Strategies and Secrets
It’s that time of year again. For organisations who work to the traditional financial year, there is a window of opportunity for managers. Somewhere between completing their online tax return and the Easter Holidays, the business plan which has been in gestation for the past few months is now ready to be expressed as a series of objectives, KPIs and team plans.
It’s a time of communications and cascades. A combination of ‘ra ra’ and dire warnings, the messages to the next level managers communicate the vision, the challenges, the new opportunities. There’s a healthy dose of ‘don’t screw up’ and a fair bit of eye rolling as last year’s targets are increased while budgets freeze.
As each function commits to the board to deliver new programmes and activities, the ‘from … to…’ PowerPoint slides fly through the ether to teams who must take their share of the heavy lifting to realise the organisational vision.
Ideally, these objectives, plans and strategies would be parlayed into the warp and weft of the organisation. Team targets would lead to capability maps and capability maps would transform themselves into individual training plans, building the team’s capacity to deliver. A chance to work smarter, link learning to business objectives which in turn delivers value to shareholders.
Sound familiar? Well, theoretically, but in practice?
The challenge seems to be somewhere in the middle. How do you ensure the managers and team leaders who weren’t involved in the inner sanctum of the business planning process fully understand what’s needed and, having done so, be able to explain the needs to their team members? In many of the organisations that I work with, that’s the bit where it all goes decidedly Pete Tong.
The barriers seem to be three fold.
The first is that achieving more from less, or doing different things in a changing environment is tricky. Without real clarity of purpose, real explanation and (be careful, here comes a dirty word) education… the fact is that many of the people to whom the grand plan has been delegated simply don’t get it. Yes, they can parrot the words, they may even be able to describe the key strategic thrusts and priorities, but does that mean they know what everyone should be doing on Tuesday? No, it doesn’t.
So, our first challenge is how do we train and (here it comes again) educate these important links in the corporate chain? I know one thing for sure: there’s anything but clarity in many organisational strategic pronouncements. Read the average outline of future strategy and your eyes will be awash with a torrent of corporate clichés and a tsunami of impenetrable jargon. The stand up routines of the directors released like an endangered species of very bad comedian are littered with meaningless phrases. My particular favourite is “going forward”. I thought that the future tense expressed the concept of “it’s going to happen in the future” not the need for an extra phrase. Going forward is a meaningless verbal tic. Except it isn’t. What is actually denotes and transmits is a person desperately wanting to be seen as thrusting and dynamic, but actually not having any clear idea about how or if something’s going to work. By its fatuousness it communicates more than they could ever know.
In a world of naked emperors, the middle manager pretends not to notice and commits to taking the key messages – whatever they are – back to the front line.
As route planning goes, this is a real case of “if you want to get there, I wouldn’t start from here”. But nonetheless, some team leaders and divisional heads do try their utmost to make sense of the corporate demands and break it down so that the people who have to actually do the job might understand the general direction of travel. Trouble is, what this means for the day to day work has probably not been worked out, so our teams are building a house without a blueprint. This is our second barrier.
In most organisations, there’s a disconnect between the front line and the strategists in head office. Some try to understand the reality of what it means to do the job – or did the job themselves a few years ago – but even with real life experience things change. Things change because the strategy changes and the day to day job that Tony the strategy director used to do 15 years ago, is a very different one from the role Antonia fulfils today. What’s more, one of the reasons it has changed is because Tony changed it. But still, the field experience from yesteryear seems to command incredible authority in planning circles.
The truth is, our modern day manager of the front line has a series of targets and financial goals to achieve, but no one who set the strategy has explained how it can be achieved, nor indeed if it can be achieved. One of the reasons no one seems to know if it’s possible, is the third barrier.
The plan which is now being communicated isn’t the strategic plan dreamed up over the last few months. In fact, the plans for financial year 2011 – 2012 were dreamed up over a year ago. In fact, just as last year’s plans were being rolled out the strategy for this year moved from being a gleam in some strategist’s eye to being a much loved and fussed over baby.
Well that’s how strategic planning has to happen, doesn’t it? Yes, probably, except there’s one simple weakness. If we only have plans and projections for where we’ll be when the plan starts, how can we have any faith that the world the plan has been drawn up to shape is the same world at all?
So what’s needed?
Well maybe it’s an all new approach to the development of business plans and the strategic planning cycle, but given I’m unlikely to be successful in convincing anyone to abandon these processes in 1,200 words, I’ll make a highly predictable plea for training and (yes, I really mean it) education.
The desperate desire I would want is that the learning and development team are involved early enough in the planning process (i.e. before the plan is communicated to everyone else) and are able to influence the plan by reflecting on the real people capability which the organisation possesses. The L&D input should also act as a brake on the more business speak components of the communications activity. If you’ve given some good people the job of actually having to help people understand how their role changes to meet the new demands of the organisation (and you’ve given them time to push back where it makes no sense) then you could be on to a winner. You will have built a feedback loop with people who really do have an incentive to get it right. Remember, these guys don’t do 45 minutes with a from… to… PowerPoint slide. They do six hours locked in a room with the great unconvinced. Believe me, it’s no fun trying to train in something which you know can’t possibly be achieved to people who are telling you it can’t possibly be achieved!
The second thing you have established is a deep understanding of the capacity and capability in the organisation. Most internal trainers can tell you exactly what skills and levels of understanding the people they work with are at, and as a consideration on which to build strategy, that’s probably more use than a blind faith that in 12 months time we will have hit all the targets we’ve only just set.
This approach requires a bit more planning and a few more people in the loop, and if you don’t have those extra resources, then you may need to think about bringing some people in who can help you to dissect the new skills needed implied by your new plans and build some tools to help your people gain them.
And that’s what I’ll talk about next week as we discuss the strategy secrets going forward.
