Strategy – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

Defining Your Organization’s Vision and Mission

September 15, 2022/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Defining your organization’s vision and mission helps you focus on work that is consistent with your purpose.

A vision and mission define your purpose and your destination. While the mission and vision are usually written for top-level organizations, these tools can be used at a departmental level and even at a personal level. They help you focus on work that is consistent with your purpose and that takes you closer to achieving your goals.

The mission is why your organization exists. It specifies the business you’re in, who you serve, and your impact on the world around you. It’s the road you’re on. I run a leadership training firm. My firm’s mission is to advance the art of business leadership through hands-on training and coaching led by dynamic business people. It’s clear what business we’re in: business leadership training. It’s clear who we work with: people in large and small organizations who are their leaders. And the impact on the world is helping people improve their skills in this arena.

The vision is a midterm objective of what you’ll achieve three to five years out. It’s a waypoint along the road you’re on. My firm’s vision, right now, is to be a global firm of uniquely skilled executives who teach managers around the world how to be great leaders. This lays out my expectations for the type of work we’re going to do and when I’ll consider us to be successful. This global element is something that’s new in the past few years, and it’s really getting us to focus on other countries.

The mission and vision are linked. They can be created for any organization. They’ll set direction and help determine the work you will or won’t do. For my firm, our vision and mission do exactly that. We routinely say no to consulting work. It’s not part of our mission and it doesn’t help us achieve our vision. When you lay out your mission and vision for your organization, it’s going to set that direction that will enable you to know which types of work matter and which types of work are off your path.

Want to learn more about strategic focus for managers? 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 assess and improve your critical thinking. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

How to Shift Your Strategic Focus

September 7, 2022/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Market and organizational changes can require you to shift your strategic focus. Being explicit about the details of the shift will help you and your team adjust to these changes.

Market and organizational changes can require you to shift your focus. This can mean temporarily pausing some work to accelerate or add new projects. Remember that your team’s time and energy is a fixed asset. Shifting focus doesn’t mean adding new things to focus on. Unless you add resources, you have to make trade-offs on where people spend their time. This enables you to complete more projects faster because your team is focused on them. During a shift in focus, draft a plan and communicate it. This plan should include:

What’s causing us to shift focus?
What’s our desired outcome once we get through the change?
What’s our strategy for navigating the change?
What old work will we stop doing to free up resources?
What new work will we be focusing on?

When I worked at a financial services firm, we had a major event that caused us to shift focus. The regulators came in and took a look at our processes. They didn’t like what they saw. They said we needed to rectify a whole list of issues. We put together and communicated a plan. What was causing us to shift focus? The regulators identified these 10 issues. What’s our desired outcome once we get through it? Well, those issues are resolved to the satisfaction of the regulators. What’s our strategy for navigating the change? Well, we’re going to stop doing some of our technology projects and move all our resources to the regulatory issues. What old work were we going to stop? Well, here are the five projects that are now on hold. What new work will we be focusing on? Here are the 10 ideas, and here’s how we’re going to allocate resources against them.

By being explicit about the shift and moving the resources to it, we got through those regulatory issues pretty quickly. When we finished, we picked up the technology projects and moved forward. If you shift focus without communicating the new end state and explicitly saying what work is in or out of focus, you risk people taking on new work but not feeling like they can stop doing the old work to take on the new. You risk burning out the team. When you have one these major shifts, be deliberate about putting a plan in place and communicating it to the organization.

How to Evaluate New Opportunities

September 1, 2022/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Resist the urge to pursue every new opportunity. Invest your resources in the ones that align with your overall strategy.

New ideas and opportunities come along all the time. Resist the urge to jump on the next new thing. Rely on your prioritization process to assess all new ideas. Remember, if you add something new to your list, you either need to add resources to work on it or you have to stop working on something else, or finish something that’s a higher priority before you start working on the new task. Failure to do this leads to the inevitable burnout of your team.

In high growth organizations, periods of hyper growth can be really dangerous. During that time, everything’s interesting and exciting. The team has the energy to pursue a lot of ideas. But eventually, they run out of steam. Initiatives fail. Morale drops and performance suffers. Maintain a rigorous approach to drawing the line, and only pursue initiatives when you have the resources available to pursue them properly.

What I mean by drawing the line is, think of your initiative list. Start at the top of the list with your highest priority initiatives and then list every single idea and project you’re working on. Then, once you have that complete list, figure out what resources you have available to do the work. That may be people, time, or money.

