There’s a difference between experiencing failure and being a failure. Some of the greatest lessons come from failing – but only if you’re willing to learn them.
On March 2, 1962, Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain had the highest scoring NBA basketball game of all time. He scored 100 points in that game, a feat likely never to be repeated. Chamberlain was the number two highest average scoring player in history, behind Michael Jordan. He would have easily been number one, had it not been for his free throws.
Wilt Chamberlain was terrible at free throws. Terrible. He was so bad that the coach wouldn’t play him at the end of a close game, since the opposing team only needed to foul him, and send him to the free throw line, where he would surely miss.
Meanwhile, Chamberlain’s teammate on the Golden State Warriors, Rick Barry, was the most accurate free throw shooter in the league. By the time he retired, Barry was the most accurate free-throw shooter in NBA history, averaging 90.0 percent of his free-throw attempts. In his final season, Barry hit over 94% of his free throws. Rick Barry shot all of his free throws underhanded. That’s right, Barry shot “granny style.”
You might think since both Chamberlain and Barry were on the same team, Chamberlain would learn a thing or two about shooting free throws. Well, sort of. For a short period, Barry convinced, and taught, Chamberlain to shoot underhanded also. He improved his free throws remarkably. But it didn’t stick. Chamberlain said he couldn’t do it. He said he felt “like a sissy” shooting underhanded.
What other people think of us – or what we think other people think of us – means so much that we would often rather fall back on old habits, or abandon new thinking and new ideas, in favor of simply fitting in.
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We are experiencing one of the greatest revolutions the business world has ever seen and unlike any other we have experienced in our lifetimes.
Are we ready for this?
In 1965, Gordon Moore saw it coming. He posited that the computing power of microchips would double every two years. A prediction he confirmed a decade later, concluding it would likely continue. “Moore’s Law” has since been used to describe the ever-increasing speed of technological innovation. But Mr. Moore and his Law could not have predicted the impact the latest technological developments, such as automation and artificial intelligence (AI), would have on virtually every industry and aspect of business.
Let’s take a moment and define some important terms. Automation is our ability to use software scripts to perform what were historically human tasks in a fraction of the time, reducing the need for manual labor and ostensibly increasing efficiency. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is our ability to use new technology platforms for processing data, recognizing patterns, and making decisions, all while constantly learning and improving their effectiveness, very much like humans.
What jobs and industries will be impacted by automation, if not displaced? What about AI and the ripple effect it already has had on creativity and informed decision-making? How will automation and AI continue to drive the current wave of digital disruption, and will we even need accountants or fast-food restaurant order-takers, after they become ubiquitous and widely adopted? Conversely, what jobs and industries will be created as a result? Who will be the winners and the losers?
Now, more than ever before, it is essential for today’s leaders and their organizations to adopt a decisive and agile mindset; one which can monitor the horizon, identify opportunities and threats, and make the types of productive decisions required to achieve their objectives and goals. I assure you that those who are decisive and agile, able to quickly pivot and pursue new opportunities will come out on top.
So, how do we do this and do it consistently?
First, we have to realize that decision-making is a process, not an event. It is the ability to assess and identify when you are being prompted by a change of any kind. The current big change is a technological change of the first magnitude. But the truth is, change of one kind or another is happening all the time in organizations. Those changes may create less urgency than what the current wave of digital disruption is creating, but they need to be successfully managed, nonetheless.
Over the past two decades, I have worked with and in top organizations. It was clear to me that some were far better at making decisions than others. Several years ago, I began to develop a decision-making framework that I call ‘The Decision Switch’, based on proven principles I have myself adopted. I have used it extensively and taught it to my teams with remarkable results. Seeing a growing need, created by an increasingly complex and less forgiving business climate, I sought to address a critical development need for leaders and authored my new book, The Decision Switch: 7 Principles of Successful Decision-Making.
The framework for The Decision Switch:
Triage First: Increase your productivity by assessing and prioritizing before taking action
Follow Your North Star: Defining a clear objective serves to align all subsequent decisions
Collaborate with Others: The power of numbers helps to achieve your goals
Recognize Cognitive Bias: Eliminating mental blinders creates more productive outcomes
Establish a Champion: Visionary leaders are able to provide credibility and influence others
Manage Fallout: Integrity and legacy start with awareness, empathy, and: helping others
Practice Self-Reflection: An acute sense of self-awareness empowers personal growth
A framework built on the validated premise, decision-making is a process and not an event. While not necessary to follow it in the exact order, all the steps are important in whatever order they are taken. Following it will keep leaders from making knee-jerk or uninformed decisions and ultimately, mistakes. It will help identify potential risks and impediments and enable you to establish a clear path forward. Allowing you to move forward confidently, knowing you have asked the right questions and made the most optimal choice available.
While digital disruption is creating tremendous opportunities for those able to catch and ride the wave of change, it is sure to wreak havoc on those paralyzed by fear and anxiety, due to a lack of understanding and heightened uncertainty about the future of their business or career.
