Download pdf - On Leadership and Teamwork

empowering communication globally

JOHN SUTHERLAND ON LEADERSHIP AND TEAMWORK

18 Meeting Expectations14 Closing the Leadership Gap

39 Brilliant Senior Team Work 43 Structure Follows Strategy – But May not Look Like You ImaginedSenior Team Development for the Unwilling

34

The 4 P’s: Saving 25%of Meeting Time

28

5 Leaders Who Hunt As a Pack2 Leaders Who Hit The Numbers Developing Leaders with Practical Mastery

9

Creating Collaborative Advantage

22

Leaders Who Hit The Numbers

Leadership is seen in the heat of the moment in the world of work, not in theory during an off-site course. Leadership development, therefore, must occur during business as usual, not in some sim-ulation. In this article, John Sutherland discusses three main problems in leadership development programs and key solutions on how to solve them.

What does your business need from its lead-ership? If you are like most businesses it will be some, or all, of the following:

Leaders who: • Hit the numbers• Increase profitability• Galvanise those working with them• Deliver and develop your business plan• Grow value through business development• Create traction and delivery rather than drama

and slippage• Actually lead and take the business forward under

their own steamSo you have read 'Good to Great' by Jim Collins

and studied the '7 Habits' espoused by Steven Covey. You may even have sent yourself or some of your leaders off to business school, but so far no prog-ress. Your business has not substantially transformed. Nothing has moved the dial on net profit.

Well how hard can this be? Surely there are experts on leadership who can advise you on what you need to do to transform your business. And thereby hangs a tale.

Leadership development is in urgent need of a shake up. The tried and tested approach of attend-ing a business school to learn leadership is designed to fail, and no one in the schools is going to be the turkey that votes for Christmas by exposing this truth. Books on leadership cannot, by their nature, give you leaders who hit the numbers in your busi-ness. Fact. Innovation is required in leadership devel-opment and in this article I will set out the three main current problems and the three key solutions I see.

PROBLEM ONE: There is no one set of universal leadership skillsEver wondered why there are so many leadership models? Servant Leadership, Situational Leadership, Transformational Leadership, Relational Leadership, Authentic Leadership, Level 5 Leadership (add your own favourite here). In addition to the famous ones there are dozens of other models put forward by man-agement consultants and business schools. All apply in specific situations and many are well researched (within the current research paradigm) but all fail the same test: they do not understand your business context. In fact, if you parachuted any of the authors of these models in to run your business the most likely result is that they would fail miserably. You are the expert on the leadership needed in your business. You may want some help developing the leadership you know is re-quired to deliver your business plan but you do not need someone to tell you how to run your business.

BY JOHN SUTHERLAND

Any book or leadership course that thinks that it has the answer to 'how you should lead' runs the risk of turning its audience into followers, not leaders. You can't create leaders by telling them what to do. Think about it.

Leadership

2 The European Business Review March - April 2012

www.europeanbusinessreview.com 3

The reason why there are so many models of leadership is that the leadership required for success is strongly dependent on the context and purpose of the organisation you are leading. Leading a business focussed on manufacturing and production is, of course, very different from one focussed on gaining a return on investment as a venture capital company. Even within one sector there are dif-ferences. Leading an early stage technology start-up enterprise is very different from leading the same organisation as it goes through ramp up. Ask any investor.

PROBLEM TWO: A leader without followers is like a rudder without a boatThe well-known business schools and books fall foul of a second fallacy, that you can work on leaders in isolation from those they seek to lead. Firstly, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher learnt to her cost, as soon as you step too far beyond the purpose that your followers (her cabinet) are prepared to accept (in her European policy of the day) your leadership days are numbered. There is a connecting thread that needs to stay intact and you cannot take people where they have no wish to go. Interestingly, if you can keep the connecting thread intact you can persuade them to do all sorts of things they had no intention of doing but yank the thread too hard and it breaks - permanently. Keeping the thread vibrant and intact seems to me to be part of how you galvanise your followers, but that is another article.

Secondly, if you try using the leadership skills you developed, for example, running a large engineering operation as a managing partner in a firm of advisors you will quickly learn that the skills do

not translate. In practice, you cannot develop leaders in isolation from those they seek to lead. Sending them off for a couple of months to a business school disconnects them from the very context they have to perform in. Leadership is seen in the heat of the moment in the world of work, not in theory during an off-site course. Leadership develop-ment, therefore, must occur during business as usual in the real world of work, not in some simulation. In fact, in my understanding, lead-ership is a behaviour that is only exhibited in a context. It is a behav-iour that emerges between people and, in practice, the actual leader in a group may revolve rapidly as the task goes through its project life cycle phases from inception through design, delivery and review.

Donna Ladkin's map of leadership is helpful here (figure below) showing how leadership is nested both in purpose and context of an organisation and in the nature of those you are hoping will follow your lead. (Source: Rethinking Leadership, by Donna Ladkin, Edward Elgar Publishing 2010)

Feature

LEADER

FOLLOWER

PURPOSECONTEXTTHE

LEADERSHIP MATRIX

PROBLEM THREE: Telling people how to lead makes followers not leadersAny book or leadership school course that thinks it has worked out the answer to 'how you should lead' runs the risk of turning its audience into follow-ers, not leaders. You can't create leaders by telling them what to do. Think about it. Instead you have to treat them as leaders from the outset and ask them to identify the areas where leadership needs developing. This may seem obvious with hindsight but the vast majority of leadership courses and books are based on the idea that the course organ-isers or book author know what you should do. The best such approaches can ever hope for is to make carbon copies of past leaders, and frankly copying someone else's approach is not my idea of leader-ship. Leaders have to lead their own leadership de-velopment. Obvious really.

Most training programmes attempt to dictate not only the frame of reference but also the content of the learning for their participants. They are hierarchi-cal. And most participants expect there to be a struc-tured programme and a model so that they know what they are going to get and can feel uncomfort-able if there is a lack of clarity. Whilst this can work for skills training at the management level it cannot work as a method for developing leaders. There needs to be at least a level of collaboration between partic-ipants and course providers or, better still, the direc-tion setting needs to be done by the participants.

Business schools and business books have their place, of course. They are great for developing indi-viduals and enhancing their CVs. But they can never get to grips with what your specific organisation needs. If you want to develop your business, rather than a few future leaders, you need to focus your de-velopment activity in-house and run a bespoke pro-gramme where you set the focus.

So how do you develop leadership that hits the numbers?

Here are our top three solutions.

SOLUTION ONE: Develop a coherent sense of directionThe first thing you need is a strongly coherent sense of direction. In my 22 years of working with senior management teams, both assessing them (in manage-ment due diligence processes for the venture capital community) and developing them, I have learnt that, after the quality of the CEO/President, the single

most important factor is to have coherent direction. This means that no matter who you ask and how you ask it, you get the same answer back about what it is you are hell bent on achieving as an organisation. This is the laser like focus of energy within your or-ganisation that means you can punch through all the obstacles the market and your competitors will throw at you. And they will.

SOLUTION TWO: Clarify the leadership skills you need to achieve your business plan Once you have a coherent sense of direction you are ready to ask the obvious question. What leadership skills do we need to achieve our vision and strategy? Where should we focus our attention and resources? As a leader this means you are calling the shots on where you need to focus, not asking someone who does not understand your business and could not run it to tell you where your leaders should focus.

SOLUTION THREE: Run your leadership programme during business as usualThirdly, as far as you can, run your leadership devel-opment work to support and facilitate the work that needs to happen in order to deliver your business plan. Using leadership development time to strength-en people working on strategic projects works really well. These are the heat of the moment issues, and serve to ensure that your leaders are developing their skills with the people they need to lead, not in isola-tion. Use leadership development to serve your busi-ness, rather than being the customer of the leadership programme's clever ideas about whichever model of leadership they espouse.

The Leadership Development industry needs, in our view, to learn how to serve its customer, the real leaders. That is the key innovation required in the sector.

About the AuthorJohn Sutherland is the managing director of Strategic Resource and the Leadership Initiative. Strategic Resource is a leading provider of management due diligence. The Leadership Initiative

provides an international innovative approach to developing leadership within organisations during business as usual.

Email: john.sutherland@leadership-initiative.co.ukwww.leadership-initiative.co.uk Tel: +44 207 887 1372

If you want to develop your business, rather than a few future leaders, you need to focus your development activity in-house and run a bespoke programme where you set the focus.


Leadership


Leadership

LEADERS WHO HUNT AS A PACK

Feature

BY JOHN SUTHERLAND

Most leadership development does not produce a pack. It produces individual leaders. Below, John Sutherland discusses the importance of leaders working well with other strong leaders, and argues that the pack that hunts together stays together.

Wolves hunt as a pack and are brilliant team players. Once they pick up the scent they are strategic, purposeful and persistent.

Quite frightening if you are the quarry but good news if you are interested in the wolf pack's success.

What about your leaders? Do you have individ-uals who vie with each other to be top dog or do you have powerful leaders who also pull together as a pack? And what do you need to achieve your business plan? If you are like most businesses you need leaders who pull together to become an unstoppable force focussed on hunting down your compelling vision. You want all the energy channelled towards your ob-jective, not dissipated in internal fighting.

But most leadership development does not

produce a pack. It produces pack leaders. Great for the individual ego, but counter-productive if you need leaders who hunt as a pack.

The Cult of the Individual LeaderThe primary focus of most leadership programmes is developing individual leaders, not creating the pack. That may be no surprise because the very word “lead-ership” conjures up the image of an individual, like Steve Jobs or Richard Branson. The debate then starts on the particular qualities, behaviours and habits that define these charismatic individuals. No wonder, then, that a focus on the individual is what most people are expecting when they go off to a business school

Every leadership programme we have run has the same defining moment. It is the point at which the leaders realise the potential they collectively have to really shift the dial on performance across their organisation.

or enrol on a leadership programme. They want to become a compelling leader who stands out from the crowd, to grow leadership presence and get promoted above the rest. To be top dog.

It seems logical to want the best leaders working for your company. The current fad for “Top Grading” is a prime example. The idea being that you only recruit the top 10% of people in any profession or disci-pline, on the assumption that if you have the very best people working for you your venture will do well. And of course having excellent people is a useful starting place, but if they end up fighting each other rather than fighting the competition together you will have a problem. They not only have to have phenomenal in-dividual leadership skills, they also need to know how to work well with other strong leaders. It is a bit like the Olympics. Having a number of potential gold medal winners at their individual discipline is fantastic. If, in addition, they know how to be part of their country's team and support each other as they build the momen-tum required to march up the medal table together, then it can be amazing.

However, many of us are not wired or trained to work well together. We want to be in charge. Picture the scene. Two strong and independently minded leaders stand facing each other pulling a tug-of-war rope between them. Each is trying to haul the other over to their side to win. If either succeeds they will feel validated and triumphant but the business will have lost out and the loser will plot their revenge.

Meet Jonathan and Ted, both senior players in a retail business. Jonathan's experience tells him that you need to make decisions quickly and crack on with a sense of urgency, otherwise you never hit the numbers in the plan. Ted's experience is that if you rush a decision you fail to tackle the issues in suffi-cient depth to find the robust answer that will stand the test of time. Jonathan is structured and has a value around people following clear instructions, and he has a personal need to feel in charge. Ted is flexible and has a value around involving people so that they are on board with the chosen way forward, and he

has a need to feel heard. They are both strong char-acters and neither is willing to back down, so their ar-guments become heated and often end in stalemate. There are a large number of Jonathans and Teds in every business. Strong “medal contenders” in their own discipline but working across each other rather than synergistically.

So how do you develop a pack that knows how to, and wants to, work together? Here are the four success factors we have found in our leadership de-velopment work over the last 25 years.

1Scenting the Quarry Your leaders need a common goal to unite behind and get their teeth into. Just running

a leadership programme is not enough, it needs to be directly focussed on achieving your business plan. A focus on revenue growth, for example, will draw out different leadership needs than one aimed at turnaround. If you need to develop cohesion across a global business or develop margin in the EMEA region these, again, will influence the specific leader-ship skills you require. But whatever your business is focussed on achieving, the same rule applies: make this the primary focus for your leadership develop-ment work and expect the programme to make a sig-nificant contribution to the delivery of your high level objectives.