Start at the top of your list and work your way down that list, figuring out how many resources that project is going to consume. When you run out of resources, draw a line on your prioritization list. Don’t work on anything below that line until you have additional resources or you finish a project above the line.

Enforce the discipline of assessing all new initiatives through your strategic filters. The filters let you know how closely aligned an idea is with your overall strategy. When you find something that’s off-strategy, there’s a rationale for saying no to it and staying focused on the most important ideas.

Understanding Opportunity Cost

August 24, 2022/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Innovation, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Understanding the concept of opportunity cost will help you prioritize your team’s most important tasks. Learn to say no to low-value work.

Do you know what your team’s time is worth? Lack of focus consumes time. That’s the one resource you can never get back. When you look at activities in terms of their time cost, it becomes easier to say no to distractions.

Don’t just ask, “What task am I going to do next?” Instead, ask, “What task am I not going to do so I can work on the new request?” When requests come in to your team, assess what other work isn’t going to get done by the team if you take on the new request. If you can explain the tradeoff to the person who’s asking you to do the work, they’re probably going to be more open to you saying no and deprioritizing that new task if it’s not as important as other work you should be working on.

I work with one attorney at a large corporation who has a team of lawyers. People come to his team all the time and ask for legal work to be done even if his team shouldn’t be doing that work. He always says yes even though it’s not necessarily something an attorney has to look at. He was complaining one day about how much work was on his team’s plate. I asked him, “Hey, would you pay an outside attorney 400 dollars an hour to work on that new project that just came in?” His eyes got big and he said, “Absolutely not.” That’s when the lightbulb went off for him. He realized by taking on that project, it meant his team wasn’t working on higher priority work. He was sending that high-priority work to outside counsel and paying 400 dollars an hour. The thing is, taking on the low-value work was essentially costing him that 400 dollars. That’s when he started saying no to those distractions so his team could focus on the most important work.

When you understand these tradeoffs in terms of time cost, it’s easier to say no to low-priority or low-value work. This is going to make the work your team does the highest priority work that’s on their plate.

Challenge How Your Business Operates

August 17, 2022/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Transform your business by completely rethinking how it works. Analyzing your business model, revenue, and costs can lead you to innovative solutions.

When you go to generate new ideas to run things better, you need to think critically about the way your business runs. I like to look at three things: a business model blowup, a revenue blowup, and a cost blowup.

On the business model blowup, fundamentally rethink how you go to market. And rethink what your market actually is. You’re going to challenge the entire business model for the way you deliver products and services. On the revenue blowup side, how do you dramatically expand the products, your pricing, the geography, and the reach of your business? And on the cost blowup, how do you fundamentally eliminate drag from the business to become more efficient?

Business Model Blowup: Skybus Airlines

Critical Thinking: Understanding the Real Question

August 10, 2022/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

When a stakeholder asks you to solve a problem, make sure you understand what’s driving their request. Asking follow-up questions can help you come up with better solutions.

So many times when we’re asked to look into an issue, we just rush off and start solving it without really thinking through what’s causing the person to ask the question in the first place. Probe to understand why you’re being asked to look at something. Once you have a good understanding of why, you’re more toward a cause, but don’t stop there. Once you have that understanding, ask why again. Really get that deep understanding of what’s causing concern on your stakeholder’s part.

By understanding the real question they have, you can avoid solving symptoms and instead, come up with a recommendation that is going to resonate for them and be something that they’re excited about. The real question opens up new answers, new ideas, and new opportunities.

Let me offer an example. An executive that I worked with, named Sue, was asked by her senior stakeholder, Kim, to look at employee turnover data. Sue knew this data inside and out. It was very easy for her to go into the information, pull out the data, and generate a report about turnover. And she could have done that, but she didn’t. She stopped and asked Kim why she wanted to understand this issue, and it was really an issue of evaluating unit performance.

Well, once Sue understood this, other metrics made more sense than just the base turnover data. She stopped though and asked Kim again why was she looking at unit performance in particular. Turns out what Kim really wanted to understand was whether they were having issues with leadership or with processes. They were having a lot of churn and turnover of their associates. It was now clear to Sue that she had to look at metrics and processes. By doing so, she was able to generate ideas on how to fix some of the issues with leadership, as well as some of the processes that should change. She generated a better solution.

What I’d encourage you to do is take a look at a problem you’ve been asked to solve. Go back to that stakeholder and understand what’s really driving that request. Why do they care about this? When you get a better understanding of that, you’ll find the solutions you come up with are going to be bigger, better, and more exciting.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning about critical thinking. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Critical Thinking Tools: The Problem Statement

August 9, 2022/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Writing a problem statement helps you define your goals, boundaries, constraints, and assumptions when faced with a challenging project.