The decisions that will be made around these new and quickly evolving technologies and yet-to-be-developed innovations, will need to be continually assessed to determine whether you or your organization is ready for what’s next, and how to proceed with confidence in your choices and actions.
At the end of the day, it’s a simple equation: Better Decisions = Better Outcomes. It’s completely possible and that’s good for everyone involved.
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Succession planning is critical to ensuring the talent gaps are short when a key player leaves or gets promoted.
One of the great things about leading a high performing team is that people grow and they grow very quickly. The problem with that is they’re always looking for new opportunities. You’re always at risk of losing someone either to a promotion within the organization or they move on to bigger and better things outside of your company. As a leader, you need to be prepared for these changes because over-reliance on an individual player can be extremely dangerous.
For example, my dad was in the Navy and he was on a submarine, and they had a badge that was called the Dolphins. And the way it worked was that every individual in the crew had to know and be able to perform the jobs of every single other crew member. Because think about it—on a submarine if someone got injured or went down, you couldn’t have the rest of the crew not know how to perform that role because it would put the entire organization at risk.
There are huge benefits to cross-training. First, it builds redundancy. If someone leaves your organization, you have someone else who can step in and fulfill those responsibilities because the business needs to continue operating. Second, cross-training gives people a development opportunity so they can grow. And third, the people conducting that cross-training are learning how to train and develop others. So you’re doing two things at the same time. That individual is learning a new skill and the person teaching it is learning the skill of developing others.
Succession planning is critical to ensuring the talent gaps are short when a key player leaves or gets promoted. As a leader, you need to start looking ahead beyond what your current team has from a people standpoint. You need to build a robust talent pipeline of people who can join your team and fill roles when gaps arise. Succession planning is not an HR responsibility. It’s yours. HR does the recruiting. HR helps you find the candidates. But as the leader, you need to understand and build that talent pipeline. You can ask HR to come in and assist you in that work. You should be regularly assessing the talent on your team as well as looking across the broader organization. Ideally, you have a short list of people elsewhere in the organization you would like to recruit should you have an opening.
I know some leaders who actually have that talent pipeline written out and it also includes people outside the company who they know from their own personal and professional network. By staying in touch with those people in other parts of the organization or in other companies, you can quickly reach out to those people and fill a role much more rapidly than the leader who doesn’t have a talent pipeline built for an unexpected opening.
By having a robust talent pipeline and making sure you’re doing cross-training and having that bench strength built in advance of a role opening up, you’re going to fill your openings faster, you’re going to get better talent that is better qualified for that role, and you’re not going to have to just settle and say, “Well, I need a body. I need anybody to just be able to do this work.”
Want to learn more about building high-performing teams? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to build high-performing teams. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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One your biggest responsibilities as a leader is helping your team members identify the places they need to grow and then giving them the opportunities to learn those skills.
Even though the members of your team might be high performing, they can always achieve the next level of performance. One your biggest responsibilities as a leader is helping them identify the places they need to grow and then giving them the opportunities to learn those skills. As you think about an individual’s development plan, there are some very clear steps that you can take to help them get to that next level.
First, look at the skills that are required based on the competencies defined by that role. Different roles require different sets of skills and you should be able to document for each role what the set of skills is for somebody to perform well in that role. Your job as a leader is to look at the next level of performance that that individual can step into and say at their current level they’re fine and they’re meeting all the competency requirements but if I were to promote them or look at expanded responsibilities for that person, how would they stack up at that next level of performance?
Once you’ve identified the gaps, you have to take a moment to think about why the gap exists. Is is that we’ve never trained this person on this skill? Is is they’ve never had an opportunity to demonstrate the skill? Once you have an understanding of why that gap exists, you need to sit down with that individual and discuss why they think the gap exists. Help them understand where they currently perform, where you expect them to perform, and what that gap looks like in terms of actual demonstrable skills that you should be seeing every single day.
Once those gaps are identified, identify specific projects or specific deliverables that the individual can take on as their responsibilities—where they’re going to be able to start performing those tasks and building those skills. Ask for their commitment to filling those gaps, because if somebody doesn’t want to grow, no matter how hard you push them, they’re not going to step into that next role. By getting their commitment to that growth, they’re going to be much more receptive to taking on additional responsibilities, going to additional training, and working a little bit harder in areas they’re not yet comfortable.
Once you both have agreement, document that agenda and lay it out as their individual development plan. In targeting their development toward specific projects you give the individual two things. One is you give them real-world experience performing the activity that they’re not yet familiar with. Second, you give them clarity and focus. You help them link the competencies to actual behaviors so they can spend their time dedicated to filling that skill gap. My rule is they should be able to do 70% of that project very easily without a lot of effort and that incremental 30% is where they’re going to develop and learn and grow.