Every leadership programme we have run has the same defining moment. It is the point at which the leaders on the programme realise the potential they collectively have to really shift the dial on per-formance across their organisation. This is when it stops being a mere leadership programme and starts becoming a group of significant leaders, realising just how much impact they can have working together on real business issues. There is always a surge of energy at this transition point as the leaders on the pro-gramme realise that “this is for real” rather than “just for development”, and it is my favourite moment. They quickly become an unstoppable force focussed on delivering your extraordinary achievement.

Your leaders need a common goal to unite behind and get their teeth into. Just running a leadership programme is not enough, it needs to be directly focussed on achieving your business plan. A focus on revenue growth, for example, will draw out different leadership needs than one aimed at turnaround.


Leadership


2Learning on the Run Having set the target as the achievement of your business plan, the leadership develop-

ment work can then be focussed on the real and live business issues of the day.

But the key advantage is that it means the work is live and relevant, not based on some abstract scenar-io which has been beaten to death by a thousand dele-gates before you. Scenario based learning is the major teaching methodology of most business schools and leadership programmes, because they are not able to focus on the precise needs of your unique organ-isation. Live work on current objectives within your business brings compelling advantages.

As I write we are working with a client who has just made a major acquisition, and the leadership team is drawn half from the parent company and half from the company they have acquired. A perfect place to develop post-acquisition competence and high per-formance senior team work in real time. One half of the team had been on a leadership programme before but found that doing the development work “for real” around live business issues made all the difference. It was so much more relevant and they could see the immediate benefits of their learning. They were excited, and it was infectious.

Learning on the run immediately removes the age

old problem of how to transfer learning from off-site workshops back into the real world of work. When the benefits are obvious uptake is immediate and morale gets a boost. Leaders begin to sense the potency of the pack and that is when a critically im-portant switch in the development focus takes place. At the outset somebody, perhaps the CEO or the HR Director, decided there was a compelling business case for running a leadership programme and invited people to attend. But when the people they have invited on the programme start to see the impact they can have, and the benefit they are deriving, they begin to find their own sense of direction and momen-tum for their ongoing development as a pack. They become leaders of their own leadership development work, identifying where the development work can focus next to bring the most benefit.

3Teaching Others to HuntLeaders who have been through a highly pro-ductive and relevant development programme,

progressing real business issues, always have the same reaction. They want to pass their learning on to their direct reports so that they can have a positive influ-ence on the wider organisation and accelerate progress. There are three fantastic benefits of this impulse. The first is that one of the best ways to really understand

Learning on the run immediately removes the age old problem of how to transfer learning from off-site workshops back into the real world of work.

Feature

what you have learnt is to teach it to others. It means you have to understand it at the level of practical mastery, so that you can explain it from direct expe-rience, rather than just spout theory. The second is that they pass their knowledge on in a way that is di-rectly tailored to the needs of their unique organisa-tion. Yes, this leadership model builds real collabora-tion but the way we ground that in our organisation is, of course, unique. The third is that, through so many leaders getting involved in working with the next layer of the organisation, it becomes apparent which are the four or five most potent leadership models that capture the distilled essence of what really works for moving the dial on performance here. No two organ-isations are ever the same, of course, and I can never predict which, of the 70 or so models we regularly use, will prove to be the key ones for each client organisa-tion. Quite often the final selection includes a model that has been co-created between the leaders and the facilitators. Putting all this together means that they au-tomatically produce a unique company leadership ap-proach, based on proven models, that helps provide continuity across the organisation and gives a cohesive framework for new joiners. You end up with your own book on how to do leadership here.

4 Forming as a PackWhen leaders work and learn together with peers in this way it is inevitable that strong

bonds of loyalty are formed. The pack that hunts to-gether stays together. They are there for each other and reach incredible levels of honesty, challenge and focus which translates into impact, productivity and, finally, Return on Investment. It takes a good deal of courage and self-awareness to get past the stage of vying to be top dog in order to realise the potency in-herent in complementing each other's skills and ex-perience. Paradoxically, you cannot have your pack of wolves working well together unless each individu-al has developed a high degree of emotional com-petence. If Emotional Intelligence is understanding my reactions and those of others then Emotional Competence is mastering the practical skill of knowing how to turn tension into traction and con-flict into cohesion. Entirely more useful and critically important in pack behaviour.

Because they go through a lot together the pack forms more tightly and they feel able to tackle organ-isational issues that have been resistant to change, or seemed to present insurmountable problems. Once leaders are confident in the pack their optimism rises, not based on some fluffy good intention but rooted in the repeated experience that the pack is much stronger than the sum of the parts.

Your leaders forming as a pack is bad news for your competitors. Focussed and persistent with fabulous team work. Self-directing and quick to learn. Scary. I would not fancy their chances against you.

About the AuthorJohn Sutherland is the Director of the Leadership Initiative, which provides leadership development focussed on delivering the business plan. He also runs Strategic Resource, which pro-

vides management due diligence and portfolio value enhancement work for the investment [email protected] +44 15394 66000

The pack that hunts together stays together. They reach incredible levels of honesty, challenge and focus which translates into impact, productivity and, finally, Return on Investment.


Leadership


Leadership

You may know about leadership but can you lead? One you learn from a book or a course, the other through repeated trial and error in the real world of work. The difference is critical when you need to ensure you get a healthy return on investment from leadership development. John Sutherland introduces the Nexus process spe-cifically designed to ensure the development of wise owls: leaders with practical mastery.

PHIL HAS A LIGHT BULB MOMENTPhil attended a leadership programme, and returned to his desk filled to the brim with clever ideas and models. He enthused about the course, which he found utterly fascinating, especially all the input on the so-called “soft skills” (which he affectionate-ly referred to as “psycho-babble”). But there was a problem: Yes, he had a light bulb moment, but it was only 25 watts. Six months later, no one had seen any change in his actual leadership behaviour. For sure, he was a walking encyclopaedia of conceptual slides, but the collaborative skills he went off to learn were marked by their absence. He still became defensive when others offered alternative views and his col-leagues continued to manage around him for the next two years. What had gone wrong?

Phil had learnt about leadership, but had not learnt how to lead, and there is a crucial difference. You learn about leadership when you read a management book or attend a course. But learning how to lead means deliberately developing practical mastery, through re-peated trial and error, until you find a process that works for you, and gets the intended results in the

real world of work. Leadership models help point the way, by offering insight, but the path to mastery re-quires sustained effort and, usually, some discomfort during the learning process. You have to be willing to make mistakes in order to learn.

It turns out that there are a lot of leadership courses like the one Phil attended where the net result is a zero return on investment, and this is becoming a real issue for business. We need to ensure that the in-vestment made in the “value on legs” (that's “people” to you and me) gives a healthy return. This is especial-ly pertinent in war-for-talent sectors where the talent may use its legs to walk out to join the competition, if it does not think it is being developed in role.

So how do you develop genuine leadership at a practical level of mastery? The first step is to be clear about how adults learn, and learn to the point where there is a clear change in behaviour.

Feature

Developing Leaders with Practical Mastery

BY JOHN SUTHERLAND

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates

Leadership workshops focus on the reviewing and experimenting phases of the learning steps. Vital for beginning the process towards mastery – unconscious competence in this model, but not sufficient in and of itself – to establish new neural pathways. That needs more time and can require weeks or months. By design, therefore, the vast majority of leadership programmes are set to fail. Sure, they may provide a follow-up some months after the initial workshop, where they hope participants will return with stories of how they triumphed, putting their skills into prac-tice. All too often, the sorry tale is that their best in-tentions got lost in the myriad of operational priorities that hit them like a tsunami on their return from the course. Even those who make early progress with a new skill often report losing momentum because their progress was not reviewed and supported on a regular basis. The follow-up becomes just another date in the diary for an event that fades in the memory during the months that follow. Something much more robust is required to support the repeated practice of new lead-ership skills until they are mastered at a practical level, and used to great effect day to day.

With this in mind we have developed the Nexus© process, after many years of experimenting with dif-ferent forms of on-site practical learning. It is based on five principles, all designed to provide a robust and reliable process for supporting learning during “business as usual”.

1. Just the right amount of structure Over the years we have tried everything, from expect-ing leaders to evolve their own structure, to direct-ing each step of the way and setting “homework”. Unsurprisingly, neither extreme works. With too little structure, a lot of time is wasted discussing how the emerging leaders are going to work together. Too much, and it removes the ability of leaders to exercise choice in their learning focus, and it becomes more like a taught course rather than a true leadership pro-gramme. Just the right amount, like the bowl of por-ridge that Goldilocks devoured, is perfect.

What is “just right” tends to vary from business to business; but, as a place to start, we recommend delegates work in groups of between three and six and choose one main priority area to focus on each month. It is their job as leaders to ensure that the objective they choose is relevant to the business, and is something each group member can direct-ly address. They actively try out different ways of

LEARNING STEPS AND THE NEXUS PROCESSNoel Burch developed a model of learning steps, which is sometimes wrongly attributed to Maslow. Although developed in the 1970s, it is still relevant today and, if anything, is even more compelling now that we are our able to see the way the brain creates new high-speed neural pathways as it learns. For highly practiced skills, such as in professional sports and music, the brain actually shows physical changes due to the creation of new learning connections, al-lowing these messages to travel easily and quickly. To become masters at leadership we also need to have enough practice to get to the point where our new way of leading has become a well-learnt routine. Having had a lifetime of being defensive, Phil had not given sufficient time to the practice of really listening to his colleagues with an open mind. His old defensive routine remained the easiest and quickest route.

FIGURE 1. UNCONSCIOUS-INCOMPETENCE/LEARNING STEPS

UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCEI am not aware that I can’t do this

PRACTICE

EXPERIMENT

REVIEW

UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENCEI can do this without having to think about it

CONSCIOUS COMPETENCEI can now do this by deliberate effort

CONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCEI now know that I can’t do this

To become masters at leadership we also need to have enough practice to get to the point where our new way of leading has become a well-learnt routine.

Leadership

10 The European Business Review July - August 2014


CLARIFY ANDAPPLY LEARNING

DEFINE LEARNINGOBJECTIVE

AGREE RESEARCHPROCESS

ANALYSEDATA

CARRY OUTON-SITE RESEARCH

REFINE

SUMMARY OFLEARNING

NEW RESEARCHTOPIC

FIGURE 2. NEXUS© DIAGRAM

©

APPLIEDLEARNING

NEXUS

making progress with the objective over the month, using ideas they heard about during the course, but also learning from each other. They meet after a fortnight to compare notes, swap ideas and in-sights, and refocus their efforts for the next two weeks. At the monthly meeting we provide a facil-itator who helps them gather their individual and collective learning, and choose the theme or objec-tive for the following month.

2. A mall group who learn togetherDeveloping practical mastery requires stamina and resilience. Ask any sportsman or musician about the many hours of work they put in before they were “sud-denly discovered overnight”. It is all too easy to set off with good intentions (like that diet) and find that a few weeks in you have lost your resolve. This is especial-ly true when the focus is developing emotional com-petence, where you need strong leverage over yourself to manage the discomfort involved in challenging and changing old, baked in, habits that no longer serve you.

Being part of a small group of between three and six people has several benefits. Firstly, the com-mitment you make to each other firms up the col-lective resolve to see the learning through. Secondly, if you are all focussed on developing similar leader-ship skills, you benefit from each other's experience. Thirdly, even if, in the final analysis, how you lead as a unique individual is subtly different from how your peers lead, it is still very useful to learn from their suc-cesses and failures and they, of course, will benefit from your learning.

3. Focus the learning on your key strategic objectivesNow this may sound obvious but it is worth stating. Assuming you are not a generic business, you do not need a general leadership programme. You are unlike-ly to need seven habits or seven questions or any other “tried and tested” model. It is more likely that you want your leaders to be busy developing the precise individ-ual and team skills required to move the dial on your key metrics. You probably need to achieve your busi-ness plan and hit the numbers in the current year.

So if, for example, you have six high level strategic objectives, focus your Nexus group learning on one objective a month and measure their progress against your usual metrics. Your leaders can choose the order in which they work on them, based on their opportu-nities and needs. And, of course, there is nothing like

having a compelling need, such as a personal objec-tive or KPI, to focus the mind.

4. Include emotional competenceHans had recently finished a two-day course on coaching but had not improved his coaching skills. No amount of theory made any difference to the dis-comfort he felt in confronting poor performance. For Hans, like many of us, the key to unlocking his leadership potential lay hidden beneath an old emo-tional scar that limited his choices.

