Making Your Business Strategy Work in Practice
Author: Sean Kilemade
To contribute effectively to business strategy, leaders must have the necessary skills and competencies. Taking a holistic approach to personal and professional development can be the key to success, says Sean Kilemade.
Joe met Frank in the practice car park on the way to the early morning strategy review meeting. Frank volunteered for strategy implementation assignments and is having difficulty managing them along with his normal workload. Frank also has some stressful challenges in his private life. He has confided in Joe, the managing partner, regarding the issues. When they reached the office Frank stopped at the door and stood still. He looked Joe in the eye and said “But I’ll tell you this – as soon as I step over this threshold I put all that grief behind me. I don’t let it affect me in the slightest. I am totally focused on the job.” Joe nodded but thought to himself “if only he knew”. Frank is living in delusion, but not for long. The managing partner has booked a meeting with Frank after the strategy review. He has received a lot of negative feedback about Frank over the last few months and intends to raise the issue with him today. He is quite nervous about the conversation.
The end product of any strategic process must be a programme of business improvements delegated to responsible individuals. The word ‘strategic’ implies that the improvement programme aims to elevate the firm’s operation on to a higher competitive plane. Despite the intensive thinking, discussions and hours of work, most strategic plans fall short. There are many reasons for this, but let’s look at two principal reasons why this may be so.
-Making unrealistic commitments to delivering on strategic goals
-Fear of operating outside the comfort zone to deliver results
People with business goals will have other pressing priorities both inside and outside of work. Some will allow themselves to over commit and accept new projects. Others will back off accepting more responsibilities or accept those responsibilities half heartedly. The end result of failing to engage the realistic commitment of the key people to strategic responsibilities is a doomed business strategy. Commitment is realistic when the input of focus and effort matches the success criteria of the project. Unrealistic commitment arises when the focus and effort offered is either insufficient, or is sufficient but unsustainable over the duration of the project.
A holistic approach offers a solution to this problem. Such an approach embraces all of the concerns of individuals when they are asked to commit a serious investment of time and energy to a prolonged project.
To be successful, the approach must be holistic, embrace all dimensions of a person’s life and provide the best chance of gaining realistic sustainable commitment to business goal achievement. Think of your life as consisting of three dimensions – personal, professional, and business.
Personal Dimension
The Personal Dimension is about you as a human being, your personal needs, interests, hopes and concerns. It includes your family, your relationships and roles in the community. The personal dimension is the most important for long-term happiness and peace of mind. The benefits you enjoy in the personal dimension are reasons why we engage ourselves in the other two dimensions. These benefits are the reasons ‘why’ we work. Sometimes we forget these reasons.
Professional Dimension
The Professional Dimension is about your capability to create value in the world of work. It includes your knowledge, skills, experience, and expertise. These assets enable you to create value and receive value in exchange. These assets are the ‘what’ we bring to the world of work in order to earn a living.
Business Dimension
The Business Dimension (which includes work/job) is about the contractual arrangements and structures we establish to apply our professional assets for reward. These arrangements are the ‘how’ we operate to create value in the world of work.
The holistic approach recognises all three dimensions. While acknowledging the need for balance, it accepts the reality that we cannot always be in balance. However, it is essential that one examines and defines one’s individual/personal balance in order to restore harmony to one’s life regularly. Managing life balance ensures that workers maintain the energy needed to perform excellently while at work. A business leader or manager should make realistic commitments to delivering strategic outcomes based on life balance.
It helps immensely if they have engaged in a strategic planning process for the personal and professional dimensions of their own lives with a focus on life balance.
If business strategy is good for the health of the business then personal strategy it is also good for the health of the person. And of course healthy people are good for business. We in ICAI’s Practice Consulting team recommend that business owners and managers prepare, adopt and implement a Strategic Life Plan comprising two Plans:
-a Life Balance Plan and
-a Strategic Business Plan.