Document their growth over time and renew the gap filling cycle of understanding. Great, you’ve built these competencies. Here’s the next set of gaps we need to fill. Here are the corresponding projects. Then you just continue with that cycle over time. Hopefully, by the time their annual review comes around, you can say, “Here are the projects you performed against and here are the new competencies that you have.”
So your role as a leader, in terms of developing others, really boils down to understanding what the requirements are for their role from a competency standpoint and then identifying gaps and tying them to very specific projects. And in doing so, that individual will see themselves grow over time.
Want to learn more about building high-performing teams? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to build high-performing teams. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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If you’re able to take all seven the elements of building a high performing team and connect them to one another, you’re going to see a virtuous circle of performance happen on a regular basis, and your team will achieve more than you ever thought they could.
In looking at the seven elements of building a high performing team, there’s this really interesting dynamic where they create this virtuous circle, where one element links to another and enables the members of your team to perform even better than they would if you’d just focused on an individual element.
In terms of setting direction and laying out that vision and mission, your people will understand where they’re going. They’ll understand where they personally fit in to the broader whole and how they can contribute to the achievement of that vision.
Next, in terms of deploying and gathering resources, your people will have what they need to succeed. There’s nothing more frustrating than being asked to perform a task and not having the right tools and resources for doing so.
If you assemble the team correctly, they’re going to be able to work more effectively with one another. There will be that team chemistry where they’re going to feed off of each other’s efforts and push each other to perform even better than they would alone.
If you allocate the work properly and prioritize efforts, people will feel that they’re fairly treated, that they’re not carrying more of the burden than another one of their coworkers might be. That prioritization is going to enable them to focus their efforts on achieving the goals that are most important for achieving that broader vision.
If you’re executing the plan well, you’re going to be taking action and accepting risks, but appropriate ones, that enable the team to see progress and results from all their hard work.
Then thinking through motivating them, it’s going to help them build their capabilities and drive high performance of the broader organization. People come to work because they want to grow and they want to develop, so focusing on how you’re motivating them and understanding what gets them excited is going to unleash that potential.
Then lastly, if you’re really thinking through developing the team, you’re going to expand the bandwidth and the capabilities that they have because you’re going to push them to the next level of performance. You’re going to create growth opportunities for them to expand into, which is then going to motivate them and build their skills.
So if you’re able to take all seven of those elements of building a high performing team and connect them to one another, you’re going to see that virtuous circle of performance happen on a regular basis, and your team will achieve more than you ever thought they could.
Want to learn more about building high-performing teams? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to build high-performing teams. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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Last weekend I was out for a mountain ride on my adventure motorcycle. I was high up in the foothills outside of Boulder, Colorado, which is full of twisty gravel roads and dirt trails. I love to glide through the curves with some sweeping power slides and just flow. Then, in a quick glance in my handlebar mirror, I see another motorcycle coming up on me from behind…Of course I had to accelerate and up my game! How could I possibly allow somebody to catch me, let alone potentially pass me? Keep in mind, this was just a Sunday morning ride and we didn’t even know each other!
Now think about this: When you are trying to figure out how to accelerate your business for growth and profitability, it is easy to wish your competitors were not right there in your rearview mirror! Or perhaps you are in their rearview mirror. All the same, in the grand scheme of things, competition drives innovation and we need it.
One of the reasons we care about building a better mousetrap, marketing it better, or producing it more efficiently, is that we know our competitors are up at night trying to figure out the same thing. Just like in sports, strong competitors force us to improve our performance or be eliminated.
Many powerful and innovative companies take their cues from their competitors. They look at what competitors are doing and ask how they can do it better, market it better, or do it more efficiently. These kinds of innovations may not seem as glamorous as inventing something new from scratch, but they benefit the consumer and the innovator just as much.
Unfortunately, our attitude toward competition often hinders creativity. When we approach the task of innovation as if there were a finite amount of creativity in the world, we can become secretive and overly protective of our ideas. This often prevents us from getting the input and feedback we need to evaluate and improve them. In larger companies, this toxic kind of competition can exist between individuals and even departments as a whole.
Effectively leading an innovative organization requires cultivating an atmosphere where people are more concerned with productivity than egotistical gratification. It also requires systems that allow people to effectively collaborate as well as share credit for successes. Here are a few ways to build such a culture:
Steer clear of fear. When we are in a state of fear, the brain’s entire focus is to find safety. It looks for ways to minimize risk, which works against creativity and innovation. This is why leaders who use fear tactics to motivate their employees will see dismal results if their tasks require any kind of creative thinking. It is also why fear of failure or competition (on an individual or organizational level) can cripple innovative potential.
Lay the groundwork for innovation by seeking original ideas related to what you do. Allow employees from any department to present short pitches for new innovations on a regular basis. These may include ideas for innovative products, services, process improvements, marketing, or even business models.
Determine the right intervals to create excitement around innovative ideas without distracting from ongoing tasks.
Reward those who come up with the ideas that you implement, especially with recognition and giving credit where credit is due.