So, alongside the strategic objective our Nexus groups select each month, we also strongly encour-age each person to continue their journey with emo-tional competence. It is crucial work and not easy to do, which is why so many leadership programmes ignore this element if they can. It means moving past the review phase to the experimental stage of the learning steps model, where we deliberately try a new action, until we find an effective way of turning tension into traction.

You have to have leverage over yourself in order to make progress with emotional competence, and that is much easier to do when you are working

Feature

We also strongly encourage each person to continue their journey with emotional competence. It is crucial work and not easy to do, which is why so many leadership programmes ignore this element if they can.

with others who are on the same journey. Think more “marathon” than “sprint”, and you will get the picture. I plan to write more on this fascinating area in a subsequent article.

5. A process that becomes self-sustainingIf you have satisfied all the four points so far, you will now have a group who have become self-reli-ant and know how to continue their learning without any further facilitation. This is excellent news for you, because it means you have a delivery mechanism to build future value for no further cost.

Our experience has been that most Nexus groups become self-sustaining after five monthly supervision sessions. It has by then become an effective, simple and efficient learning group of peers who know how to challenge and support each other, and keep themselves focussed on the strategic objectives of their organisa-tion. If, like me, you believe that learning is for life, then being part of a peer group that sees the value in carrying on their journey together is highly rewarding.

CONCLUSIONSFor Phil it all ended well, eventually. Two years later, the team he had been working with went on a lead-ership team programme and the team became his Nexus group. They learned together, and used each meeting to refine their skills and to remind each other of their personal and collective learning objectives. He finally got to unlock the emotional competence issue that had acted as the handbrake on his progress to date - his need to feel in control. This time his light bulb moment kept glowing.

About the AuthorJohn Sutherland is the Director of the Leadership Initiative, which provides lead-ership development focussed on deliver-ing the business plan and producing a solid return on investment. He also runs

Strategic Resource, which provides a suite of services for the investment community. [email protected] +44 15394 66000

Being part of a peer group that sees the value in carrying on their journey together is highly rewarding.

Leadership


Creating individual leaders is not enough. To achieve your ambitious plans you need leaders who know how to hunt as a pack. Your job is to make sure they have a coherent purpose in focus. Our job is to give you leaders who work together as an unstoppable force until they achieve your objectives.

Wolves are…Focussed Strategic Purpose driven Courageous Successful

And they hunt as a pack.

T. +44 (0) 15394 66000 | [email protected] | www.leadership-initiative.co.uk

0917 Li EBR Advert PRINT.indd 1 11/12/2013 11:29

Traditional leadership development programmes operate with a one-size-fits-all mentality. Below, John Sutherland argues that the key to developing the right kind of leadership skills for your organisation lies in creating, and continually refining, your own programme, and outlines five crucial principles that need to be taken into account when doing so.

You have worked hard to create your vision and turn it into a detailed strategy. It is an exciting time and the potential for value cre-

ation is credible, based on your analysis of the total addressable market, your competitors and poten-tial acquisitions, and your strengths. So far so good. Now you cast your eyes over your organisation and ask the killer question: do we have the leadership skills we need to deliver our strategy? Do we even have the skills we need to complete the current plan, in order to earn the right to go onto the next phase of the plan? For most firms the answer is no, often to both questions.

If there is a yawning gap between the skills you need and the ones in evidence, what are your options? Here are 5 principles we have found to be effective, based on the newly emerging disruptive technology in leadership development.

1 Co-design your leadership programme around the specific skills you need to

close the gapThis may seem like common sense but, unfortunately, it is not currently a common feature of traditional leadership programmes. Most are 'by the book' and are based on an analysis of what the average business leader need. They are generic, standard and sold on the 'tried and tested' ticket. The logic offered is that if it worked for company x, who are truly impressive, surely it will work for you. But it won't. General leadership development is, usually, useless for meeting your specific needs. You need the precise leadership skills that will close the gap between your current performance and your future vision. So the first task is to get very clear about the actual skills gap you have and to co-design a programme that perfectly fits your circumstances and requirements. Most programmes are not designed this way, even though it seems like an obvious thing to do.

CLOSING THE LEADERSHIP GAP

The most reliable and robust way to ensure that you end up with leadership skills that work in practice in your organisation is to develop the skills required during business as usual.

BY JOHN SUTHERLAND

Leadership

14 The European Business Review September - October 2014


Peter's organisation had two obvious gaps. The first was the need for a real step-up in delivery and follow-through skills. No point adding new strategic projects to a long list of unfinished ones. The second was internal coaching. They were losing the talent they wanted to keep because those on a rapid career trajectory did not think they were being sufficiently developed. Peter's organisation did not need a complicated design to deliver the results he was after. All he needed was a couple of modules. Sometimes less is more, as it keeps it crisp and to the point.

Peter's own experience of leadership development was of the traditional variety: the good and the great imparted their wisdom, which was then discussed in small groups through a series of rather well-worn scenarios, in the hope this would impart understanding. Peter said that those who attended had all got something out of it and had particularly enjoyed the small group discussion work. But it had not met his specific needs and, of course, it was not designed to. To do that your programme needs to be designed from the ground up, specifically for your organisation.

2 Focus the development around the delivery of real work

The most reliable and robust way to ensure that you end up with leadership skills that work in practice in your organisation is to develop the skills required during business as usual, preferably on-site. Lashing a raft together to cross a lake may be fun but has the obvious problem that you then need to work out how to transfer any learning that occurred half way across the lake back into the real world of work. All too often whatever learning does result from such activities sinks like a stone. Far more useful is to develop the skills around the delivery of your current priorities. Not only do you get facilitation of your key projects, but you also have leaders focussed on the exact skills that are needed for success. An additional benefit is that it minimises the time spent just on development, because they are learning whilst performing the day job. If they are focussed on your strategic priorities it is likely that you will get yet another advantage, as this will require your leaders to learn how to work together to make progress. Strategic leadership usually requires effective collaboration to be effective.

In Hans Olav's organisation most of the strategic projects required effective matrix management, rather than mere collaboration, and this was

Co-design your programme on the assumption that it will keep on evolving as the picture of what is required sharpens from slightly blurry into high definition.

something they had struggled to achieve since making a major acquisition a few years before. Focusing the development work around their 5 strategic projects meant that not only did they evolve effective cross-functional teamwork, but it also provided much needed coherence across their Europe-wide business. Delivering the 5 projects became their laser-like focus and, over time, the leadership programme became synonymous with delivering the strategic plan. In practice this resulted in the programme being timed to fit in with the 'drum beat' and rhythm created by implementing the strategic plan, rather than being something people had to attempt to fit in around already over-packed diaries.

3 Plan for continuous improvementIf you follow the two steps detailed so far

you will be way ahead of the competition, but let's keep you there. Each time you run an element of your leadership programme you are going to learn something about how to refine what works well and about the precise skills needed to make your vision a reality. So co-design your programme on

Feature

the assumption that it will keep on evolving as the picture of what is required sharpens from slightly blurry into high definition. Traditional programmes, of course, do the opposite. They set out a standard workshop format and crank the handle, sheep-dip wise, so that everyone 'enjoys' the same experience. Whatever element is missing from those programmes remains absent and the gap stays stubbornly open. Even worse, whatever element shows promise of working really well is simply repeated, rather than refined, minimising advantage.

One of the key elements of the new disruptive technology in leadership development is the shift from telling leaders what they should learn to expecting them to identify for themselves the key areas of development required for the delivery of their individual and corporate objectives. The process raises the bar for leadership development. Who better, after all, to specify the precise skills needed and refine how to use them effectively than the very leaders you have charged with the responsibility of discharging your plan?

Back to Hans Olav's organisation. It was only when the leaders really got down to the details of how to use the matrix to deliver their strategic projects that it became clear there was a major disconnect between sales and operations. When quality issues arose, leading to a delay in manufacturing, there was an insufficient grasp of the impact this would have on the sales team's ability to hit the month end sales figures, leading to a permanent state of frenzied activity. The missing skill was identifying and acting on strategic implications across the matrix, and, as it turned out, not just between sales and operations.

4 Stay with it until the required skills become mastered

We’ve all been there. You send people on an expensive development programme and the initial feedback is

positive, but three months down the track there is scant evidence of any permanent change of behaviour, let alone improved performance. You can teach an old dog new tricks but it takes more repetition, effort and time than can ever be achieved in a two day off-site programme. Our new understanding of how the brain changes as we evolve new neural pathways tells us that there has to be a significant focus on following through the learning for 3-4 months after the formal part of the programme is over. In cost terms we recommend that the follow through budget is about one third of the overall development costs.

A small group of leaders who commit to supporting each other's learning goes a long way to turning your required skills into new habits. It is asking too much to expect individuals to maintain momentum by themselves. We tend to support the process by providing monthly internet based facilitation, as this provides another spur to maintain the focus long enough to allow true mastery to emerge. You can always identify those who have endured the learning process. They are easily able to demonstrate the skill on demand and have learnt to make it their own, fitting their unique personality and strengths. Paul was a classic case in point. In his UK based health and safety business he had learnt how to deal with conflict confidently enough to be able to go straight to the heart of heated differences between team members. His assurance gave others the space to give voice to the issues that were lurking behind their simmering disagreements. All this from a person who described himself as conflict adverse at the start of the leadership work. He had changed.

As your leaders master new habits there emerges a sense of cohesion across the organisation – you evolve an identifiable company style. In Peter's organisation it was their growing reputation for delivery that became their hallmark. When they said they were going to do something their word was their bond. Not a bad brand when it is customers who are providing the feedback, rather than internal PR or marketing people being 'aspirational'.

5 Expect to make a return on your investment in leadership development

Assuming you have based your leadership development work on the first four guiding principles you will be well placed to make a healthy return on investment, or at worst have the programme become

AS YOUR LEADERS MASTER NEW HABITS THERE EMERGES A SENSE OF COHESION ACROSS THE ORGANISATION – YOU EVOLVE AN IDENTIFIABLE COMPANY STYLE.

Leadership



Feature

cost-neutral. Focussing the development around the delivery of your business plan means you are likely to already have Management Information Systems for calculating the positive impact of the programme. We recommend doing this as a cumulative track of each individual’s contribution, rather than simply comparing your before and after EBITDA numbers, as this provides more granularity on the specifics of who did what and how it all added up to progress.

Expecting to make a return on investment is key for a couple of reasons. The first is obvious: like any other business decision, if you cannot see a pay back within a reasonable time scale then why would you run the programme in the first place? It has to wash its face. The second is a little more subtle. It is a leadership programme and leaders are paid a lot of money to make a difference and produce results. So, if your leadership programme is correctly co-designed, it should magnify their impact in a tangible way and add to the bottom line.

And finally, there are, as you might expect, some elements of leadership development that tend to be required whatever your specific business plan is. Of these the most important, in our experience, is work

on emotional competence. It is a thread that certainly runs through all the development we are asked to co-design. If a leader always needs to feel in control this will get in the way of developing their collaboration skills. If a leader avoids conflict they will struggle to confront poor performance in others. Work on emotional competence is crucial for unlocking leadership potential.

It does take more effort and innovation to define – and then refine – your own programme rather than import someone else's, but the rewards are compelling. The early CEO adopters of this disrupting technology have already proved the concept is effective. How will you close the gap?

About the AuthorJohn Sutherland is the Director of the Leadership Initiative, which provides leadership development focussed on delivering the business plan and producing a solid return on investment.

He also runs Strategic Resource, which provides a suite of services for the investment community. [email protected] +44 15394 66000

if your leadership programme is correctly codesigned, it should magnify their impact in a tangible way and add to the bottom line.

Most senior teams only have one or two ways of working together and never learn to vary their approach, based on the needs of the work in front of them. Below, John Sutherland argues that team work is a difference engine and diver-gence is the fuel.

Tim is in a leadership team but feels torn. He knows it is important to meet but has found that, all too often, little is achieved. He has

started writing his emails during the meetings to mi-nimise wasted time. No one has complained because his fellow team members also think their meetings are non-productive. Their in-joke is that they swung between the 4 T's: Tedious, Time consuming, Tense and Territorial. They were certainly meeting their ex-pectations because their expectations were very low,

Meeting ExpectationsBY JOHN SUTHERLAND

and had been for years. Sounds familiar?Meetings are the butt of many a joke and often

fall into disrepair or neglect. In fact, many senior teams have stopped holding team work sessions al-together because they could not make them effec-tive. Avoiding meetings, however, just hides the issue and resolves nothing. If you need to get your meet-ings back on track here are the five factors that I have found to be the most powerful, over my 25 years working with senior teams. What works for you in your business may, of course, be different. There is no one rule book that applies to all organisations.