One of my favorite critical thinking and problem solving tools is a good problem statement. You should never just take a problem and rush off in a general direction, thinking you’re going to come up with a solution that will satisfy the needs of your requester. If you don’t know the destination, you’re going to get lost. It’ll take you a long time to get there. The corollary here is with your problem solving and critical thinking. You need to know what that destination is. What is success for your problem solving?

Your problem statement defines that endpoint. Without a problem statement, you’re going to spend a lot of wasted hours, wasted work, and have excessive revisions because your recommendation won’t make sense. Nobody will know what you’re trying to solve for. When you put together a good problem statement, it becomes your charter for your critical thinking efforts. It’s going to spell out your goals. It will lay out boundaries on the problem solving space. It will define success criteria. Your problem statement should spell out the constraints you’re going to face. It should articulate your assumptions, who the stakeholders are, and any timelines that you’re going to face.

I have one client organization that didn’t spend the time laying out their problem statement. They ended up with major issues for their charter for a huge technology project. Because the team was trying to solve all different problems, they didn’t have clarity on what the ultimate goal was, what the metrics were, who the stakeholders needed to be, and what the boundaries were for the space they were trying to solve in. This led the team to write a lot of code, have multiple revisions, and multiple attempted roll-outs. They couldn’t solve the problem because they hadn’t defined what the problem was in the first place.

Take a look at a problem you’re trying to solve. Is it clear what the problem statement is? Do you know what the goals are? Do you know what the boundaries, constraints, and assumptions are? Do you know who the stakeholders are? The time you spend with this type of critical thought is going to help you be more effective in solving the problems that you face.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Using The 80/20 Rule to Think Critically

August 3, 2022/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Learn how an Italian gardener’s simple principle can make problem solving much easier.

Critical thinking doesn’t only apply to coming up with recommendations. You need to think critically about the way you’re going to spend your time and energy. Those things are limited. You have too many problems to solve and not enough time. I encourage people to follow the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle.

The Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle was coined by Vilfredo Pareto when he noticed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. He was also a gardener, and he noticed 80% of the peas coming out of his garden came from 20% of the pods. He said, “That’s interesting. Two totally different realms demonstrating the same principle.” 20% led to 80% of the impact, and that’s the 80/20 rule. 20% of the drivers will drive 80% of the results. You need to think about your work the same way. You can’t focus on that 80% that only drives 20% of the results. Focus your efforts on the meaningful. Let me offer an example. Read more

The Importance of Critical Thinking

August 1, 2022/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Stopping and considering decisions before you make them is only the start to critical thinking and building on those skills makes all the difference.

The importance of critical thinking

Let’s look at the importance of critical thinking. So many times when people ask us, “Can you go solve this problem,” we rush off and start solving it without stopping to think before we do.

We’re facing new demands that require extensive amounts of information before we can make a decision. There are multiple departments involved in all of your problem-solving efforts, and each department is contributing its own input. As part of your problem-solving process, there are going to be multiple stakeholders involved. This increases the complexity of trying to get to an answer.

When you do ultimately come up with a recommendation, those big decisions will involve numerous trade-offs. Not everyone is going to be happy with what you recommend. There are going to be long lag times in acquiring the required data to make your decision, and when you finally do make the call, there’s going to be high scrutiny over whether you were right or wrong. And a bad call can have both business as well as personal and professional implications. Add to this unforeseen bottlenecks in getting the process done of getting to that answer, multiply it by the number of problems you’re trying to solve every single day, and then divide by the limited amount of time you have to get to an answer.

The importance of stopping and thinking critically before you rush off and undertake all these very comprehensive efforts is very high. That critical thinking process is what’s going to differentiate you and the solutions you develop versus rushing off without any thought at all.

Distinguish causes vs. consequences

As you begin your critical thinking efforts, I’d like you to think about causes and consequences. One of the biggest challenges we’re going to face with any problem solving is that desire to rush off and get to an answer quickly because we feel like we’re being responsive to our stakeholders when we do. But think about it.

Have you ever solved a symptom only to find out there are other symptoms that arise after you solve it? Have you ever put in place a recommendation only to find out you created new problems down the road? When you’re going through this critical thinking process, first, consider causes.

Look at the symptom that is problematic. Then figure out the real reason it’s happening. And come at that possible symptom from multiple perspectives. Once you generate a recommendation, stop and think critically. What new problems can you create if you implement this recommendation? What are the new symptoms that will be caused? Think that through before you implement your recommendation.