At the end of the day, people who effectively harness creative power do not waste much time or energy worrying about someone stealing their ideas, because they do not see creativity as a finite well that will someday run dry. They believe that there are just as many good ideas in their future as there are in their past.
As companies like Google and Apple have repeatedly demonstrated, the right kind of collaboration can spark tremendous creativity and subsequent innovation. But what does this look like for smaller organizations that don’t possess Google or Apple’s inherent attractiveness to potential collaborators? The secret often resides in openly exploring what we see around us and then asking ourselves a better question to get a better answer!
A few years ago, I was speaking to a director at a business school where I serve as a senior adviser to the Dean. She was deeply frustrated with the fundraising goal they had been given by their parent university and felt she had no support to help her with the enormous task before her. She also complained that she was so short on staff that her PhD professors were being tasked with putting together binders for the events she was coordinating.
I asked her three questions: 1) How many local businesses were “partners” with the business school? 2) How many graduate students did they have? 3) How could new technologies potentially reduce the need for binders and physical material? As she answered my questions, I saw the wheels begin to turn.
I proposed a mastermind speaker series with local business leaders as an ongoing fundraiser towards the university’s endowment. Graduate students who wanted business experience were happy to volunteer as support staff in exchange for the opportunity to help and interact with the business community speakers. She engaged the university technology department to explore different alternatives to physical binders. By simply looking around her with a different set of eyes, she began three collaborative efforts that were extremely beneficial to all parties involved.
So much innovation comes out of creative collaboration with others. Are you getting the most you can out of your professional relationships? Are you approaching these relationships in a compelling sort of way?
Allow yourself to approach your professional partnerships with the mindset of a shared bold future. Move forward with a vision of abundance, knowing that there is more than enough for all parties to prosper and thrive. Enjoy the sweeping curves of life’s adventure together!
For three decades, Scott Cochrane has been helping executives expand their businesses as a Growth Acceleration Adviser to hundreds of C-Suite leaders in 32 countries. His psychological and neuroscience-based methods have championed $54B in growth. Cochrane advises executives on how to strategically approach accelerated growth for both themselves and their companies to achieve exponential success. He documents it all in his books, keynotes, custom corporate programs, and retreats designed especially for C-Suite executives. Learn more at BoldMindX.com.
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Assembling a high-performing team involves more than just finding great talent. Follow this 7-step formula to develop the team of your dreams.
As a leader, one of your most critical responsibilities is to turn your team into what can be considered a high-performing team. And to do that, there are seven elements that you need to bring together to turn your team from one that just exists to one that’s considered high-performing:
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Discover the Tell Tale Signs of Fake DevOps. Learn the three steps a leader should take to prevent Fake DevOps and the five principles of DevOps.
Today’s guest post is by Nikolay Gekht, CTO of Gehtsoft USA.
Let’s say you want to know whether your DevOps works well. The answer is simple: measure outcomes!
What’s the best way for a Leader to spot signs of Fake DevOps?
The DevOps community builds a whole philosophy around delivering proper things fast. If there is no delivery, we miss the entire purpose of DevOps. So, consistent failure to deliver or a slow pace is a good sign of problems. However, it is not enough to call it fake. Problems happen. The diagnosis requires another check. You inspect how the DevOps team handles slow and wrong delivery. If they proactively reveal, analyze, improve and share problems, it is just a change that requires time. Suppose they don’t… Most probably, you have to deal with fake DevOps.
These are not random checks. Both leverage DevOps principles. By measuring the outcomes, we validate the purpose and inspect whether the first way of DevOps work. I mean “simplify and improve the value production flow.” By checking the problem handling, we ensure the second and third ways. The second way is “create and shorten feedback loops.” The third way is a “culture of continuous experimentation, learning, and sharing the information.” Inquiring about the problem-handling also evaluates a safe experimentation environment. This environment is essential to building the proper DevOps culture.
What causes Fake DevOps to occur?
As any fake, fake DevOps occurs when actions trump meaning. A bogus doctor can simulate a procedure. But a phony MD doesn’t understand why it is required and what is the desired outcome. Likewise, fake DevOps perform actions (typically focusing on automation of the process only). The fake process doesn’t care about business outcomes and the core values of DevOps. Lack of outcome-based metrics or lack of feedback loops based on these metrics facilitates the faking process.
But I know this is not the answer to “what causes it.” The right cause should answer the question “why?” Why do they fake it?
The simple answer is “because it is easier.” Repeating the actions and doing them by recipe is less complicated than understanding. It also relieves accountability for making the right decision. “Everybody does it, and so shall we!”, “Experts said so!”, etc…
But even this is not the ultimate answer. We need to dig deeper. Why are people disconnected from business outcomes? Why are they not interested in learning principles? Would they benefit from implementing DevOps or not? Why so? People always choose the most efficient strategy. If faking DevOps is efficient, the answer to the question “why” is the key to the problem.