1.CoherenceEverything starts with coherence. But what does that mean? Sounds like one of those words you get a tri-ple-bonus score for on BS bingo. It means that no

Many senior teams have stopped holding team work sessions altogether because they could not make them effective. Avoiding meetings, however, just hides the issue and resolves nothing.

Senior Teams

18 The European Business Review January - February 2014


Feature

matter who you ask, or how you ask, you get a con-sistent message about what your organisation is fo-cussed on. As an analogy, a light bulb works by scattering energy around the room. Take the same amount of energy and focus it in a straight line and you end up with a powerful laser that can punch a hole through the wall. That is coherence. Which is your organisation more like, the light bulb or the laser? When I run management due diligence assign-ments for investment companies the first thing I look for is coherence. You need to be able to punch a hole to grow market share.

Once you are clearly focussed (and in my experi-ence most organisations are not, even though they claim they are) you can then ask the simple business question: what do we most need to focus on in our meetings in order to move the dial on performance? The linked, but equally important, question is what do we need to stop spending time on? What needs to go off the agenda that has been clogging up our meeting time but not creating traction?

2. DecisionsThe second thing I look for in our management due diligence work is the decision making capabil-ity of the senior team. Do they evidence an ability to take the tricky decisions and abide by them? Or do they have a 'car park' full of unresolved decisions they keep on recycling? Decisions are one of the key 'products' from team work but most teams are poor at the decision making discipline. Why?

Here is a clue. Decisions can be viewed as falling into one of five logical categories, as seen from the view-point of the team leader.

In practice, most leaders have a 'home style', usually either 'I decide' or 'we decide'. The 'I decide' leaders do not involve people enough. The 'we decide' people do not lead enough. So what is your home style? It helps to know. The first task for a team leader is to match the decision making process to the needs of the current business issue. Some issues are not suited to collective decision making, such as bonus payments. Others require multiple input, such as strategic debate.

The second task is to ensure that team colleagues know which process you have selected. Much time is wasted, and much frustration is generated, by a mis-match of expectations about which decision making process is being used. For example, if you have chosen 'I decide' but your team think it is a 'we decide' issue the debate is likely to rumble on. Whichever process you choose, once you have reached a deci-sion, do yourself a favour and write it down where all can see. You have not agreed until you know that you all mean the same thing by the same words. It saves a lot of time later to take an extra two minutes to check for real understanding.

3. Sutherland's 4 P'sTo be effective and efficient every meeting needs to be clear about the 4 P's.

There always needs to be a clearly identified leader for team work. Knowing who it is, especially when the baton passes between people on different items, helps to maintain progress. It is this person who has to make sure that the right items are on the agenda and the wrong ones are taken off. It is also their job to ensure that only the people who need to be there to make progress attend.

Here's a funny thing. Most senior teams only have one or two ways of working together and never learn to vary their approach, based on the needs of the work in front of them. I worked with one leader-ship team, in the finance sector, for whom every bit of team work was based on the 'straw man' process. One unfortunate partner was selected to present a positioning paper and the other five partners took in turns to rip it apart. Unsurprisingly, team morale was dreadful and the weekly meetings were avoided at the slightest excuse.

Team work can be focussed on providing clear di-rection, sharing information, making a decision, re-viewing progress on projects, checking operation-al reports for strategic implications, considering an

Who is running the meeting

and who needs to attend?

PERSON

What is the clearly defined

purpose of this meeting?

PURPOSE

Which team work

process we are using for

each agenda item?

PROCESS

What tangible outcome

do we expect to get out of

each piece of work?

PRODUCT

SUTHERLAND'S 4 P's

I DECIDE. I will tell you. No discussion required, just check you understand.

I will consult for an hour; a day, a week and then decide.

We will decide together and I will drive the process.

You have raised an issue for me to decide on.

I have delegated the decision to you.

I CONSULT THEN I DECIDE

WE DECIDE

YOU CONSULT AND I DECIDE.

YOU DECIDE

options paper or kicking-back for wider strategic debate, and more besides. Each of these have their own process. Decision making, for example, needs to focus down to reach a conclusion. Strategic dialogue needs to open up for wider debate. Most team meet-ings I sit in on are comprised of a mind-numbing round of individual operational reports that take up 90% of the available time. Simply using exception re-porting can reduce the time taken drastically, leaving space for other important team work tasks. If you do not vary your team work processes to match the needs of each agenda item you are not being effective.

But what about the product? If you cannot iden-tify a tangible outcome from the meeting why are you planning one? Agreeing the budget, deciding on project stage gates, running scenario planning, and acting on the strategic implications from the oper-ational reports are all examples of 'products' from team-work. Getting to the end of the planned agenda is not an outcome. Just a relief.

4. Core ApproachWhat is your core approach to business? At the senior team level it typically falls into one of the four quad-rants, shown in the diagram. You can be strategic or

operational and you can be linear or iterative. Linear means working in a structured step-by-step manner. Iterative means refining the process through repeat-ed cycles of exploration. Many teams get into diffi-culties because those who are operational and linear view those who are strategic and iterative as “fluffy” and wasting time. And those in the strategic-iterative quadrant view their operational-linear colleagues as “luddites” who are stuck in the day-to-day. It is easy to fall into the dangerous trap of believing that your approach is the way everyone else should work.

Try this thought experiment. Firstly, identify which quadrant you spend the majority of time in. Now think of the person in your team you fall out with most often and identify where they usually sit in the quadrant. Chances are they are in a different section, and this is likely to be a key component of the tension between you.

Which quadrant does your team need to be in, in order to be successful with your business plan? It is a trick question, of course. You almost certainly need to use all four quadrants. Getting them to work well together is the issue. Many global organisations exhibit the classic tension between regional business managers, focussed on the linear current operational needs of clients, versus corporate directors, focussed on iterative future strategic development. By con-trast, I am working with a great business in Bergen, Norway. Their vision is broken down into key stra-tegic drivers and balanced score cards (linear) and is refined through a regular rhythm of strategic process meetings (iterative). Their process intentionally goes through all four quadrants in a planned and cohesive way. Their business has doubled its revenues this year.

5. Team Work is a Difference EngineThe foundation for effective team work is strong-minded individual leaders. Contrary to the “bumper sticker” slogan that “there is no i in team” the com-plete opposite is the case. The pre-requisites for pro-ductive team debate are coherent focus and clear leaders who are willing to articulate their divergent views, strongly if need be. Team work is a difference engine and divergence is the fuel. To ensure you reach

STRATEGIC

LINEAR ITERATIVE

OPERATIONAL

SENIORTEAM

FOCUS

StrategicPlanning

StrategicProcess

Agile ProjectManagement

ProjectManagement

To ensure you reach robust outcomes that deliver results, it is imperative to actively seek the differences between individual team members' positions. There is no collaboration unless you have people who can think independently.

Senior Teams



same thing just in different words”. Chances are you are using similar words to mean something quite dif-ferent from each other. Teams that fuel the difference engine go faster and further.

So what about Tim? He is not the team leader but has decided that every time he feels frustration welling up in a meeting he is going to work on one of these five factors. The great thing about Tim is that when he is frustrated everyone knows about it. Go Tim.

What about you? What are your expectations about the productiveness of your meetings and what are you going to do about it? The ball is in your court.

About the Author

John Sutherland runs the Leadership Initiative, focussed on providing busi-nesses with the specific individual, team and organisational leadership skills required for success with their

business plan. He also leads Strategic Resource, a pro-vider of management due diligence services. Contact [email protected] +44 15394 66000

robust outcomes that deliver results, it is imperative to actively seek the differences between individual team members' positions. There is no collaboration (collaboration = deciding together) unless you have people who can think independently.

You can only have effective debate if each person arrives at the team session having already established their autonomous view (autonomy = deciding for yourself). But if your meetings are viewed as being a waste of time the chances are that, like Tim, you and your colleagues will turn up without having done the preparation work re-quired to make the meeting effective. Especially if, like most businesses, you do not send an agenda out before the meeting.

Try this experiment at your next team meeting. Ahead of a key item give everyone ten minutes to think through their autonomous position, before engaging team debate. Then actively identify the areas of funda-mental difference between each team member's initial position. Go for conflict rather than avoiding it and be cautious of early claims that “we are all really saying the

Feature

What is your core approach to business? At the senior team level it typically falls into one of the four quadrants. You can be strategic or operational and you can be linear or iterative.

CREATING COLLABORATIVE ADVANTAGEBY JOHN SUTHERLAND

Senior Teams

what seemed like strong mutual agreement, in fact covered over real and palpable differences. This is more like gardening, with regular weeding required, than building a framework agreement and setting it in place. Baden and Tony were a case in point. They had easily agreed that, in outsourcing technology development to a specialist firm, there would be real mutual advantages to both parties, in terms of controlled costs for Tim and securing a large contract for Baden. As the first year rolled by it became clearer that for Tony the overarching purpose was to support his desire for “world domination”, whereas for Baden it was more about proving the validity of the collaborative model. For Tony collaboration was simply a means to an end but for Baden it was an end in itself. Not a showstopper but something that put a real edge in their unfolding partnership discussions.

This section is called Towards Coherence because, in practice, you never really fully achieve it but the constant quest towards it turns out to be critically important. In practice, what you need is to understand where your alignment overlaps and where it diverges. It is never going to be a complete match. But so long as you have

Figure 1: Sutherland's Cumulative C'sIN

TERN

AL

EXTE

RNA

L

Coherence Capability

CollaborationCo-creation

Virtuous Cycle of Symbiotic Participation

Sutherland's Cumulative C's

Successful collaboration between businesses can have myriad advantages. In this article, John Sutherland talks us through four key aspects for successful collaboration and demonstrates how sometimes collaborative advantage is of far more value than competitive advantage.

Business looks through the prism of competitive advantage. Almost every book on strategy is based on the assumption that you want to compete with others in your sector and in-

crease your market share, at your rival’s expense. Consequently, the well-worn strategic tools relied on in countless strategic off-sites, such as the SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), are also predicated on the same assumption. But what if you have decided that you want to collaborate, rather than compete?

An increasing number of organisations and businesses are seeking collaborative advantage, as the most effective way of realising their vision. And there really are compelling reasons for selecting to work collaboratively for some organisations. Get it right and it takes you out of the fight for preserving your share of a commodity market and puts you in a place where the symbiosis between you and another organisation creates a new offering/service that is competitor free. But at the moment these vanguard leaders are struggling to find the tools that will enable them to make their collaboration effective.

Here is the health warning. It is not easy. In fact Chris Huxham, a leading researcher in the field, warns that you should only consider seeking collaborative advantage if the reasons for doing so are utterly compelling. Otherwise keep away. Many have tried and ended up with “collaborative inertia" rather than real progress. So, in this introductory article, I am going to set out the 4 factors that my team and I have found to be powerful aids, over the 20+ years that we have worked with collaboration and partnership work.

1. TOWARDS COHERENCEAsk those at the start of the journey towards developing collaborative advantage what is going to be crucial and they will, correctly, say that there needs to be clarity on the purpose of the proposed collaboration. What is the compelling mutual benefit and why does this make obvious sense to both parties? Indeed, this is where my own alternative SWOT analysis (Figure 1: Sutherland's Cumulative C's) model begins. It is an excellent starting place and I can attest that collaboration without coherence is very hard to achieve.

Ask the same people after the first year of working together on collaborative advantage about primacy of coherence and they will tell you that the work on this never ceases. It is dynamic and as the journey unfolds you discover more and more areas where,

Allowing the other organisation to be different, and tolerating them thinking and acting differently, is all part of the resilience required for effective collaboration.

Senior Teams



enough in common, that is “good enough”. Allowing the other organisation to be different, and tolerating them thinking and acting differently, is all part of the resilience required for effective collaboration. You have to be different, and allow each other to be different, to collaborate effectively.