Let me offer an example. I know a client situation where the organization was going to roll out a brand-new website that would be facing their customers. The problem was they continued to miss deadlines for rolling the website out and going live. Now let’s look at causes and consequences. What was the cause of the website not rolling out? Well, the code wasn’t ready. Yeah, but that’s a symptom. That’s a symptom of a problem. Why wasn’t the code ready? Well, the specifications weren’t done. Okay. Well, that’s also a symptom. Why weren’t the specs done? Well, because they didn’t agree on the features and functionality of the new website. But let’s not stop there. Why was that symptom happening? Well, they weren’t given clarity by leadership around one aspect that was a major strategic decision in terms of how they would roll the website out. That was the cause of all these issues and why the rollout wasn’t happening.

Now let’s think this through. Once that strategic decision is made, what are the consequences of it? So leadership finally decided to make the website a closed network. Therefore, new customers would have to call in to register instead of registering on a website. Let’s look at the consequences of that decision and the new problems that can emerge. New customers are now going to have to call a call center associate. That’s then going to flood the call center with incremental calls. The consequence of that is the staff in the call center is going to be over-worked. And then the consequence of that is current customers are going to experience service issues. They won’t get their calls answered as quickly. And then the consequence of that is we might lose current customers.

By stopping and thinking about causes first and then consequences, once you do make a recommendation, you’re going to identify the true problem that you need to solve and, hopefully, you’ll be able to avoid causing future problems. When you go out to solve a problem, think backwards about the causes and think forward about the consequences.

As you go to apply these notions to your critical thinking processes, I’d like you to think about a problem you’re working on. Look at the causes. Spend some time thinking about what’s really causing this issue. Continue to work backward until it’s clear you’re solving a problem and not a symptom. Then, once you’ve generated a recommendation, think through the consequences. What are the new problems that could emerge if you implement your recommendation? Think about a problem that you made a recommendation on where it didn’t go so well. Which of these two did you miss? Did you miss the real root cause? Did you miss possible consequences of your recommendation?

By spending this extra time thinking about these aspects and putting in the critical thought, there’s a much higher likelihood that whatever recommendation you come up with is going to solve the true problem and you’re going to account for some of the possible consequences down the road.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Saying No

July 27, 2022/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Strategic focus often involves saying no to intriguing project requests.

One of the shortest words you can say is also the most important. Saying no is about choice. Shifting your mindset from “I have to” to “I choose to” requires saying no to tasks and activities that are off track.

There are many reasons why saying no is hard. You might not want to miss an opportunity. You might feel like you’re not being a team player. It may feel like you’re not getting to work on something fun and interesting. To achieve focus though, saying no is required. It can be hard to say no to someone’s idea or a group’s request of your team. When you say no, it feels like you’re not helping somebody out.

Try saying, “yes if,” instead. Essentially, what you’re doing is putting conditions around that yes. Those conditions can include things like, “You have to give me budget, you have to give me time, or you have to give me people to get this idea done.”

I had a boss who was full of ideas. He was always coming to me with new project requests. A lot of them were off strategy. They were distractions. I used to say no to all of them because to me it was clear that they weren’t strategic. After a few months, I started getting some negative feedback from him. He said, “All you do is say no, Mike. Nothing is ever positive with you.”

At that point, I shifted to the behavior of saying, “Yes if.” Whenever he came to me with a new project, I said, “That’s a really great idea. I’m happy to do it if you give me this much budget or this much time or if you give me that team member from that team to come work on the project.” A lot of times he would say, “Well no, I’m not giving you that budget or time or people.” And I said, “Well, then I can’t pursue the idea.”

Essentially, I was making him say no to the idea because it was clear that the idea wasn’t big enough or on-strategy enough to prioritize it properly. By getting the requester to focus, I was being positive and contributing to the team but also maintaining focus.

Saying no keeps your team members focused on their core responsibilities. When you do say no, you might have to back them up and say no for them. The point is, that short little word is the key to keeping your team focused on its strategic priorities.

Want to learn more about strategic focus for managers? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning about strategic focus. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Running a Prioritization Process

July 20, 2022/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Building a prioritization process for your organization can help you eliminate distractions and focus your efforts on the most meaningful projects.

A consistent and regularly-scheduled prioritization process helps eliminate distractions and focus your efforts on the most meaningful projects. Some processes are formal while others are simply frequent conversations about priorities.