What steps should a leader take to prevent Fake DevOps?
Every employee may have no desire to understand and embrace the whole DevOps philosophy. And that’s ok. But the people who lead DevOps shall. Plain and simple. At the strategic level, DevOps implementation needs to be built around three ways and five principles of DevOps. They work altogether, and we can omit absolutely nothing.
Three ways are:
Create, simplify and straighten the flow of value production
Create and shorten feedback loops
Create a culture of continuous improvement, learning, and knowledge sharing.
The five principles are:
DevOps Culture
Automation of routine actions
Lean management
Measurement
Sharing
Any tool, process, or method works in support of the ways and principles of DevOps. Any action is as successful as it contributes to the outcome and improves DevOps implementation.
By implementing this approach, a leader of an organization would facilitate the building of an efficient and state-of-art DevOps process.
What can a CIO do to fix a project afflicted with Fake DevOps?
Let me rephrase Lev Tolstoy’s quote. “All successful processes are alike, but every broken process is broken in its own way.” This truth makes fixing the broken process incomparably more challenging than building right from scratch. Unfortunately, there is no ultimate recipe for how to fix what’s broken. Fixing the problem will be a difficult quest full of unexpected events and hidden dangers.
However, there are a few tools a pensive CIO can leverage to support the recovery process:
Understand the theory and principles behind the actions.
Don’t look for a silver bullet; follow kaizen (the art of small changes), not kaikaku (the radical change). Use Toyota Improvement Kata: set the direction, make a hypothesis, experiment, learn and adjust. Live the approach “a small change right today is better than a significant change by the end of the week.”
Recognize the social part of the problem. Fixing the broken process always involves handling assumptions, habits, beliefs, and relationships. And sometimes, it is a more significant part of the problem than merely the process aberrations.
Final Words
Please, don’t limit yourself to a couple of articles about buzzwords or one expert opinion. People have an enormous degree of misconception about trends. DevOps, Agile, psychological safety… all of them are full of myths and distortions. The best way to avoid regretful mistakes is to understand the theory and philosophy of this method. The most crucial “why” questions to understand: Why do I need DevOps? Why does it work? Why is it the right tool for me? Why is it essential to my company? Why should people be motivated to adopt it?
When we speak of DevOps, I highly recommend starting with the “DevOps Handbook” by Gene Kim et al. Reading and understanding this book would help to avoid many misconceptions and mistakes.
As a managing partner and CTO, Nikolay Gekht directs the Gehtsoft USA team in requirements analysis, architecture design, and product development. His technical expertise, leadership and client advocate voice ensure that every project is value optimized and delivers the results clients expect from Gehtsoft.
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A strategic growth plan is a crucial component of a company’s long-term success. It serves as a roadmap, guiding a business towards its goals by outlining objectives, strategies, and tactics. A well-constructed strategic growth plan enables businesses to navigate through market shifts, adapt to new trends, and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
This article will discuss the best practices for writing an effective business strategic growth plan, focusing on ten key points that will ensure your organization is set up for success.
Define your vision and mission
The first step in creating a strategic growth plan is to clearly define your company’s vision and mission. The vision statement should describe your long-term aspirations, while the mission statement should communicate the purpose of your business. These two elements will serve as the foundation for all subsequent decisions and actions.
Set SMART goals
Establish specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals to ensure your growth plan is realistic and effective. SMART goals are more likely to be reached and can be easily tracked and evaluated. Prioritize your goals based on their impact on the business and their alignment with your vision and mission.
Conduct a SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis is an essential tool for identifying your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. By examining these factors, you can better understand your competitive landscape and capitalize on your strengths, while addressing your weaknesses. This will enable you to uncover new growth opportunities and create strategies to mitigate potential risks.
Identify your target market and segmentation
Knowing your target market is crucial to creating a tailored growth strategy. Identify the specific customer segments you want to focus on and analyze their needs, preferences, and pain points. This will allow you to develop products, services, and marketing strategies that resonate with your target audience, ultimately driving growth.
Analyze your competition
Understanding your competition is essential to maintaining a competitive edge. Assess their strengths, weaknesses, market positioning, and target audience. This information will allow you to identify gaps in the market, opportunities for differentiation, and potential threats that you need to address.
Develop a unique value proposition
A unique value proposition (UVP) is a clear and concise statement that communicates the benefits of your products or services, setting you apart from your competitors. Your UVP should address your target audience’s needs and preferences and showcase your company’s competitive advantages. Developing a strong UVP is critical to attracting and retaining customers, ultimately driving growth.
Create a marketing and sales strategy
Your marketing and sales strategy should outline the tactics you will employ to attract and convert customers, focusing on channels and messages that resonate with your target audience. Consider a mix of online and offline channels, such as social media, email marketing, content marketing, and events, to reach a wider audience. Align your sales and marketing efforts to ensure a seamless customer experience, and set performance metrics to track your progress.