2. ASSESSING COLLABORATIVE CAPABILITYNot every organisation can manage collaboration. A reasonable barometer is to check for collaboration within your own organisation before seeking to collaborate with another. Some people do not possess the emotional competence to collaborate and cling on to the need to be in control. Kevin's team struggled to collaborate. When we worked with them it became clear why. As highly experienced precision engineers they had never found the need to focus on working relationships - they just got on with the job in hand. The idea that there was a need to focus on the quality, and clarity, of their working relationships was a complete anathema to them. We might have been speaking a foreign language. So a core capability is the emotional competence and willingness to attend to relationships.

Behind these so-called “soft skills” are a whole host of other capabilities to assess. What technical, practical and complimentary skills are both sides bringing to the table? The ability to be “brutally honest” about what each side can bring, and cannot bring, is of crucial importance. Firstly, for the obvious reason that you need to know what resources you can call on for your collaboration. Secondly, because this is an early opportunity to explore trust. If you can be straight with each other, and experience bears out what you are saying, then trust starts to grow. If there is any sense that you have misled, or been misled, then trust is damaged and, at this embryonic stage, may never recover.

One of the hidden capabilities to check for is time. I can give you a cast iron guarantee that the amount of time absorbed in setting up effective collaboration is more then you would expect at the planning stage. If you are already heavily time constrained this needs to be a serious consideration before proceeding.

3. THREE COLLABORATIVE PARADOXESNo two people, let alone two organisations, can be in constant collaboration. It would be far too exhausting and time consuming. In practice, collaboration is just one of the “relationship modes” you need to be in. So, and here is the first of three paradoxes, to achieve collaborative advantage the first skill is to know when you need to be collaborating and when not. Much of the rest of the time you are getting on with the work to hand. But there are two other “relationship modes” that you need to master, both of which enable effective collaboration at the right time (Figure 2).

The first is “Contractor” mode. This is when you need to take instruction from the other organisation about how they need you to operate, behave or perform. In every collaborative relationship

Feature

there are times when you need to simply do as you are told, without arguing back. The ability to respond to direct instruction and direction setting from the other party is a major building block for collaborative competence. So much so that, and here is the second paradox, it is in fact easier for unequal organisations to achieve collaboration than for organisations that are matched for power and influence. Some of the most successful collaborations exist between customer and a supplier, where the customer always retains the ultimate control and the supplier offers something of mutual benefit to both. In these cases there is no need to fight over who is in charge and how power is shared. It is obvious. The degree of difficulty and risk of collaborative inertia goes up as the organisations become more matched. In such cases the effort required to collaborate successfully grows exponentially, mostly around a simmering battle for power.

Figure 2: Contractor ModelO

ur in

fluen

ce in

crea

ses

Expert Collaborator

ContractorSurvival

Their influence increases

The other useful relationship mode is the “Expert” mode where you bring your unique contribution to the collaboration. There is something you do really well, which is the reason why you have a seat at the partnership table, and for collaboration to flourish you (and your colleagues) need to have room to excel at this, without fear of being told that you are not being “very collaborative”.

The mode to avoid is the “Survival” mode, which is an area all collaborations fall into at some point. This happens when there is a

mismatch between what you expect from the partner and what you get, and what they expect from you and what they get. “Why are they doing that” is Survival mode's signature tune. It is a painful place and quickly erodes trust. The main thing you need to know is how to get out of the Survival box as quickly as possible. The answer is the third paradox. The only way out of Survival is to go back into Contractor mode. That is to clarify what the other party needs from you. Any attempt to go from Survival back into Collaboration without going through Contractor first will fail, and only serve to erode trust further. You will save yourself a lot of anguish if you take my word on this.

4. THE WORK OF CO-CREATIONThe final part of the jigsaw puzzle is to actually do the work of collaboration to gain the latent advantage. In this practical “getting on with it” phase there are three issues to watch out for. The first is that, inevitably, the group involved in the collaborative venture broadens and new people join who have their own agenda, which can complicate matters immensely. Martin, a newly appointed purchasing manager for a retail firm, was keen to prove his worth by taking as much cost as possible out of the suppliers. He was a late joiner to a team that had spent nine months delicately developing a joint understanding of how to gain collaborative advantage through their supply chain. It went against everything Mark had learnt to resist the temptation to grind the suppliers into the mud rather than developing a symbiotic partnership.

The second is that it is always better to start out with modest aims and let trust grow through what you have achieved together, rather than talk forever about what you might achieve in the future. Actions do speak louder than words when developing collaborative competence between two different organisations, where business processes, cultures and values add to the complexity of turning potential into progress. So start small and build from there.

The third is that those at the sharp end of the action can easily get caught between the need to take decisions, so that progress is made, and the need to report back to other decision makers in their organisation, so that they keep their colleagues on side. Decisions can grind to a halt in a never ending round of “I'll have to check that with my boss and come back to you" before momentum is lost and the potential remains unrealised. Back to the gardening

analogy, sometimes what is needed is hacking away the bureaucratic undergrowth that threatens to engulf the tender new shoots of collaborative advantage. To collaborate and succeed sometimes you have to be brutal rather than “nice”. If you can balance brutality with partnership working you will do well.

When you have been round the cumulative C's once you are ready to go round again, but this time with greater coherence, refined capabilities, collaborative competence and practiced co-creation. The work never finishes.

Whether you choose to seek competitive or collaborative advantage the key is to make a deliberate choice. Just knowing that there is a choice puts you, already, ahead of the pack. If you choose to collaborate you will find that there are, currently, few resources to help you make progress. Here are two tools that can assist, my own version of a SWOT analysis, geared to foster collaboration, and the Contractor model. It also helps to have someone working with you who has been down the path before. Let me know how you get on.

About the AuthorJohn Sutherland is the Director of Strategic Re-source, which assesses and develops senior teams in order to support them in achieving their business plan. He is a pioneer in the

practice of developing collaborative advantage. Email [email protected].

Whether you choose to seek competitive or collaborative advantage the key is to make a deliberate choice. Just knowing that there is a choice puts you, already, ahead of the pack.

Senior Teams



Strategic Resource has 25 years of experience supporting senior teams, and those who work for them, in developing and delivering their business plan. We are pioneers in the field of collaborative advantage.

T. +44 (0) 15394 31945 | [email protected] | www.strategic-resource.co.uk

Are you gearingup to seekcollaborativeadvantage?

We know howto oil the wheels

of success

1155 Euro Bus Rev SR Jan 15.indd 1 16/01/2015 13:19


Ineffective meetings are the bugbear of many organisations. In this article, John Sutherland, Director of Strategic resource introduces and discusses the 4 P's model. He advises that setting out the 4 P's – Person, Purpose, Process and Product for any form of teamwork or organ-isational meetings promotes efficiency, produc-tivity and focus.

Do you sit in meetings that just seem to ramble on, whilst your life strolls by and other impor-tant work mounts up? Ineffective meetings

are the bugbear of many organisations. Our clients tell us that using the 4 P's adds structure, focus, and ownership and increases productivity. On average they report being 25% more efficient in their meet-ings. Interested?

THE 4 P'SOf all the models I have developed in my 25 years of consultancy work, to date, this is the most straight-forward and the most impactful. Whenever you are about to engage in meetings, or any form of team-work, it pays to set out the 4 P's.

SAVING 25% OF MEETING TIME

PERSONYou always need to know who is 'holding the pen' for each meeting. If the pen is going to pass between team

members it is particularly important to clarify when the pen passes and whether it is passing back to you for the next agenda item. Just having a clearly identi-fied leader marshals activities enormously. When Neil volunteered to be the Person for his team's first dis-cussion using the 4 P's the unanimous feedback was that it was the most productive meeting they had ever had, in 13 years, primarily because there was someone designated as the main driver.

The other job for the 'Person' is to clarify who needs to be involved in each part of the agenda. Far too many meetings have team members sitting around waiting for their turn to present, when they could be getting on with other priority work. There is a natural discomfort for many in simply stating who needs to be involved, and therefore who does not, for fear of having people feel excluded. My advice is to take a risk and check.

"Hey Regit this next item does not really involve you so why don't you pop back at 12:00, when we come to the piece on financial planning?" Not too hard to say and frees up time for Regit. It also gives more space for discussion amongst the key players. You want the people who can add value to this piece of work to take up the air time. No others.

Some people are better at being the 'Person' than others. They are more accomplished at drawing out different voices, holding the verbal ramblers in check, keeping the work on track and summarising where ‘we have got to’. The 'Person' does not have to be the

BY JOHN SUTHERLAND

Far too many meetings have team members sitting around waiting for their turn to present, when they could be getting on with other priority work.

Feature

The 4 P's:

PERSONWho is running the meeting and whoneeds to be involved?

What are the clearly defined reasons forworking on each issue?

What team work processes will we use?

What do we expect to achieve?

PURPOSE

PROCESS

PRODUCT

Senior Teams

agenda owner, team leader or even the subject expert. Just someone who is good at setting and keeping a focus.

PURPOSEBusinesses are prone to the malaise of the rolling agenda. The common picture being that every, say, Monday at

10:00 the team meets for an hour to go through a set agenda, working hard to keep it to an hour. Typically, the meeting over-runs, covering only the urgent op-erational matters and seldom the more transforma-tional, forward looking needs of the business. Teams frequently spend too much time working in the busi-ness and not enough time working on the business. To check this tendency the Purpose question provides a strategic analysis of what you need to be working on, at the team level, in order to achieve your business plan. It is a relevance check and helps to maintain a balance in teamwork. If your meetings are not focussed on the most pertinent questions what are they for?

Sometimes the answers the Purpose ques-tion throws up can be surprising. Take Darryl, who decided to review the Purpose of their monthly Board preparation cycle. When he and his team fearless-ly explored what they were asking the International regions to do they realised they had been getting the, already over-stretched, regional managers (and their teams) to do work that would be mostly repeated a week later. They had been doing this for 5 years. The resulting saving in time was immense and positive-ly impacted the wider organisation. Of course, not all Purpose discussions produce such dramatic results but, routinely, the 3-5 minutes taken to ask 'Why' helps to bring clarity, priority and a sense of owner-ship into the meeting.

PROCESSThe Process you use to achieve your Purpose will be driven by the nature of the Purpose. And this is where

most teams go wrong. They simply 'do what they do' when working as a team, with the vast majority using a combination of operational reporting and project update Processes in all meetings, regardless of the

Purpose. Useful in their own right but never designed to, for example, assess the Total Addressable Market in your sector or identify the learning that emerges when you look across your business division's per-formance. If you know you need to come to a de-cision use a decision making process. If you need to discover best practice use an inquiry process, and so on. As an aid to thinking about mapping Purpose to Process here are four continuums we have recently developed, through our work with client teams. (See Teamwork Process Map below)

Strategic-OperationalIs your Purpose more strategic or more operation-al? Are you looking to set or refine direction (stra-tegic) or report on progress or deviations against plan (operational)? Even most senior team meet-ings are weighted towards an operational focus, not giving enough oxygen to the unfolding work of strategy. And this is why they often end up being so tedious. When challenged, teams say that there is never enough time to debate strategy, because of the busyness of the urgent and important opera-tional matters. But, of course, if the only Processes you deploy are designed to focus on operational matters you will never 'find time' to work on more strategic issues. You have not equipped yourself with the right Process tools.

THE PURPOSE QUESTION PROVIDES A STRATEGIC ANALYSIS OF WHAT YOU NEED TO BE WORKING ON, AT THE TEAM LEVEL, IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE YOUR BUSINESS PLAN. IT IS A RELEVANCE CHECK AND HELPS TO MAINTAIN A BALANCE IN TEAMWORK.

Senior Teams



Processes for working with Strategic purpos-es are, of course, different from Operational ones. Some are very well known, such as the (over-used) SWOT analysis. Others are less frequently used, such as a Stakeholder analysis or running a future scenario planning exercise. Sometimes you need a process that starts out Strategically and move down the continu-um to become more Operational. For example, the use of a KPI 'dashboard' highlights the critical areas to dig into at the operational level, in order to achieve the plan. Others move intentionally from Operational to Strategic. For example exception reporting means reporting only those items of current performance that have strategic implications.

Divergent-ConvergentDoes your purpose mean you need to open up debate (Divergent) or bring a wide range of views to a single point of agreement (Convergent)? Divergent process-es are good at bringing in new ideas, perhaps through brain-storming or inviting an external advisor to give input. They are also ideal for wide ranging strategic debate. By contrast all forms of decision making, be it an options paper, a consultation process or team decision, are natural convergent Processes. Many teams are better at the divergent end, spawning endless debate, than the convergent end, bringing it all to a conclusion.

