Category Archives: change

The Great Repeatable Business Model

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As budgets contract while missions expand, one way to accomplish the mission might be to look at how businesses innovate their expertise to grow and become more successful.  Zook and Allen offer some insights below:

  1. Most very successful organizations do not reinvent themselves through periodic “binges and purges”.  Instead, they focus relentlessly on their fundamental strengths, and moving from strength to strength.
  2. Successful organizations learn to deliver their differentiation to the front line, creating an organization that lives and breathes its strategic advantages day in and day out, and sustaining it through constant adaptation from the market.

Four actions you can employ to sustain your competitive advantage:

  1. Ensure  you and your management team agree on differentiation NOW and in the future-ask your top team: what do our end users see as our advantages over others? How do we know?
  2. Ask the same question to those who are on the front lines interacting with end users, customers, and partners. Are the advantages similar?
  3. Write your strategy on an index card-does it include and center on key sources of differentiation?
  4. Translate strategy into a few non-negotiables. Can you describe the simple principles that drive key behaviors, beliefs, values?  Are they adhered to on a daily basis?

The article also has some key categories you can use with your team to describe and distill areas of strategic advantage and innovation.

 (Source: 2011, Zook and Allen, Harvard Business Review)

5 Key Thoughts and Principles of Leadership (Part 5 of 5)

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This is the last in the series of key thoughts and principles of leadership from an interview with a CEO.  You can find the previous key thoughts and principles below:

Part 1: Know Who You Are     Part 2: Be a Listener/Listen Broadly

Part 3: Courage and Attitude   Part 4: What is your Philosophy of Leadership

5-COMMUNICATION-What do you believe in and how can you communicate that most effectively?  You say more by saying less. Be authentic and genuine. We all can learn a lot and do a better job with this.  Style never displaces substance.  you have to avoid the situation where your team says…”Pass me the hemlock please”.  You have to work on your communication skills all the time-you always can improve.  You deploy the right style with the right audience , then tailor the message-length, style, substance.

Are leaders and great communicators born or made? I get this question a lot.  I believe that lots of leadership skills that can be learned. Even if you are not wired that way-you can get over that.

Two questions you need to ask yourself:

1-Before you say anything that is emotionally charged, ask yourself “Is what I am about to say necessary?” I have to ask you…If you sit in meetings, how much commentary would not pass that test?    Ask yourself, “Will what I am about to say advance the discussion, add a new dimension that matters and is relevant and important OR is what I have to say a regurgitation of what others have said?”   If what you want to say needs to be backed up, it is necessary. But if it is argumentative for sake of disagreeing, you don’t do it. This works in families as well.

2-Is what I am about to say, kind?  I mean this in an exploratory and inquiry based way, not sugar and spice.  How you say things is more important than what you are going to say.  Will you say it in the right way and will it be constructive or destructive?  How many times have we seen a relevant point delivered in the wrong way?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Keys to Accelerating Your Team’s Effectiveness

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Earlier, I mentioned my admiration for Jon Katzenbach on organizational culture.  Another person I follow is Rob Cross, who focuses upon social networks (Not social media-but the face to face social networks that all of us work within).  I ran across Rob from a trusted senior leader who recommended his work after noting, “the higher you go in an organization, the more your success lies outside of your organization.”

Cross and Katzenbach  (May 2012, “The Right Role for Top Teams”) suggest that the most effective teams, especially those within multiple organizational units set themselves up as hubs surrounded by spokes of formal and informal subgroups to address specific issues.  Here are three key findings:

  1. Invest in intentional informal networking: this is enhanced by specifically and intentionally building relationships among different subgroups during formal and ad hoc meetings and events.
  2. Deal with inevitable tensions and conflicts within the network by focusing on the constituent level (who in which subgroups have investments in a particular course of action and can sabotage certain initiatives who are also well connected to other subgroups).
  3. Make disciplined choices about when you need subgroups with real-team accountability and focus, and when the clarity and speed of a single-leader unit is better;

What are some tactics and strategies you have found effective in working with people outside of your immediate organization?

How do experts shape culture? 6 key insights from Jon Katzenbach.

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One of the giant thinkers on organizational culture is Jon Katzenbach. I’ve set up a Google alert for any of his work on organizational culture.  Periodically, I go back and review some of his insights on organizations and organizational culture. I’ve summarized 6 insights from an article he wrote on organizational culture and change

1. The existing culture can be a powerful source of energy and influence for behavior change. Culture is rarely “all bad”.

2. If you don’t have to overhaul or replace a culture, don’t! A deeply embedded culture does not change very much, very fast. Moreover, a major culture replacement requires extensive programs and structural redesign.

3. Start with changing behaviors, not mindsets. It is much easier to “act your way into new thinking” than to “think your way into new actions.”

4. Focus on changing only the few critical behaviors at different levels within key populations. This is less disruptive than attempting wholesale change — and certainly more manageable and sustainable over time.

5. Use viral (i.e., cross-organizational) methods to motivate behavior change, not just formal top-down programmatic methods. Storytelling social media, and informal tools enable and accelerate formal change methods.

6. Mobilize both rational and emotional forces to reinforce the new behavior patterns and achieve lasting change. Both the rational and the emotional elements need to “jump together” to yield sustainable change.

To what extent do you agree with his perspectives on culture and change?

Yes, But Can They Trust You? (Part 3 of 3)

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My previous two posts have focused on trust as a leader.  I’ve focused on one of NC State’s Poole College of Management professors, Dr. Roger Mayer. Dr. Mayer’s research on trust focuses on three elements: ability, benevolence, and integrity. I have linked the previous posts on ability and benevolence.

The final leg of trust from Dr. Mayer’s research is integrity.  Integrity focuses upon dependability and consistency with values and principles that others find important.   Dependability and consistency is basically doing what you say you are going to do over a prolonged period of time.  Yet if you act dependably in ways that your team does not value, you lose integrity. For example, you lack dependability and consistency if you are flitting from one initiative to another to a third based on the latest book, article, or management fad you’ve read about.  At the same time, if you act consistently in a way that is contrary to what your team values, then you have little to no integrity in their eyes. This is a critical part of culture.

In future posts, we’ll share some specific examples from GEN Shelton and senior leaders from a variety of backgrounds (public service, private and corporate practice, collegiate, and youth).  I’m interested in your examples as well.

What was a situation where you saw a leader demonstrate one or more of the three legs of trust (ability, benevolence, and integrity)?