Establish a financial plan
A robust financial plan is a cornerstone of a successful growth strategy. Outline your expected revenue streams, expenses, and investment requirements, and create financial projections for the next 3-5 years. This will enable you to identify potential financial risks and ensure your growth strategy is financially viable.
Implement an operational plan
Your operational plan should outline the processes, systems, and resources required to execute your growth strategy. This includes hiring and training new employees, implementing new technologies, and streamlining processes to improve efficiency. Regularly review and adjust your operational plan to ensure it remains aligned with your strategic objectives.
Monitor progress and make adjustments
Finally, it’s essential to continuously monitor your progress against your SMART goals and KPIs, adapting your strategies and tactics as needed. A properly scheduled cadence of formal review meetings (weekly, monthly and quarterly), along with standardized meeting agendas and reporting structure, will set you up for success.
Mike Fata is the Chief Executive Officer of Fata & Associates and the author of Grow: 12 Unconventional Lessons for Becoming an Unstoppable Entrepreneur. He is the co-Founder of Manitoba Harvest Hemp Foods and hosts the Founder to Mentor podcast. As a 9-figure entrepreneur, certified holistic health coach, and growth coach, he motivates and inspires people to discover their authentic business passions and live their best life every day.
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Employees now expect more. Employee engagement is key to success for most organizations. If we understand the typical and recurring mistakes made in this field, we can predict and prevent them happening to us.
During a visit to one of the sites where my Rapid Mass Engagement (RME) process had been implemented, a group of senior visitors toured the site guided by a shop-floor employee who outlined the new high-performance culture. The visitors could see and feel the culture and were impressed by the ‘Behavioral Standards’ – behaviorally specific standards designed to make accountability both easy and transparent developed from employee data and created by employees. One of the visitors informed the guide that they were going to take these away and ‘roll them out’ in the visitors’ own organization.
The employee guide looked deflated and when asked why, explained:
“If you think you can roll these out, I have not explained properly how they were created … and who owns them.”
This roll-out assumption is common. In one site the employees added the following to the organization’s Behavioral Standards:
“Warning: attempts to apply these standards without the process that created them will only disappoint.”
Ownership matters and creates discretionary effort and engagement, and anything rolled-out, by definition, is not owned by those on the receiving end.
Engagement without Enablement
Imagine you do what it takes to create a highly engaged workforce, but employees then crash into overcautious and inflexible legacy systems. Our HR and Quality policies, how we recruit and promote, how early we involve end-users in the design of equipment and software can all be designed to maximize enablement, but frequently suffer from producer capture.
Failing to quickly and systematically align systems to your nascent emerging culture, will mean you have highly engaged employees, but working for another organization.
Squashing Ownership, Solution Space and Discretionary Effort with Unnecessary Standardization
Western universities and organizations dominate thinking and research in areas such as leadership and engagement. In addition, our understanding of improvement science (Lean/Six Sigma, etc., however described) means we first create standards before attempting to improve them.
Why is this a problem? I have seen many examples of corporate functions specifying the color, the size, even the font to be used in visual management.
Why do we think corporate knows best? Why carelessly disregard the mountain of goodwill, ownership and discretionary effort available by letting a thousand flowers bloom, by encouraging local people to create their own?
If you have multiple locations worldwide, allow each to design their own approaches to visual management or, as in the example above, how they codify and articulate their high-performance culture. Give them the maximum solution space and they will fill it with locally resonant and authentic words owned by the employees concerned.
Naïve Engagement
I often hear comments such as “no-one comes to work to do a bad job.” The danger is when this is followed by a logical leap such as “all we have to do is empower our teams and they will do a great job.”
In corporate life, I designed the training for CarnaudMetalbox’s Self-Directed Work Teams (called ‘Autonomous Manufacturing Teams’ in French); the key was ensuring clearly defined scope and responsibilities.
If we create a power vacuum the only thing that is certain is that the power vacuum will be filled. The hope is that a highly motivated self-directed work team will always fill this vacuum, but that cannot be relied upon. It some cases this naïve assumption led to systematic restriction of output, bullying and abuse of vulnerable employees.
Random outcomes are the opposite of high performance. Some of my work comes from helping readdress the damage caused by such policy failures which ignore everything we have learned from FMEA and Human Factors in other contexts.
Timid Engagement: Wishing the Ends without Willing the Means
An executive from a global organization who had visited a RME site contacted me.
He told me he was very impressed by the culture he had experienced on the site and the impact on quality, customer service and productivity and he wanted that for his organization.
We discussed what was involved in creating such a high-performance culture and his enthusiasm declined rapidly. This is common.
This was one of many examples of people willing the ends without the will to enact the means necessary to achieve those ends.
In the senior team diagnostic workshops that are the 1st stage of RME, it is common for at least some of the senior team to imagine that transformational outputs can be achieved with conventional ‘safe’ inputs; they can’t.