The thinking that goes into the former is highly personal and engaging because it is all about you. Yet it is as confidential as you wish it to be. Both plans follow a similar format so preparing your Life Balance Plan is good preparation for crafting your Strategic Business Plan. Writing a Life Balance Plan is potentially the most important investment you will ever make. It involves an investment of time and mental concentration. For everyone, writing is a creative activity that directly accesses the subconscious mind. It facilitates an internal conversation with yourself. As you engage fully in preparing your Life Balance Plan, you will generate greater clarity about what is important in your life and what you need for yourself and others going forward. You will develop clarity about your personal and professional needs for the future and how to meet them. You will realise the importance of your career as a provider of job satisfaction and also money to facilitate achieving your Life Balance Goals. Whether you are a partner, manager or staff member your Life Balance Plan allows you to make realistic commitments to achieving results in business or your job. The plan is flexible in that it provides room for give and take. In life, as in nature, there is a process of ebb and flow. Life is seldom in balance for very long. Yet with a Life Balance Plan there is an inbuilt momentum moving you back to balance more frequently.
Fear Of Operating Outside the Comfort Zone
Accepting responsibility for delivering strategic goals can be scary for those unaccustomed to being goal driven. Your success will usually be achieved through other people, requiring a high degree of self management coupled with an ability to lead and manage others. Your job is to get the best out of others in your quest for results. You may be an expert in your technical discipline but a novice when it comes to getting high performance results through others. We described the Professional Dimension of life above. This includes technical competencies and people managerial competencies.
With regard to the latter there may have been little in your past training to equip you for the challenge ahead. Competencies are a combination of behaviours, values, attitudes and talents which enable job holders to deliver superior performance at work.
When it comes to high performance in managerial roles, it is not high IQ and technical expertise that matters most. Over twenty years of research in the world’s leading organisations has shown that emotional intelligence and soft skills are at least twice as important in achieving superior performance in management positions. This is a crucial point. It indicates that people management skills are a critical success factor in delivering strategic results. Clearly the strategy process itself needs to identify the critical soft skills competencies that partners and managers are required to exercise as they lead people to deliver strategic objectives.
Competency Approach
The competency approach enables business leaders to benchmark and develop the critical competencies that are relevant to a specific firm given its strategic intent for competing more effectively in future.
The approach enables firms to:
-Identify and clearly define the critical competencies for target partner and managerial jobs in the context of the strategic agenda
-Pinpoint the competency attributes that lead to superior performance
-Bring greater clarity and focus for job holders as they engage in getting better results
-Provide a language to discuss job performance more objectively
-Facilitate more effective performance reviews while minimising the scope for negative reactions from job holders
-Provide clear guidance on behavioural change in order to enhance job performance
-Help to shape and communicate the desired culture within the business
-Enhance awareness of different personality types on the team and thereby enable improved interpersonal communication and collaboration
The Competency Approach Involves Four Elements:
-JOB BENCHMARKING : Disregard the current job-holder; look only at the job; if the job could speak, what job-holder attributes would the job ask for in order to be performed in a superior manner given the strategic context? Attributes include behaviours, personal values and soft skills.
-SELF-EVALUATION : By job holder against the bench-marked attributes.
-GAP DISCLOSURE : Facilitating a more objective and constructive discussion of the job in terms of deliverables, soft skills required, training needs, behavioural adjustment, motivational factors, culture fit, etc.
-JOB HOLDER DEVELOPMENT PLAN
Bridging the competency gaps by establishing and continuously reviewing the job holder development plan in order to achieve high performance in the job.
The competency process equips you with enhanced skills to successfully deliver the business improvement programme. It enables you to engage in personal and professional development relevant to your new challenges in the strategic context. You learn to develop personal strategies to overcome obstacles, and to identify and adopt the best means to achieve longer-term goals.
The process challenges current thinking and provides a framework for exploring new possibilities, methods and opportunities to achieve results in a more efficient manner. It helps people to develop greater self-responsibility and self-reliance, creativity, assertiveness and highly positive attitudes to what can be achieved in all situations.
‘Responsible’ is a key word and a key requirement.
There is a natural tendency to avoid responsibility. It is a brave, but effective, and valuable, person, who steps up and says ‘I’ll take responsibility for this project and I will be accountable for its success’. Responsible people say … ‘if it is to be, it is up to me’ … they either do it or they don’t – they offer no excuses.
Back to our story about Frank. Our Managing Partner has just read this article as he waits nervously for Frank to arrive in his office. He wishes that the firm’s strategic process included a Life Balance Plan for himself and his team. Frank would certainly have benefited from that. He made unrealistic commitments given his life situation. Secondly, he wishes that the competency process had been applied to Frank and all the partners and managers. Undoubtedly the meeting he is about to enter would have been more positive and more beneficial for the partners, staff and the firm as a whole.