replacement.

So unless you’re retiring soon, take a deep breath and “hug up” this reality. And while you’re at it, stop complaining about your inbox being flooded. The fact is that email incompetence is afflicting almost everyone. The only ones exempt? The few who receive a trickle of messages each day…like less than 25.

Don’t aspire to be like them. Take responsibility now and in the future.

2- Your suffering is avoidable

Think back to the days when you were among the “exempt”. You didn’t have a problem. In fact, you were happy to be sent email. It showed that you mattered to other employees and friends.

However, your joy was short-lived. When 25 incoming daily messages turned into 150, you hit a threshold: your old techniques stopped working. For example, if you used to check email in the quiet intervals between tasks, meetings or projects, you probably saw this shortcut become impossible.

Instead, evening and weekend email became the norm. Plus, others began to complain that you are not returning messages fast enough. Your “time management” skills were questioned.

While this state of affairs is awful, there is an answer.

You need a different, new set of practices to address a high volume of email. Furthermore, this approach needs to scale so that you can handle double or triple the volume you receive today. Why? Not only is email unavoidable, its use is growing.

3- Instant Repair

The complex blend of habits and technologies we use means that fixing email is like plugging the leaks on a rickety boat. There are a vast number of things which can go wrong, all of which add to the overall burden. Tackling them all is beyond the scope of this article, but here is one basic concept. Set aside high-quality time for email by blocking time each day in your calendar.

With this technique, email transforms from a thankless chore to a prime activity. Here, you can give your full and undivided attention. Consider it to be an appointment you simply cannot skip. A professional requirement. For example, a surgeon would never skip washing her hands before an operation.

Why the high priority? The fact is, each email requires you to make a decision and this takes energy. Add in the fact that you must quickly switch mental contexts from one message to the next, and the challenge multiplies.

It’s as if each day’s most important choices are distilled into a single sprint. If you try to make them piecemeal, prepare to see your inbox turn into a bottomless pit of unmade decisions.

Setting time aside each day is the only way to ensure that the molehill doesn’t turn into a mountain. Unfortunately, it only takes a few days of neglect to turn a peaceful inbox into a ticking time-bomb.

The best method is not to respond like a firefighter. Instead, treat email as a priority that deserves its own time-slot, and mindset. Use a fresh head so that you can make a series of difficult, but high-quality snap-decisions.

Soon, it will become the heart of your job, rather than a nuisance. And you will be effective.

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.

Is Your Company Being Led by a Great Strategist?

Each day you go into the office, you want to be inspired by your work. Elevated by what your organization can accomplish. But if that’s not your daily experience, does the quality of strategic leadership have something to do with it?

Perhaps you have seen the stories of companies led by executives with breathtaking strategies. These top teams produce game-changing innovations which revolutionize industries. Millions of lives are transformed. The likes of Facebook and Netflix displace also-rans who look stale by comparison, capturing hearts and minds in every corner of the world.

But when you compare what happens in these model organizations with your own, you see a big gap. Are you making an unfair contrast? Are the elements you focus on the right ones to examine? What are the naked truths you wish you could explain to your leaders if you had the chance?

  1. Bold Vision

COVID has led many CEO’s to limit the scope of what they say they want to achieve. Times are hard and uncertain, they admit, and things are changing too fast to think about big goals.

All they have is energy for survival. A vision would be a distraction.

Unfortunately, research shows they are likely to fail. Creating Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) is, according to Jim Collins and Jerry Porras of Built to Last fame, essential. Their comparison between companies that use BHAGs versus those which don’t is stark.

However, this doesn’t mean you should throw together yet another vision statement. In fact, these pronouncements can damage productivity if they are vague, undated and insulting to the average person’s intelligence. When employees deduce a lack of seriousness, such declarations destroy motivation.

Instead of nebulous promises to be “world class”, create the kind of vision that paints a clear picture of a single destination. This means it must have a date, and an unequivocal set of target metrics, at minimum.

  1. Feasible Pathway

BHAGs are an essential part of great strategies, but in 2022, they aren’t enough. We have become more immune to aspirational statements than we were in 1994 when Collins/Porras published their book. Why? Oftentimes they include little more than wishful thinking.

The way to bring corporate dreams into existence is to go deeper in the planning stages. How? Craft a credible pathway between today’s reality and the final destination.

This is no easy feat to accomplish. It takes a small team an intense effort to lay out a plan that covers 15-30 years. It gets complicated: within each time period, certain financial and operational milestones must be hit.

While there are projects introduced during this planning horizon that drive the numbers, these should be realistic. In fact, it pays to be conservative.

This powerful exercise forces teams to confront realities that otherwise would be ignored. For example, a client’s strategy called for entering Latin America in a big way. The price? Moving the company’s headquarters to Miami.

This was too heavy a tax to pay and the plan was moderated.

Another client required the acquisition of competitors. But the firm had never undertaken such an activity and would need to hire expensive specialists. It shelved the idea.

Weak strategists leave such details to others. To save face, they pretend to buy-in, which dooms the effort to failure.

  1. Customer Obsession

Who would think that Carnival revellers would pay more for amenities such as mobile bathrooms, cool-down mist and makeup facilities? Tribe Carnival from Trinidad and Tobago has introduced a slew of innovations like these ever since its inception. Over time, they have produced exponential growth for the business, even though it charges a premium.

In a similar manner, clients of JMMB swear by a comparable approach to innovation in its investment operations. Like Tribe, the company has a relentless focus on the customer that leads it to do things other institutions scoff at.

From a strategic point of view, few companies understand their customers well enough to innovate around their deepest unmet needs. Such in-depth study is simply too hard and expensive to undertake.

As such, they end up following the lead of competitors like Tribe and JMMB. But this is the coward’s approach to innovation…to copy what others are doing after it’s been proven to work.

If your company is being led by a strong strategist, expect to see a struggle to capture customers’ unspoken sentiments. Once these are defined, they should be driving every new product and process development. If no such link exists, the strategy is likely to be ordinary.

This list of three activities great strategists undertake is not exhaustive, but it is essential. Use it to judge how your company is being led (not just managed) and to distinguish if today’s actions are inspired by more than mere survival.