Shiny and New
I have worked with tens of thousands of employees in highly participative workshops where, in the early stages of culture change, cynicism about ‘management’ is common. Employees often tell me of an interesting coping mechanism. Having experienced a high turnover of senior leaders and initiatives they advise their peers to smile at the new leaders and make encouraging noises. They go on to say “this initiative won’t last very long and then another shiny and new initiative will be launched that we can give superficial commitment to! It seems to make them happy.”
Why exhaust yourself launching and re-launching initiatives top-down when it is possible to gain employee ownership of change and culture from the bottom-up. This will maintain the humor but also create and sustain meaningful change!
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Why are memorial services celebrating the life of a loved one who has passed always convened around candlelight, music, and poetry and not around bright lights, PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets?
Why are memorial services celebrating the life of a loved one who has passed or that bring communities of diverse people together after a tragedy like a human-caused tragedy or natural disaster always convened around candlelight, music, and poetry and not around bright lights, PowerPoint presentations, and spreadsheets? Memorial services are meetings around the most significant emotional and spiritual events in our lives – not about budgets or cost overruns that seem insignificant in comparison. They serve to help people who might or might not know each other find a sense of presence with change and hold hands to risk moving forward. Change always involves grieving the death of something old and mustering the courage to accept the birth of something new. I think it’s time to shed some new light on how we meet to achieve change.
Nothing would be more un-business-like than convening a business meeting in candlelight with music and poetry and nothing would be less human-like than convening a memorial service in bright lights with agendas, charts, and graphs. We need to recognize that not all meetings are the same. I think there is a practical business lesson here – at times our task requires us to be impractical and un-business-like. Those times are turning points in the life of an organization when change, creativity, and innovation become a survival necessity and people need to support each other as human beings in changing themselves.
The lesson is simple. Organizations exist at two levels of reality. The most obvious surface level represents the brightly lit performance stage on which human beings act out their defined roles. It consists of structures, organization charts, systems, goals, regulations, policies, plans, and job descriptions. These elements are visible and difficult to ignore in our day-to-day work. There is a deeper underlying level of reality, however, that is only visible in candlelight. That fragile flame reflects the spirit of loving, compassionate, forgiving, respectful, and collaborative human beings conscious of their common mortality and their insignificance in the face of the night sky. Any change strategy is more likely to be effective if we could work with these human beings and not the entrenched role players who have a stake in the status quo.
We look more like each other in candlelight than we do in the roles we play under the bright stage lights in the conference room. In this light, people are more open to change and ready to support each other in risking it. Issues like trust, poor communications, broken relationships, lack of employee engagement and buy-in, and leadership development are barriers to change that are amplified in bright light and defused in candlelight. These barriers are surface-level issues that can only be addressed at the deeper level of organizational reality. To prepare people to transcend these barriers and achieve real and sustainable change, it is necessary to reveal them as human beings beneath their business suits. Shouldn’t our meetings about change topics be more like memorial services that invite emotional and spiritual presence than agenda-controlled and facilitated meetings that intentionally deny that presence?
We need to better appreciate the effect of how we illuminate our meeting places. For decades I have been experimenting with ways to bring the spirit of candlelight into meetings where it makes sense to do so. I have just published a book entitled A Place for T: Giving Voice to the Tortoise in Our Hare-Brained World where I share my learnings. My book launch events communicate my message with a simple experience. I begin my presentation in a brightly lit room with shuttered windows. On a table in front of the room, I have lit candles. After a short PowerPoint introduction, I shut down my computer, turn out the room lights, play reflective music, and let my audience sit in silence before I continue. Now those flickering flames become the focus of attention. Then I ask them to share what they experienced with the change in lighting. They naturally get it and awaken to the deeper level of reality without me lecturing to them.
Our human consciousness is mirrored in those candle flames. They awaken the human being within us. People who sometimes feel lost, unappreciated, and alone in the roles they play, sense a call home to what they really care about. Now I can talk to an audience that is prepared to be intimately connected to what I have to say and prepared to engage in meaningful dialogue. Isn’t this what organizational leaders really want – to have employees who are intimately connected to what they have to say and fully engaged? But I fear these leaders are a bit afraid of the darkness and don’t trust what might emerge.
Lack of trust might be the biggest barrier to change. If you want trust, then trust. Creating candle lit meeting places challenges leaders to let go of the need to control and trust the natural capacities of employees to do what is right and good for the organization. As I look back on my experiences, I have developed a much greater appreciation for the potential inherent in the natural emergence of change as a product of learning and for the natural emergence of leaders as needed. In their busy lives, employees might have forgotten how to talk to each other, what conditions they need to learn together, and how to lead in their own way. But if the lighting is not blinding them to the fragile candle flame, they will help each other naturally remember that they already know these things. I have seen this emergence happen too often to ignore it. We just need to create the meeting conditions, a meeting place, that invites the conversations we need to have, not the ones we assume we should have. The most critical condition might be how the ‘place’ is illuminated. I think senior leaders need to muster the courage to occasionally turn down the house lights and risk being un-business-like in candlelight. We all look better in candlelight.