Choose a process that’s appropriate for the size of your organization. I’ve worked for two very different organizations. One was large and one was a small business unit. In the large one, we had a very formal prioritization process. All departments were involved and you had to have a very rigorous business case to get your idea on the list. In the small business unit, it was an informal process. We achieved prioritization by allocating budget to different budget owners. We then gave them discretion to choose their own priorities.

In the large organization, it was very rigorous, but sometimes we lacked agility. It kept us focused, but at the cost of innovating every once in a while. In the small organization, it enabled a lot of distractions to happen. People pursued some pet projects, but it was an environment where people could try things pretty easily.

When you’re running a prioritization process, it’s important to ensure resources are allocated only to high-priority projects. Pet projects and distractions should not be worked on if they haven’t been prioritized.

In my large organization, we got big projects done. They had a huge impact. In the small business unit I was in, we got a lot of small things done, but a lot of times they were disjointed, they lacked impact, and some of them weren’t even on strategy.

Build a prioritization process that is appropriate for the size and complexity of your organization, and make sure that process is in charge of of allocating resources accordingly.

Strategic Planning Pitfalls

July 13, 2022/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Avoid these six pitfalls as you create your organization’s strategic plan.

As you look at your organization’s strategy and your current strategic planning process, it’s critical to understand there are some really large pitfalls out there that you can fall into.

First, do you lack a clear direction? If your organization can’t clearly articulate, “Here’s where we’re going, here’s why we exist, and here’s what we look like three to five years from now,” you may lack direction.

Second, do you know how to say no? Or do you say yes to everything? Look at the latest set of initiatives you’ve pursued over the past year. How many of them have been failures? How many of them should you have walked away from? That’s an indicator that you’re not saying no.

The next pitfall is failure to prioritize. Go look at everything everybody’s working on right now in terms of major initiatives. Are they all properly resourced or are some of them lagging? If you have a bunch of projects that are stalled or are behind schedule, you probably haven’t resourced appropriately and your prioritization process may be broken.

Lacking diversification is another pitfall. When you look at your portfolio of initiatives, do you have excessive concentration either in a specific market or a specific product? Or are your bets spread out?

The next pitfall is starving the kids. Are all of your resources going to the one big core business that generates most of your profits, and all the great new ideas are never getting funded?

Finally, the last pitfall is not revisiting your strategy on a regular basis. You should be refreshing your strategic plan at least once a year. That doesn’t mean doing all of these exercises again, but it does mean sitting down, validating the market, and looking at your spot. Look at your core competencies, your vision, your mission, and ask, “Are these still valid and relevant?”

Let me make this real because these risks are huge. I know a consumer package goods company that failed on several of these dimensions. First, they lacked a clear direction. Everything looked interesting, and they were more than willing to pursue something as long as the financial returns looked attractive. Second, they weren’t very good at saying no. When something came along with a high enough rate of return, they would tend to pursue it. And third, they didn’t look at diversification risk. They were so concentrated on a specific set of new initiatives and new markets they wanted to get into that they took on excessive risk.

The way these failures manifested was that they made an acquisition for approximately $100 million in an entirely new market that they didn’t know a lot about. They made the acquisition based on the fact that the financial return seemed like they would be very attractive. Fast forward three years from that decision and every year they lost between $2 and $5 million. After three years, they realized they couldn’t run the business well. They didn’t understand the market. They wrote off the entire business and shut it down.

So these pitfalls are real. Do the diagnostics and ask yourself these questions as you look at your overarching strategy to make sure you’ve got a strategy that’s viable and will help you achieve your overall goals.

Want to learn more about strategic planning? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how plan strategically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Our Courses

Hanging light bulbs with glowing one isolated on dark blue background

Executive Communications

Structured Problem Solving

Creating Leadership Maxims

Leading inside the Box

Deliberate Decision Making

Simple Strategic Planning

Storytelling for Leaders

Storytelling for Sales

Executive Presence

Principles of Chart Design

Time Management Mastery

Breakthrough Innovation

Leadership Resilience

Conflict Resolution

Leading through Change

Project Management Reality

Coaching for Impact

High Performing Teams

Everything is Negotiable

Leading with Influence

Building Personal Resilience

thoughtLEADERSHIP

Engagement Management

eLearning Courses on TITAN

Structured Thought: Problem Solving

Structured Thought: Problem Solving

Clearly define a problem, scope all issues related to the problem, generate potential solutions, then analyze and select the best solution by using time-tested critical thinking methods and tools.

Our Course Offerings

Leadership Skills

Communication Skills

Individual Skills