Some Purposes are best served by first working Divergently before funnelling down to a Convergent conclusion. Many team discussions can be described in precisely this manner. It is a core Process. However, it helps if everyone knows in advance what the 'game plan' is, so that when it comes time to funnel down they start looking for connecting strands and summa-ries rather than new avenues for exploration.

Informational-TransformationalDoes your Purpose lead to a need to gather and share information or is the core Purpose to trans-form and improve the organisation? Informational processes include sharing updates on competitor, market, or sector activity and may require a Process specifically designed to gather intelligence and de-termine the relevant 'signal from the background noise'. Other processes, for example running a team development session, are by design transformation-al in their Purpose. As before, you may start with an informational process, e.g. how is the team current-ly performing, before moving to a transformational

process, such as an exploration of useful additional team work processes to drive team work efficiency.

Linear-IterativeThis is the one that catches most people out. Over half of us are wired to organise work through Linear structured Processes, such as project management with clear stage gates. The rest of us prefer to organ-ise work through an Iterative learning process, getting nearer our goal through each new phase of activity. Some Purposes lend themselves to a more Linear ap-proach, for example compliance control. Others lend themselves to a more Iterative approach, for example software development (agile project management). If you are like most people you will have an in-built bias one way or the other and will need to check that you are flexing the Process you select based on the actual needs of the Purpose and not just on what suits your preference as a person. Tricky.

A PROCESS EXERCISE• Take 20 minutes with your team to think back

over the previous 3 meetings. What team work Processes did you use?

• Take a further 10 minutes to think ahead to your next meeting. When you examine the in-tended Purpose behind each agenda item what new Processes could you import that would be a credible match for the work in hand?

Feature

Team Process

Sampler

Iterative

Strategic Iterative Divergent Operational Informational Linear

Transformational

Divergent

Operational

Informational

Linear

Convergent

Vision

Double- loop

learning

Strategic dialogue

Parameter Setting

Total addressable

market

Business plan

Delegated actions

Shared vision

Real-time strategic change

Total quality

Bench-marking

Change management

Dashboard

Brain-storming

Agile project management

Focus groups

Pilot

Inquiry

Sub-group problem solving

Co-ordinated research

Workstreams

Funnel

Project update

Project management

Priority setting

Thinking hats

Gap analysis Cost control

Transfor-

mational

Some Purposes are best served by first working Divergently before funnelling down to a Convergent conclusion. Many team discussions can be described in precisely this manner.

• Finally, think through how you could describe the 'rules' of each Process to your team, so that they know how to work efficiently towards your intended outcome. Each Process has its own set of 'instructions'.

If you want some prompts take a look at the team work sampler, to stimulate your creative juices. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list; we work with a library of over 60. But it will give you a reasonable starting point. The aim is to grow your own unique library, matching the needs of your unique organisa-tion. (See team work sampler on previous page.)

PRODUCTThe final P, and in many ways the most important one, is having 'the end in mind'. If the Purpose is at

the strategic level (the 'Why') the Product is at the Operational level (the 'What'). What will we achieve as a result of this agenda item and the meeting? If you cannot specify the 'Product' at the start of the meeting the chances are you will not arrive at a clear destination. Meetings can then become a vacuum, sucking up energy, time and morale. By contrast repeatedly achieving a clear 'Product' is incredibly motivating and, more importantly, gets your team into the healthy habit of making regular tangible progress.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHERThe power of the 4 P's is in putting them all togeth-er. Our experience is that it can feel awkward at first but stick with it and very soon you and your team will start to prompt each other on when and how to use the model. One of our energy sector clients has made the 4 P's into large posters that adorn all their meeting rooms, in their offices around the world. The senior team lead by example and expect to see the 4 P's in active use in all meetings. They are now working on making the 4 P's 'pop up' in the software they use to book meetings. The more they use it the better the results they get and the better the results they get the more they use it.

One way to start would be to share this article with your team and experiment together. Reading about the ideas is not enough. Then all you have to decide is what to do with the 25% of the time you will save. Pack more into your meeting or finish early? Your call.

About the AuthorJohn Sutherland is the Director of Strategic Resource, which assesses and develops senior teams in order to support them achieving their business plan. He is also the Director of the

Leadership Initiative, which provides bespoke in-house programmes focussed on the specific skills re-quired for each unique organisation.

Repeatedly achieving a clear 'Product' is incredibly motivating and, more importantly, gets your team into the healthy habit of making regular tangible progress.

Senior Teams


33 The European Business Review November - December 2015

Perfect teamwork is a skill that comes withknowledge and practise.

Rowing in the same direction helps too.

Strategic Resource are specialists in assessing and developing senior teams and have been for 20 years.

T. +44 (0) 15394 31945 | [email protected] | www.strategic-resource.co.uk

1238 Li Advert EBR.indd 1 13/07/2015 14:02

BY JOHN SUTHERLAND

Senior Team Developmentfor the Unwilling

Traditional team work over-emphasises the whole team approach far more than is needed for most practical purposes. In this article, John Sutherland discusses developing effective team work for senior teams.

Clare had an issue. Senior team work was unpro-ductive but she was not sure how to resolve it to make progress. The team members were all

strong characters and no one had time for any develop-ment. Too busy. Historically, when they had explored how they worked together, it opened up a whole new can of worms about how fundamentally different they were from each other. Too risky. In fact, the mere sug-gestion that the senior team needed developing was deemed to be mildly offensive. Too senior.

Team Development is Never an End in Itself The senior team just needs to be able to develop and deliver their part of the business plan, and not get in the way of others who are busy delivering their part. The senior team's job is to move the dial on per-formance, not to feel like they have excellent team work. So, rather than focus on team development, focus instead on supporting them whilst they are busy making progress on their key strategic drivers. No one has time for team building these days. But making team work fit for purpose whilst you crack on with delivering the plan is both efficient and ef-fective. Efficient because it avoids taking up extra time. Effective because you develop practical forms of team work that operate well in the heat of the moment. Craft yourself an excellent “dashboard” that gives you a dynamic view of progress against plan and the stage is set to crack on with the work.

Here are four facilitative factors that we have

found helpful in maintaining progress with your senior team.

1. Avoid gratuitous team workMuch of the work that actually needed to be done in Clare's team, to make progress against plan, was best done by individuals, pairs or small groupings. Only three items needed the full team of seven to all be in-volved. These were setting the budget, agreeing the medium-term strategy and ensuring a consistent ap-proach was taken across the organisation on bonus in-centives. And here is an interesting point. Traditional

Senior team work (meetings aside) is really a collection of sub-groupings, linked together to make the necessary progress. Mature teams slide up and down a team work continuum.

Senior Teams



team work over-emphasises the whole team approach far more than is needed for most practical purposes. Senior team work (meetings aside) is really a collec-tion of sub-groupings, linked together to make the necessary progress. Mature teams slide up and down a team work continuum (see graph on the left page).

Individual functioning means that no team work is taken place. Best avoided.

A working group has a clear leader whose task is to ensure each person is focussed on the relevant tasks so that, overall, progress is made.

A co-ordinated group, in addition, ensures that the communication about these tasks is flawless, exter-nally and internally, so that communications are con-sistent and no work is repeated.

A project team is formed for the life time of that project and disbands upon its completion.

A collaborative team finds that, on a routine basis, fuller team work is required to achieve the desired outcomes.

A full team is one where, like an operating theatre, it would be impossible to operate alone. There is no such thing as a lone anaesthetist. They are always part of a team.

A collusive team means that you have moved into the danger area of “group think” where individuality is stifled. Very dangerous.

When Clare first saw the level of team work con-tinuum she let out a sigh of relief. She feared that anything focussed on team development would, in-evitably, end up with them having to spend yet more time locked in a room together. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Try this fifteen minute team work exercise.1. Write the team work continuum up on a flip

chart.2. Ask your senior team work colleagues to place

their initials next to the level of team work they have observed the team using (on average) over the previous two months.

3. Discuss any clear differences in perception. Fascinating issues tend to appear when you do.

4. Ask your colleagues to place their initials next to the level of team work they think (on average) the team need to be working at in order to achieve the business plan.

5. If there is a gap between the two sets of scores, talk in detail about the practical differences in team work that these scores indicate.

I do this exercise a lot with senior teams and this is what I find.

Most teams place themselves at 2.5 for their team work over the previous two months and say they need to be at 3.5 in order to achieve their business plan.

When asked what the practical difference will be it translates into more intentional use of each other, rather than ploughing their own separate furrows.

At some point, and this is the key to this exercise, the realisation appears that the whole range is helpful. The skill is in knowing when to flex the level of team work to match the needs of the business plan.

Gratuitous team work means attempting to keep the level of team work at 4-5 all the time, irrespec-tive of the need, and is to be avoided at all costs. Much time is wasted in business by the notion that we “must be a team”. Only be a collaborative team when you need that level of team work to achieve your strategic objective.

2. Develop your unique library of team work processesDeveloping your own senior team library of team work processes is an excellent way of refining your team work, developing real ownership and increas-ing productivity. I wrote about this in the July-August 2015 edition of The European Business Review (pages 45-47) which you can read on-line at http://www.eu-ropeanbusinessreview.com/?p=7712. The 4 P's save teams an average of 25% of their meeting time. If your senior team leads by example, and insists that all other teams do the same, the total amount of time saved in your organisation will be significant.

3. Resetting the team's level of challengeMy colleague David Powell and I were working with an investment team whose performance was not where they needed it to be. They would not have in-vested in themselves. After running them through a team review, focussed on why a team of highly

Developing your own senior team library of team work processes is an excellent way of refining your team work, developing real ownership and increasing productivity.

Feature

intelligent, financially literate professionals were struggling, the “culprit” turned out to be a lack of challenge. Some teams avoid strong disagreement. Other teams seem to be in constant conflict. What about your team? (see graph above)

The challenge continuum is a useful yard stick for self-assessing your senior team. Just as in the fifteen minute exercise above, ask your colleagues to say where they think the level of challenge has been, on average, over the last 3 months. The dif-ference on this continuum is that there is a pre-ferred level. You need to be able to be at 4 (chal-lenge) and 5 (contend) on the key strategic issues, otherwise decisions will not be robust enough. “Contending” is perhaps a word that needs unpack-ing. It means I have a clear view on what we should do next, and so do you. We start from the assump-tion that the best solution will be a synergy of both our views, rather than one person “winning the ar-gument” or, some sort of mucky compromise. So, rather than working to pull you over onto my side, I seek to understand why you, experienced pro-fessional that you are, see it differently from me. I don't back down from my view but I give yours a damn good listening to. And you do the same with me. If we both do this cleanly, in a distress free way,

the solution that gets forged through the heat of our strong debate will be better than the one either I or you had in mind before we started.

4. Leveraging your differencesI wrote before that team work is a difference engine and divergence is the fuel. (The European Business Review January-February 2014 pages 58-60). You need individual differences to be stated clearly and cleanly to allow team work to flourish. But how do you understand the differences between you? Some are obvious. She is an accountant. He is an engineer. Others are more hidden, but equally telling, and have been hard-wired into us through our nature and then reinforced by our experience (nurture).

At the senior team level there are three that are crucially important.

The first is the different way people gather infor-mation, in order to make a decision. Just over half of us like to get into the details and consider what is hap-pening right now. Before we can think about future strategy we need to develop the case from the ground up, making sure each step builds on the last. The rest of us prefer to stand back from the detail to see the overall pattern and conjecture where the emerging trend will take us. We let others worry about how to fill in the gaps between the current situation and our imagined future. For the “ground up” people we look as if we have our head in the clouds, talking about mere blue sky potential. For the “trend spotters” the ground up people seem like they are painfully slow and stuck in the past. Most senior team tensions are expressions of these differences in approach. Of course you need a blend of both approaches to get the best answers, but that can only happen if we see value in each other's preferences.

The second is concerned with the approach to risk. Some of us are really good at seeing everything that could go wrong. We can instantly spot all the manhole covers left up in the road we are about to attempt to drive down. The rest of us are fantastic at finding ways around, through, over or under obstacles - once they have been pointed out to us. For us there are no

Team work is a difference engine and divergence is the fuel. You need individual differences to be stated clearly and cleanly to allow team work to flourish.

Senior Teams



problems - just opportunities in disguise. The difficul-ty comes when the bias is firmly towards either end of the risk spectrum, without the corrective balance. All risk and no action leads to analysis paralysis. All oppor-tunity with no risk analysis is just asking for trouble.

