Many organizations embrace the need for their leaders to convene offsite, for a day or two, in order to advance their ability to achieve a desired future state and to improve group performance by crystallizing and preparing to launch one or more Strategic Initiative. The best organizations know that to achieve optimum results such a session is best hosted by a trained outside facilitator and that pre-meeting data collection and preparation are key to success.
An organization that does not know how it will meet the demands of its current customers, or
An organization that has no idea where its next customer will come from, or
An organization that does not know how it will acquire resources needed to meet a surge in demand.
Such organizations exist and they are stuck. That is, their ability to perform and grow is severely constrained.
Organizations that experience sustained growth and high performance execute, create demand, and develop capacity in orderly, or systematic, ways. A system is a collection of resources working together to accomplish a common goal. The resources of an organization aggregate into three essential systems:
The Execution System, or what the organization does to Do what it does.
The Demand Creation System, or what the organization does to Sell what it does, including marketing, lead generation, sales, sales engineering, proposal writing, and sales support.
The Capacity Development System, or what the organization does to Grow, including training, recruiting, fund raising, performance assessment, goal setting, systems development, and process engineering.
Anything an organization does other than Do, Sell, or Grow, and that makes sense to continue doing, should be to facilitate, improve, or otherwise efficiently support its ability to Do, Sell, and Grow.
An organization that has execution problems essentially has no other problems because there is no point to growing or to landing new customers if the organization cannot even Do what it does to reliably deliver to customers it already has. Without a way to capture, organize, and distribute its collective knowledge from serving customers, an organization may have just a collection of unconnected experiences such that every new customer may be a “whole new adventure”. An organization that does not know for certain how it will meet delivery obligations runs serious risks and will find it difficult, if not impossible, to maintain control over the quality of its products and services.
Once there is a reliable way to execute, there is confidence to generate demand. However, without a way to generate demand that is predictable, repeatable, replicable, documented, maintained, taught, and ever-evolving, the organization’s ability to Do and Grow is likely to be constrained by its ability to Sell.
When new sales cause demand to exceed delivery capacity, it must Grow capacity to deliver. When capacity to deliver exceeds demand, it must Grow sales capacity. A growing organization needs to be clear about how it will add capacity to Doand how it will add capacity to Sell. For many organizations, this means identifying and cultivating sources of people, recruiting, and professional development.
At any time an organization’s ability to perform and grow tends to be constrained by one of the three core systems. Leadership’s job is to decide which system needs to evolve next and how.
For example, if a product provider generates more demand than can be handled by existing operations, then more production capacity is required. Once production capacity is in place, sales capacity may need to expand in order to put the increased production capacity to work. However, the amount of sales capacity should likely need to increase at a much slower rate than the rate of delivery capacity because a little more selling capacity should drive the need for a lot more delivery capacity.
In this sense, then, the evolution of Do, Sell, and Grow systems is iterative and staggered with execution capacity out in front of demand creation which is out in front of capacity to grow.
CEOs should consider the following when assigning tasks to leadership team members:
Members of the leadership team are likely to be the most capable people in the organization and therefore among the most important to deploy optimally.
Each needs to be especially clear about what is most important for them to do and then spend the lion-share of their time doing it.
If something is important to do, then someone important ought to be in charge of getting it done.
Each member of the top team ought to be in charge of something important.
It is not possible to be personally responsible for more than one or two important things at a time.
The idea is to ensure that at least what well-deployed leaders focus on goes well and to model how things should be done for the rest of the organization. Think of it this way: leadership team members don’t have to get everything right, but they each have to get something right.
The Problem
Most people, including even most top leaders, instinctively choose to spend their time doing many more than one or two things, possibly because in their minds:
Doing many things increases the odds that something will go well.
Having too many things to do gives a great excuse for not being successful at any particular thing.
The need to think hard about how to spend time is replaced by the much easier rule to spend time based on demands of the next email, text, tweet, phone call, conversation, knock on the door, etc.
