In 23 years serving as a management advisor to companies of every size, all over the world, I have yet to encounter an organization that does not struggle with some form of “communication” challenges. Although this can impact companies from several different angles, there is one communication breakdown that has the most significant impact on the overall success of the business.
The lack of a sharply focused, easily understood and extremely well-communicated vision and strategy for growth.
In most businesses, the executive team and senior managers are constantly talking about the vision and strategy, it’s part of their meetings, it’s what they lay awake at night thinking about, but typically if you go just one or two layers down in the organization nobody has a clue about the actual meaning of the vision and how they are supposed to implement the strategy. Remember this: without a clearly communicated vision there is no way to achieve alignment across the organization, act strategically, empower fast decision-making or create a high level of accountability.
When people do not know where they’re going, it is impossible for them to get there successfully!
The key point here is, to effectively communicate the organization’s vision and strategy you must talk about them all the time, using multiple communications channels, at all levels of the organization, delivering a consistent and focused message. I once had the CEO of a company ask me, “When do you know that you have communicated the vision enough?” I replied, “When you get to point that if you have to explain it one more time… you’ll vomit… that’s when the lowest person in your organization just heard the vision for the very first time.”
The answer is simple: communicate, communicate, communicate… and then communicate some more.
I am currently preparing to facilitate three strategic planning meetings, for an association, a technology company and a Fortune 100 client. Here are a few things that I see as foundational for creating an effective strategic plan.
This evening I’m giving a speech to 350 CEOs of small to medium-size businesses and I’ve been asked to talk about some of the fundamental elements necessary to build and sustain a highly successful organization. After running several companies and spending the last 22 years of my life helping businesses around the world be more successful, here are a few things I think every business owner needs to focus on:
I have just returned from two weeks of working with clients in New Zealand and while I was there I was asked to give lectures at the University of Auckland and the University of Canterbury. The topic they asked me to address was, “Leading in a Time of Disruptive Change.” This is a topic I know pretty well, but I decided it would be nice to get some additional opinions to add more depth and credibility to my comments, so I sent a note asking for input to some of my friends including Marshall Goldsmith, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Tim Sanders, Jim Kouzes, Tom Morris, Joe Calloway and several other top thought leaders, asking what they would share around this topic.
I recently presented several workshops for client company with an absolutely brilliant CEO, among the best I’ve ever met. He was a new to the organization and had been brought in to turn around the company, which was facing very severe financial troubles. This was very bureaucratic organization whose main customer was the government. They were slow to make decisions, reluctant to take any risks, complacent in their attempt to grow their business and keep margins strong, which landed them to more than billion dollars in debt. The CEO gave an impassioned speech about the need to be more entrepreneurial, while still having a culture of disciplined execution around the core strategies. He described it, much like Tom Peters did in his wonderful book In Search of Excellence, saying that the company needed to have “loose-tight controls.” They need to have elements of loose control around entrepreneurship, innovation and prudent risk-taking, while maintaining areas tight of control around their values, strategy, alignment and accountability for positive business results. He told them that in order to be successful they would have to balance a strong entrepreneurial ethic while still embracing a focused culture of discipline – and summarized his idea in the graph below.
I am doing a strategic planning retreat for a multi-billion dollar company tomorrow and another similar retreat next week. In 2015 I facilitated perhaps a dozen such meetings and here are four key things that I have seen companies struggle with time and time again as they looked at their current performance and began planning for their future success.