The third senior team difference is about values. Values lie hidden well beneath consciousness and only bubble to the surface when someone inadver-tently goes against our taken-for-granted assump-tion about what I think you must/ought/should do. There are a vast array of examples but one should suffice for this article. Some of us act on the assump-tion that in work you should follow instructions and comply. Fine to be your own boss in your leisure time but you are paid to do what you are told, so get on with it. Some of us have the exact opposite working assumption, that the only way to get the best out of people is to set them free. Tell them what they need to achieve, of course, but never cross the line of telling how to achieve it. That will simply demotivate them and suppress their creativity. Compliance versus freedom. Which side are you on? Our values are not

for changing. Don't even try. Chances are, if you are having full on conflict with a team member, and you really can't understand why, conflicting values will be at play. Knowing your own values is an excellent start-ing place to monitor what presses your buttons.

Too busy? Too risky? Too senior?

Too important to leave undone, was Clare's verdict. We all know the senior team has to lead by example. What better example can you set than de-veloping effective team work through delivering the business plan?


Leadership Initiative, which provides bespoke in-house programmes focussed on the specific skills required for each unique organisation.

All risk and no action leads to analysis paralysis. All opportunity with no risk analysis is just asking for trouble.

Feature


If you are ready to co-design your leadership programme to give you the exact skills you need for success talk to us.

You have an ambitious business plan

But does your organisation

have the leadership

skills to match?

T. +44 (0) 15394 66000 | [email protected] | www.leadership-initiative.co.uk

Li EBR Advert Sep 14 FINAL 2nd.indd 1 05/09/2014 13:36

A large number of businesses have a gap between the es-poused strategy and what actually happens day by day. So much so that it even has its own phrase in the consultan-cy world – “the rift between the rhetoric and the reality”. In this article, John Sutherland discusses how to bridge the gap between the operational and the policy cycle and to achieve brilliant senior team work in organisations.

Dave was the fifth CEO in the business in as many years. Would he last? They had written his name on his office door in chalk so he was not off to the best start. But Dave was re-

silient and up for a challenge. Just as well, as it turned out.

Taking StockDave did the sensible thing and took two months to understand the business he had taken on. Understandably, his pressing question was why had the previous four CEOs been asked to step down? The Board told him they were not “up to it” but what “it” was had never been specified to his satisfaction. Something was off and he smelt a rat. He asked me to help him flush out the problem and fix it at source. The clock was ticking for his first six-month review.

The problem, it turned out, was two fold. Firstly, there was a senior person on the team, Barry, who had been the first CEO, who was the technical “grandfather” of their process. He did not want a boss and did his own thing, regardless of decisions made by the senior team. Secondly, senior team work was dire and was failing to provide the leadership the business needed to pick itself up and come out of the downturn, sunny-side up.

A Business Cannot Have Two HeadsFirst things first. A business can not thrive with two heads. It never works well. You have to be able to achieve an agreement as the senior team and hold the line. Disagreeing strongly behind closed doors is

BY JOHN SUTHERLAND

Brilliant SeniorTeam Work

FeatureSenior Teams


fine, but once the doors open there has to be agree-ment, coherence and compliance. Barry had infor-mal networks that by-passed the formal management controls and confused people in the engineering shed. Who should they listen to? But, because he was the technology founder, the previous three CEOs had felt unable to remove him, for fear of missing a critical technology input, going forward. Dave's understand-ing was that they needed to maximise the commercial value of their current technology, not develop more, and drive to an exit for their investors, not continue their history of R&D spend. So Barry left and a major handbrake on progress was released.

Senior Team FocusThe second problem proved to be more tricky to fix. The meetings had become mired in operational detail and were viewed by all as not adding value. They were also incredibly boring. At the first meeting I attended there were 10 people sitting round a large table taking turns to give an update on progress (or lack of prog-ress) on their monthly objectives. Death by PowerPoint was rampant, so we drew breath. They were in the op-erational cycle of the strategic process map. (see oper-ational cycle model below) Let's be clear. They knew what their strategic objective was – it was to make the current technology commercially successful and head towards an exit from their investors in three years. But

in the room you could be forgiven for thinking that the main focus of the business was to talk about the lack of progress against the plan on 27 highly tactical objec-tives, each in massive detail.

The Operational CycleAfter twenty-five years in consultancy work the biggest surprise to me is still the degree to which senior teams (around the world) spend a disproportionate amount of time in the operational cycle. This is the phase where we are focussed on putting into action the plans and objectives that were set by the CEO/Board/Senior Team. It is the “doing” phase of the business cycle where we work in the business, not on the busi-ness. And there is nothing wrong with that. We all need to expose our strategy to the risk of being successful by taking intelligent action with the resources available. But by itself it is not enough. There has to be a balance between doing what we said we would and keeping half an eye on refining our approach and our aspira-tions for the future, aka the Policy Cycle.

Some businesses get stuck in an operational loop. Marc's was a case in point. Every quarter they hero-ically managed to just about hit their forecast, patting themselves on the back for their efforts. Better then not hitting the numbers, as we know, but they were dis-mayed when I pointed out to them that fighting their way out of a revenue gap at the end of every three months was not the same thing as leadership. They were in constant catch-up mode. Yes, they were “on plan” (after a fashion) but the medium-term future looked like more of the same – a frantic rush towards a number that always seemed to be impossible to hit.

Marc's division was a striking case but take a moment to check on your own team work focus. What per-centage of your meeting time is given over to project updates and operational reporting by individual direc-tors/managers? For many businesses it is over 75%. And in these businesses, when we ask where the Policy Cycle work is, they point to items on the agenda that reference future facing themes. The problem is that they never quite seem to find the time to get to these items because the urgent supersedes the important, time after time, and the future facing item is yet again deferred for a few more meetings, before dropping off the agenda altogether a few months later. Marc's team meetings got caught in a common pattern of hacking through the jungle of operational undergrowth. From time to time we need to climb a nearby tree to check that we are still heading in the right direction. “Wrong

After twenty-five years in consultancy work the biggest surprise to me is still the degree to which senior teams spend a disproportionate amount of time in the operational cycle.

OPERATIONAL CYCLETHE HOW

StrategicImplications

KPI’sExceptionReporting

Project Plan

IterativeDesign

ProjectUpdates

Senior Teams


jungle” is not the cry you want to hear when you are working all the hours possible and your family is com-plaining that you are more like a lodger then a parent.

The Policy CycleAt this stage it is all too easy for a senior team to make a classic mistake, one that Dave was keen to avoid. An off-site is called to re-set strategic direction and the senior team disappear to their favourite hotel for a couple of days of perspective setting and business planning. Nothing wrong with that, in and of itself. The problem comes in the disconnection that often follows the off-site. In Dave's organisation they had become used to the senior team going off-site. They did it twice a year and had done so for the previous three years. The problem was that it was as if there were two different worlds. One world, at the hotel, where pristine business thinking took place, consider-ing the vision (a statement of a desired future some 3-5 years out with an objective outcome measure so we know if we are making progress) and the emerging strategy (an unfolding plan on how best to achieve the vision with the resources available and in our market context). There were some beautiful ideas discussed and agreed in those previous years but they were dis-connected from the real world of the business, where work carried on as usual. The senior team would come back, gleaming with delight and clarity, but quickly became frustrated by the lack of real change that fol-lowed. A few months later and, once again, the opera-tional urgent had displaced the strategic important and the next off-site was planned to re-set the focus. Net result: no actual change in the business. And that was the second challenge Dave had inherited. (see separat-ed operational and policy cycle diagram)

Dave is not alone. A large number of business-es have a gap between the espoused strategy and what actually happens day by day. So much so that it even has its own phrase in the consultancy world – “the rift between the rhetoric and the reality”. All talk and no action, in other words. Frustrating all round. The senior team are annoyed that the rest of the business is failing to catch up. The rest of the business is frustrated that the senior team appear to live in their own fluffy cloud, floating above the real world of the daily grind. A match made in hades.

The Double-loop ModelIt was Chris Argyris who first introduced the world to the idea of joining these two worlds together in an intentional learning loop, back in the 1970s. Sometimes old ideas are the best. His first notion was the most compelling and straightforward. We know that putting a plan into action is going to bump into problems. It does not work to simply to hatch a plan; you have to adapt as you learn what works. So Argyris

It was Chris Argyris who first introduced the world to the idea of joining the Operational and Policy worlds together in an intentional learning loop, back in the 1970s.

POLICY CYCLETHE WHAT

Economy

Competitors

Brand

Culture

Values

Vision

Parameters

Stakeholders

DelegatedActions



KPI’sExceptionReporting

Project Plan

IterativeDesign

ProjectUpdates

Feature


suggested we focus on these deviations from the plan as a process of intentional learning. Each time we fail we learn a little more. Every cycle of learning helps us refine our approach until, eventually, we gain mastery in the delivery of our strategy. Like all revolutionary ideas it is at once elegant and profound. Take the very problems that frustrated senior teams in the past and convert them into a continuous improvement loop. Brilliant. (see double loop model above)

Armed with this novel idea senior teams could come back from their off-sites with coherent

direction, knowing full well there would be a steep learning curve on how to make this work in prac-tice, and then set about ensuring their organisation was agile enough to carry on adapting itself until the path forward became credible, practical and action-able. Having set delegated actions for the organisa-tion they were alert to feedback from the operational cycle on how to achieve their objectives in the most time-effective way. You have to go round the whole figure of eight policy and operational cycles many times, before the way forward becomes clear.

As Dave told his team, we know we need to drive the commercialisation of our current technology but we have yet to discover how to do this really well, so our primary task is to learn. Yes we want to make sales but the highest priority is rapid learning. And that was when the organisation tilted on its axis. We all felt it. Thereafter, his senior team meetings were buzzing with debate about what was working and, equally im-portantly, what was not working. Rather than get lost in the operational detail of each project, as they had before, they trained themselves to stay in the shaded area between the policy and operational cycles, where they held the tension between their high level vision and their current reality. And that takes some practice to achieve. Many teams “fall asleep” and confuse in-tentional rapid learning with merely completing a set objective. The former always sharpens your ability to elegantly achieve your vision. The later merely ticks off another task on the to-do list. Just another busy fool day brewing. Staying in the shaded area is strate-gic process; the unfolding dance between the future we are creating and the current reality we are dealing with; and that, when achieved, is brilliant senior team work.

As for Dave he has settled into the CEO role and now has the full backing of his Board. The business has transformed under his leadership and they are on course for their exit within 18 months. The day he re-placed his name in chalk with a proper printed sign he called me. That was a fun call.




KPI’s

ExceptionReporting

Project Plan

IterativeDesign

ProjectUpdates

Economy

CompetitorsBrand

Culture

Values

Vision

Parameters

Stakeholders

DelegatedActions Dashboard

Dashboard

POLICY CYCLETHE WHAT


STRATEGIC PROCESS

Staying in the shaded area is strategic process; the unfolding dance between the future we are creating and the current reality we are dealing with; and that, when achieved, is brilliant senior team work.

Senior Teams


BY JOHN SUTHERLAND

Structure Follows Strategy – But May not Look Like You Imagined

In the world of structural design, one size does not fit all. It pays massive dividends to get the structure fit for the purpose and strategy of your very specific business. In this article, John Sutherland discusses the seven structural archetypes and the six guidelines for structural design to make organisations more effective and capable of delivering your strategy.

Brian and his team had come up with their new strategy, after several months of vision setting, market analysis and detailed feasibility studies. Now he needed to ensure he had a struc-

ture that was capable of supporting the delivery of their new busi-ness plan. At this point many firms reach for the tried and tested line structure, based on a clear hierarchy. But that would not have given Brian what he needed. So he set about designing it from first principles, using the six guidelines laid out here.

1. Structure Follows StrategyThe purpose of structure is to organise your resources in such a way that you are able to deliver your strategy. So the first guideline is to ensure you have coherence of direction before embarking on the journey to determine your structure. Tick in the box for Brian and his team here. You must be able to articulate what the structure has to enable in order to build an effective organisation. If, for example, you plan rapid growth or International expansion your structure must be able to scale and cope with multiple time zones. If you need to bring in innovation, into a traditional structure, something will have to shift in the design to enable innovation to flourish, or it will be suf-focated at birth by bureaucracy. You could be forgiven for thinking that structures are independent of strategy, when you consider how

many businesses trot out similar versions of the traditional line struc-ture despite having diverse aims and purposes. It saves brain work to reach for the usual line diagram but the reality is that one size does not fit all in the world of structural design. It pays massive dividends to get the structure fit for the purpose of your very specific business.

