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EXECUTING THE STRATEGIC PLAN

A strategic plan begins, of course, with the customer. In a very real sense, there are only two roles in organizations: customers and suppliers. Everybody functions simultaneously in both roles, whether inside or outside the organization. Everybody means all the stakeholders in the supply chain who make your organization’s end product possible—those who supply the funds, those who supply the ideas and labor, those who supply the material, those families who support the employees, and the community and environment that permit and nurture the entire supply chain.

The essence of good business, therefore, is the quality of the relationship between customer and supplier. You, the supplier, sell more than goods and services to your many different customers. You’re really selling solutions to their problems (jobs they hire in the form of your goods and services). To be able to really solve those problems in a way that is more than just a cosmetic pat on the head requires you to deeply understand these different stakeholder needs. You have to pay the price to know what matters most to these people so that you can plan strategically in a meaningful way. Values become priorities in this planning process because principle-based values don’t change. Customers will change and so strategy must adapt, but if your values are tied to changeless principles, you will have a center pin to which you can anchor yourself through all the inevitable changes.

The litmus test of a good mission statement and strategic plan is being able to approach any person at any level of an organization and have them be able to describe how what they do contributes to the strategic plan and is in harmony with the governing values. To use the compass metaphor, they all know which way north is and how their part is moving the organization in the right direction.

Once a mission statement and strategic plan are deeply shared, either through identification or involvement, half the battle is won, because the mental, emotional and spiritual creation has taken place. The physical creation then follows. It’s all about executing the strategy—“making it happen,” doing, producing, aligning, empowering. This means you need to set up the structure, get the right people in the right jobs with the right tools and support, and then get out of their way and give help as requested.

Each sub-organization, committee, board, division, department, project and team would have to go through a similar two-creation process: the mental, then the physical; the blueprint, then the construction; the writing of the music, then the playing of the music. All things are created twice. Pathfinding is the first creation. It lays down the strategic plan for making things physical/actual/real.

You’ll also find that if this process is done well and if there is deep emotional connection to it because of the identification and involvement that has preceded it, you’ll be able to drive tremendous cost cutting throughout an organization when needed. Just as an individual gets swallowed up in doing things that are urgent but not important, so does an organization. The culture develops a life of its own. That’s why it’s necessary to constantly use the overall purpose, values and strategic plan to focus and drive every other decision you make. It will also give you the awareness and courage to get and stay out of “hobbies” in your business that are not central to its core purpose.

One of the greatest challenges that business leaders encounter is that of working to cascade and TRANSLATE the corporate vision from 30,000 feet into actionable line-of-sight behaviors among front-line workers to achieve critical objectives. Even if they have been involved in the development of the mission statement and strategic planning process, bringing it down to where the “rubber meets the road” is not easy. Think of how much more productive we could be if we had the right people working on the right things at the right time—the vital few projects and goals that ultimately matter most.

But that’s usually the problem. Too often our strategic plans are lofty and vague, and leaders fail to translate strategy into the few crucial goals that must be accomplished in the near term. Or, just as problematic, strategies are translated into eight, eleven, or even fifteen new crucial goals, which is far too many priorities to realistically focus on. When you have too many top priorities, you effectively have no top priorities. Regarding strategic goals, it is important that they are few, prioritized, measurable and inside a compelling scoreboard, so everyone knows exactly what they are and how they are being achieved. Further insight on focusing your team and organization on the few “wildly important goals” and on the importance of a compelling scoreboard will be given in later chapters.

TO CREATE an environment of focus and teamwork top to bottom, employees must know what the highest priorities are, buy into them, translate them into specific actions, have the discipline to stay the course, and trust one another and collaborate effectively. Unfortunately, most people don’t know where to focus their time and energy because top priorities aren’t clearly identified or communicated and measured on a compelling scoreboard. If they are and workers don’t feel any ownership, disagree with the strategy, are given competing priorities, or are unable to see the link between their tasks and the corporate vision, their ability to execute that vision is jeopardized. Teamwork is then threatened by low trust, backbiting, faulty systems and process, or too many barriers to action.

Organizations that are able to create a shared sense of mission so that each person knows and is passionate about the big WHY and WHO, as well as a clear line of sight strategy (the HOW and WHEN), where departments, teams, and individuals are consistently focused on their goals and people are accountable to the organization’s few highest priorities, find their voice and build a powerful, principle-centered culture. Therein lies the mother lode of the pathfinding role.

QUESTION & ANSWER

Q: I have four generations of workers. How do you unite people in shared vision and values when they are so different?

A: A principle-centered model is the only one that does apply. Whether you’re dealing with old-timers, baby-boomers, Generation X or Generation Y—all of whom come from different value systems and see life through different lenses—there is one thing that unites them all: timeless, universal principles that can be the basis for developing a common vision and value system.

I know I’m making this sound a lot easier than it really is. Nevertheless, by showing respect for each generation of workers and involving them in synergistic communication, I’m convinced a Third Alternative can be achieved. Remember again the principle—involve people in the problem and work out solutions together. When you do, people become emotionally connected to the solution. When they really understand the depth of the problem and transcend looking at it only through their own generational lens, all of them become part of a social ecology.

Q: You are constantly trying to distinguish between principles and values. This is confusing to me; they seem the same.

A: The basic reason you think this way is that most well-developed values are indeed principles or natural laws. In fact, if you involve enough people in developing a value statement, and they are informed, work in an atmosphere of high trust, and communicate openly and synergistically with each other, you will find that the shared values that emerge are essentially principle-based. You will also find that any group that develops a value system in this way will be the same, even though the words may be different. The cultural practices may vary depending on where you are in the world, but my experience around the world is that regardless of the kind of organization or level within the organization, when statements of values are produced in this way, they will basically deal with the four parts of our nature—body, mind, heart and spirit—and the four basic needs: to live, to love, to learn and to leave a legacy. This pertains to both individuals and organizations. But if values are unilaterally developed and announced, they may not be principle-based. After all, even criminals have values.

Q: Is it necessary to write mission statements or do strategic planning sessions off-site?

A: It all depends. If the product of an off-site experience is mainstreamed for input throughout an entire organization, it can be very successful. But if it produces a mission statement and strategic plan that are simply announced, it will not work. The key is that there must be emotional connection; otherwise, the criteria developed will not be used to align structures, systems, processes and cultures. Mission statements that are rushed and announced are forgotten; they’re nothing but PR statements. This is often the case with off-site products.

Remember, the process is as important and powerful as the product itself if you want to get emotional connection. Again, this will take a combination of involvement and identification in other words, the trust in other people’s vision is higher than their own, therefore they identify with it.

There still needs to be a process of communication, feedback, openness and participation in order to get this emotional connection. Many times I have seen technology used marvelously to produce one iteration after another. A committee of two or three people did the initial word-smithing of a straw man. Then gradually, through feedback—both sharing and listening it became increasingly better and more deeply reflected the many different interests until there was true cultural connection.