Dr. Robert H. Lengel is Associate Professor emeritus at the University of Texas at San Antonio, president of the consulting firm LeaderWork Inc., and author of the new book A Place For T: Giving Voice To The Tortoise In Our Hare-Brained World. He holds a BS and MS in aerospace engineering, an MBA, and a PhD that blended oceanography, environmental management, leadership and organizational dynamics in business. For more information, please visit www.APlaceForT.com
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In this article I will tell you an interesting story about how I became a successful CEO and what I believe was my biggest lesson. I have just published a book called The Buddhist CEO, but in many ways I was the accidental CEO.
Ten years ago, I joined a large not-for-profit organization in my native Scotland. I was in charge of all their daily frontline operations and was part of a four-person senior leadership team. Four months into the job, our then CEO died suddenly due to a very unexpected illness. Cutting a very long story short, this resulted in me becoming the CEO.
It was clear to me that the organization was in some difficulty at the time. It had made significant financial losses for two years running, staff morale was low, and our services didn’t perform anywhere near the level they should. Some people might have said I had inherited a poisoned chalice. However, I was able to turn the organization around quickly. In my first year in charge, we made a small profit, staff morale increased significantly and our services started to dramatically improve.
How did I know things were improving? Improvements to the finances were easy to monitor by analysing our management accounts, but how did I know morale was improving? I decided that if the organization was to improve, we needed to boost staff morale. How could we expect staff to provide fantastic services if they didn’t enjoy their job? I set up meetings with different staff groups and asked them directly about what they liked and didn’t like about the company. Clear themes emerged. Staff really wanted to work for us as they loved the idea of helping people. We were a not-for-profit organization helping people to stay warm in their homes and were involved in other environmental projects. Our staff wanted to help people, but they felt our company got in the way.
They were unclear how their job contributed to the company, managers were reluctant to take decisions, nothing worked, the IT was useless, our company cars were old and broken, our phone system was frustrating to use, and they had no idea where the company was heading strategically. In the office, people were not always nice to each other as they were just so frustrated. I realized quickly that our workplace culture was awful and if we were ever to become a high functioning organization we needed to make significant changes and quick.
This was when I started to learn my biggest lesson as a CEO. Workplace culture matters and if it is broken then your organization will never be as successful as it could and should be. I set about fixing the structural issues first. A complete overhaul of our IT, company vehicles and telephone system. This was a big call at the time, after making such heavy losses for two years prior. The board took some persuading that spending more money was the way to go. The impact of this act alone was huge. Staff felt they were being listened to and they could see that things were now working.
I then set about trying to change the culture. I introduced the term ‘world class culture’ into our meetings, our policies and strategies. This lifted the aspirations of staff. I am not sure we ever became world class, but I am certain that just by introducing the notion that we were trying to deliver everything we do internally and externally, at a level that could be described as world class, raised everyone’s game. Our performance went from okay to very good/excellent. This resulted in more contracts coming our way, as partner organizations could tell they could trust us to deliver.
We then brought in an HR specialist to help us train our managers in how to be better leaders. I empowered them to take decisions on their own with clear instructions on when they had to push a decision up to their senior manager. In conjunction with staff, we developed company values that we agreed as a company and then held people to these values. We treated people well but we expected them to treat the company well. This meant that when a staff member clearly wasn’t acting in line with our company values, we intervened and addressed the behaviours being shown.
I believed the culture was changing from negative to positive, but how could I be sure? I decided to measure our culture and we entered the prestigious Sunday Times Top 100 Companies to work for in the UK awards. Why? As part of our entry, staff had to complete an anonymous survey asking them for their view on the company’s leadership, strategy, terms and conditions, ethos, their team, their manager and how we looked after their wellbeing. Every year we got a score which was benchmarked against other companies. Over time we could build up a picture of our culture through this and other measurements we used. To my surprise and delight, we were listed in the top 100 companies to work for in the UK during 6 of the 7 years I was in charge.
This is a brief outline of how I transformed a company. None of this was easy and it takes time and effort to really engage with your staff. In my experience though, it is always worthwhile putting this level of focus on your staff as they will go on to help your company thrive and achieve great success.
The person at the top sets the tone, so make that tone a positive and inspirational one. Put time and energy into developing an aspirational and supportive workplace culture. In my novel The Buddhist CEO, the main character sets out to lead like a Buddhist CEO, applying a compassionate and caring approach towards his staff. It brings his company great rewards, but he still faces great challenges.
Thane Lawrie was CEO of an organization called Scarf, in his native Scotland, and is now an author. He recently published his first novel, The Buddhist CEO (CLICK HERE to get your copy). Thane also writes a regular blog on his website. You can follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BuddhistCeo or visit his website at https://www.thanelawrie.com/.
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