2. Structure Must be Aligned with Values and Espoused CultureYour structural design will lie at the confluence of your intentions on strategy, values and culture. If your value statements are ever going to be more than just aspirational words on a page, and you want to turn your espoused culture in tangible behaviour, this will have massive implications for your structural design work. If your stated value is to be 'customer focussed' but your organisational design is all internal-ly orientated and lacks an external radar then you are building a fun-damental clash of values into your structure and the outcome will be confusion. If you claim that your workforce is your key asset, but your organisation is driven by compliance and control, you will end up with dispirited employees and high churn. Effective structures bring clarity so that everyone can quickly understand how they are to act and relate to others, internally and externally. And they are con-sistent with the aims and purposes of the organisation, so that every-thing resonates harmoniously. So how does your structure need to be flexed to be truly aligned with your values and emerging culture?

3. Size MattersWith a small business of up to 12 people firms naturally run as a family cluster. Once they reach 24-30 they start to operate as an ex-tended family, and everyone still knows everyone. The big changes start to kick in when the group size exceeds our ability to function like

Senior Teams

Effective structures bring clarity so that everyone can quickly understand how they are to act and relate to others, internally and externally.

Feature



This became popular in the days of the 'mill owner' industry, where there was a clear boss who (hopeful-ly) knew more than everyone else about what to do and how best to do it. But few organisations today have a boss who knows more or can perform better than their 'subordinates'. In fact many managers pride themselves on their ability to hire people who are better than themselves.

Recently, line structures have developed dotted reporting lines, in an attempt to reflect the more complex organising patters that are actually at play than a simple command and control chart can convey. Wherever you have a line drawing with a multitude of dotted reporting lines you can safely assume that hier-archy is the wrong organising principle for your firm. Time to move on.

THE CUSTOMER DOUGHNUTAnother popular concept, although more frequent-ly described than actually used as the basis for the true design. Here the organising principle is custom-er focus. Everything we do needs to make sense of what the customer needs or can be encouraged to want, so we put them in the middle of our 'dough-nut' and ensure that all are activities and resourc-es are co-ordinated around their discernible current

a family. The more people, and the more complex the interactions, the more you will need to clearly define how your structure works. By the time you get to 80 people the family feel has been replaced by multiple families, a tribe or has transformed into one of the or-ganising principles discussed in the next section.

Some firms attempt to impose heavy structures on small firms, that are still at the 'family size' end of the spectrum, and this usually leads to problems of unnecessary bureaucracy, slowing down the organisa-tion rather than enabling it. It is akin to trying on your dad's suit when you are still a kid. There is no need to complicate structures too soon.

This article is aimed at organisations in the 80 - 10,000 employee size. For much larger organisations, over 50,000, issues of control re-assert themselves. Some attempt to tackle the problem by imposing a strong command and control culture, aimed at quality assurance, health and safety and budget control. Others allow divisional structures to adapt to suit spe-cific local needs whilst ensuring their reporting struc-tures are consistent and aligned.

4. The Organising Principle and Structural ArchetypesBehind every structure is an inherent organising principle. As Yuval Harari helped us understand, in his wonderful book 'Sapiens: A brief history of human-kind', as a species we are in a constant search for an organising principle around which to cluster. Our rise to dominance, on this fragile planet, is in large part attributable to our ability to organise very large numbers of people around a compelling idea, such as a belonging to a tribe, region, political party or sporting club. It gives us a massive advantage over other species. Millions of people follow Manchester United Football Club even though the majori-ty seldom get to Old Trafford to watch a match in person. Organising principles are powerful cata-lysts and, of course, are also active in our working lives. So the fourth principle in structural design is to match the organising principle of your structure to the needs of your strategy. Here are seven arche-types to stimulate your thinking.

THE HIERARCHICAL LINE STRUCTURELet's start with the one we all know. Here the organis-ing principle is positional authority. I am in charge of you and you are in charge of them. The vast majority of organisations assume that their new structure will be some variant of a hierarchical organisational chart.

SALESOPSTECH FD

CEO

The Hierarchical Line Structure

FinanceDivisions

Technical

Marketing

Oper

atio

nsSa

les

Customer

Customer Doughnut

Wherever you have a line drawing with a multitude of dotted reporting lines you can safely assume that hierarchy is the wrong organising principle for your firm. Time to move on.

Feature

THE CONSTITUTIONA number of organisational designs are, essential-ly, empowerment structures where an agreed set of guidelines, values or meta processes become the or-ganising principle. This allows the work force to crack on with tasks unimpeded by the need to gain per-mission and sign off for their work. As long as they abide by the constitution they are free to act. A well worked through example of this is 'Holacracy', as de-scribed by Brian Robertson (www.holacracy.org) but there are many others based on the same principles. Whenever you hear that an organisation is values led or is a meritocracy you know that there are a set of agreed guiding principles that steer actions day by day. It is the constitution, rather than the hierarchy, that provides the rules of engagement. What Robertson has shown is how the system also leads to gover-nance, which is a useful development.

At present some 'values led' organisations also have a residual line structure, as if not able yet to fully commit to this form of structure. In most cases we have come across this has only served to confuse people who, when push comes to shove, revert to au-thority to satisfy their felt need for control. If you are going for a constitutional paradigm it needs to be the dominant and deciding force.

and future needs. Some organisations extend the model to think about how to view all staff as 'cus-tomers', with operations being the customers of the sales team, and so on.

THE PROJECT MATRIXMatrix organisations tend to get a bad press as it can be hard to make them work effectively when superim-posed on a traditional culture. But the key to unlock-ing their potential, at least in my experience, is to un-derstand that the organising principle behind them is to focus on the larger scale projects that are required to give the customer what they need. Arrayed around the matrix are the organisational strands of custom-er interface (North plane), divisional strands of in-ternal organisation (West plane), 'job family' strands of skills clusters (South plane) and support functions (East plane). Once a customer project has been iden-tified the appropriate resources to deliver that project are drawn from the West, South and East planes for the life time of that project, and then return to base awaiting the next project. The senior team's role is to ensure the constituent parts of the matrix remain just ahead of the emerging customer's need.

THE STAR PERFORMER CLUSTERA variation of the matrix archetype is to cluster re-source around a small number of 'brilliant' star per-formers, rather than client projects. As in the matrix, the resources are used in an agile and mobile way so that the unfolding needs of the enterprise can be flexed as the stars' work evolves. This structural prin-ciple can often be found in fast paced technology de-velopment companies, such as software houses or hi-tech engineering firms. It tends to work best when the resources are all in the same building so they can move fluidly between 'stars' and begins to creak at the edges when the work crosses locations and time zone.

Customers / Region

Divi

sions

Support functions

Job families / Skills group

Project Matrix

Stars Performer Cluster

Whenever you hear that an organisation is values led or is a meritocracy you know that there are a set of agreed guiding principles that steer actions day by day. It is the constitution, rather than the hierarchy, that provides the rules of engagement.

Senior Teams

Values

Principles

Processes

CEO

The Constitution



5. Descriptive and PrescriptiveThe fifth structural design principle is that the struc-ture has to genuinely say something predictive about the observable behaviours in your organisation. Anyone can draw a new structural diagram, that is rel-atively easy, but to have that actually influence day by day actions and decisions is much harder. Sometimes an organisation will base their structure on the be-haviours that actually take place in the real world of work, rather than attempt to change culture. Petra's organisation was a case in point. They wanted to bring in a new CFO and had had difficulties finding a suitable match to the existing senior team as the ones they found were used to more traditional structures. Although they had never articulated it Petra's organ-isation was running as a matrix with a constitution, and had been doing so since the early days of its for-mation. Everyone knew the rules of engagement but they were never written down. Fine when you have been there a number of years but confusing if you are joining from a different mind-set. So we wrote down the key rules they actually ran the organisa-tion by, which were to do with meritocracy (the best idea wins regardless of 'rank') and organising around main projects. Once 'described' these rules were then 'prescribed', as the constitution and matrix through which they worked.

It follows that in your structural design work you are not finished when you have the format neatly laid out on a sheet of A3. That is often just the start of a

THE AMOEBAEHow much do you remember from your biology classes at school? The amoebae has the ability to slowly change shape to suit its purposes and the envi-ronment it finds itself it. Adaptability, if not agility, is the organising principle here. There is a nucleus, aka the senior team, that governs the overall shift of evo-lution and rate of adaptation – not so fast that the in-herent structure is lost – not so slow that it fails to capitalise on changes in the environment. Because of the inherent flux in the structure the amoebae princi-ple requires the organisation to have the ability to ar-ticulate its current and future structure requirements on a regular basis, usually once a quarter.

THE FAMILY GROUPINGEvolution has hard wired us to do well in groups of up to 12 as a family or 24-30 as an extended family. So some organisations use 'family' clusters as their organising principle. There may be a tech-nology cluster and a key account cluster but each has their own space in the organisation and devel-ops an inherent sense of belonging. I work with a market research organisation that is successfully structured in this way. Outside of the work envi-ronment Churches, Mosques and Temples often use this structure, so that each person is a member of a study or house group, allowing the overall size of the organisation to continue to grow without losing the sense of family grouping.

The Amoebae

The Family Grouping

You are not finished when you have the structure design neatly laid out on a sheet of A3. That is often just the start of a journey. The next step is to ensure the senior team understand and abide by the inherent organising principles in the structure and 'walk the talk'.

Feature

journey. The next step is to ensure the senior team un-derstand and abide by the inherent organising princi-ples in the structure and 'walk the talk'. In fact I usually suggest the senior team try the new structure out 'for size' to see if they can live by it before announcing to the rest of the organisation. Less embarrassing that way.

6. Compliance and Independence One of the most intriguing aspects of structur-al design makes up the final principle. All structur-al designs have to cope with holding opposite forces in balance. Some are well known, such as the tension between sales and operations, where the need for flexibility of sales offering is held in creative tension with the need for operational efficiency. Others are less well articulated, of which the most common in our experience is the compliance and independence conundrum. The organisation needs its members to comply with a number of key performance con-straints, for example health and safety policies and 'just in time' processes. Set against that need is the fact that individuals usually want to feel empowered to achieve their objectives their own way, and find their energy inhibited if 'managed' too closely, not only being told what to do but also how to do it.

Most organisations I have worked with have needed to find a way to do both/and – set clear parameters within which people must work and free up the talent to produce excellent results. Some structural designs emphasise control and compliance, such as the hier-archical line structures. Others emphasise indepen-dence, such as the constitution. But you are likely to need both in your design. How will you reconcile the competing needs in your organisation, especially if you are a person who has a felt need for control?

Integrating Your Structural DesignI find it helps to draw the different strands of struc-tural design out on one page, as we did with Brian's engineering organisation. The plan was to grow from £20 to £100m over five years in a business focussed on providing commercially focussed technology de-velopment for its clients. The business was now too big (over 100) to be a family structure; it had become a tribe. He required clear governance but also needed resources to be flexibly clustered around their star performers. And he wanted to underscore the strong Northern pride that was alive and healthy in the busi-ness. People needed to want to work there. It was more than just a job.

Putting it all together Brian's call was to have a mix of a constitution and star performer clusters as their organising principles. The constitution focussed around a specific meta process that applied to all in-ternal and external projects, allowing each person to know what stage gate they were at. The star perform-ers worked on varied aspects of their clients tech-nology development projects. As befits a company focussed on commercial technology development, Brian had designed a structure that was inherently 'state of the art', matching the culture in his organisa-tion. An old style line based hierarchy would simply not have worked for them. They were too fleet of foot for that.

So what about your structure? When you reflect on how you are organised is it aligned with the needs of your business plan, values and culture? Most busi-nesses have structures that lag behind their strategy and have the net effect of slowing down progress against plan. Getting the structure exactly right is like taking the hand brake off. You will be amazed at the difference it makes.



MOST BUSINESSES HAVE STRUCTURES THAT LAG BEHIND THEIR STRATEGY AND HAVE THE NET EFFECT OF SLOWING DOWN PROGRESS AGAINST PLAN. GETTING THE STRUCTURE EXACTLY RIGHT IS LIKE TAKING THE HAND BRAKE OFF.

Senior Teams