Having so many things vying for attention makes a leader feel powerful and busy, often to the point of having a “Hero complex”.
On the other hand, having many things to do means the most important people do not meet their goals because:
Each task gets too little time, attention, and effort.
Each leader works hard, but gets little done, gets tired, loses confidence, and feels ineffective yet has an inflated sense of self importance.
The CEO’s job is to make clear what is most important for each leadership team member to do and to arrange for them to do it, and little-to-nothing else, even though it may cause leadership team members to feel a greater risk of failure.
The Solution
To solve the problem, the CEO should:
Work with each leader to rank their assignments in priority order.
Ask if the odds of success on the most important task would go up if the leadership team member were to spend more time on it. The answer will likely be “Yes”.
Tell the leader to spend all their time on their top priority task until the odds of success would not get any better with any more time on it.
Most leaders will shudder at the thought of having so little to do as they realize it is now incumbent on them to be successful at just one important task. It occurs quickly that they might not be successful. When they ask: “What if I fail?” the CEO should express so much confidence that the leader will succeed that s/he will absolve her/him of such risk and promise to assign yet another important task should she/he fail at this one.
The CEO should add that if the leader puts everything into completing an assigned task, but fails on six different tasks in sequence, then, and only then,maybe it will be time to discuss whether there is good fit with the organization.
The intent is to put the fear of failure far into the future to free the the leader to concentrate on the task they have been asked to do and not on the downside consequences of failure. The fear of failure thus moves from the leader to the CEO who is then highly motivated to provide assistance, resources, governance, and incentives to maximize the odds of success.
Related Points
When a matter comes up for discussion, ask if it is important. If it is, then ask who is in charge of making sure it goes well. If no one comes to mind then assign someone or second guess its importance.
When speaking with someone on the leadership team, ask what important thing they are responsible for completing. If nothing comes to mind then it is fair to wonder why they are on the leadership team.
If something is not important then no one should even be thinking about it.
The points presented in this post align well with Steven Covey’s parable about Big Rocks. and the first three principles of his7 Habits for Effective People: end in mind, first things first, and be proactive.
UMass Commonwealth Honors College Awards Presentation
Whether on campus or in the workplace, effective leadership involves seven disarmingly simple truths, says alumnus Peter F. DiGiammarino ’75. As the Eleanor Bateman Alumni Scholar in Residence for spring 2012, DiGiammarino led two events during which he offered advice on becoming an effective leader.
Peter DiGiammarino makes keynote dinner speech at awards function for Commonwealth College Honors students.
Leaders, he explained, “get loose.” Top leaders break through conventional boundaries to find new solutions to everyday problems. They also follow a set of powerful guidelines, which DiGiammarino breaks into actions driven by seven simple truths that he says can help facilitate change at any level.
These truths are:
1. An organization exists to solve a problem for people.
At University of Massachusetts 2012 Bateman Scholar Public Lecture, IntelliVen founder and CEO PeterD presented a 45 minute lecture that summarizes 35 years of insight gleaned from successfully helping dozens of organizations get on track to long-term growth and performance, generally in the role of leader or an adviser to the founder, owner, investor, and/or the CEO of ventures with between 2 and 20 people positioning to grow to 200 to 2000.
These insights have been honed while teaching at a number of universities, most recently at American University where he serves as an adjunct professor teaching Master’s Students in Organization Development about leadership and organization analysis and strategy and at the UMass Commonwealth Honors College where he has served as guest lecturer on Leadership.
Now, in the hope of helping you Manage to Lead, please see him present about 50, from a library of more than 400, slides that summarize ever-evolving insights and lessons learned by clicking on the image below:
Slides for Manage to Lead Seven Truths to Help You Change the World
Many organizations embrace the need for their leaders to convene offsite, for a day or two, in order to advance their ability to achieve a desired future state and to improve group performance by crystallizing and preparing to launch one or more Strategic Initiative. The best organizations know that to achieve optimum results such a session is best hosted by a trained outside facilitator and that pre-meeting data collection and preparation are key to success.
