They had seemingly done it all correctly: held the offsite, chartered a leader and provided the resources asked for by the team. The person leading the team was one of their best – a leader with a talent for influence and results.
Why then, was this work stream falling short of implementation and financial contribution?
It’s a very common pattern: the chartered team carries the project into the creation of the first prototype and then it meets strong resistance – and stalls. I hear it around the internet of things (IOT) projects, new features in SaaS firms and among financial services teams.
When we dig into the diagnosis together, what we find is that many things were set up for success: there was a strong idea, a high potential leader and aircover from senior management. So why do these promising projects stall out?
The Myth of the Heroic Leader
Popular press loves to find and tell the story of the leader who grabbed the organization by the scruff of its neck and willed a vast new business into existence. These business personas become myths and legends in the press: Delorean, Iacooca, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Bezos. We love to hear about the lone wolf who sees what we do not and leads others out of sheer charismatic power.
These are all extraordinary leaders who clearly have met success, yet our own ratios of transformation project success remain stubbornly low. (see stories here and here). Why does this occur?
There is one simple reason: the organizational resistance scales faster than the hero can create support.
When we depend on outpacing resistance as the sole way to get growth done, we set ourselves up for projects that don’t break through. Many times, rather than their projected results, we find promising proofs of concept that struggle to find traction.
How to Assist your People who Aspire to Lead Growth
So, then leadership is not important, right? Of course it is – putting a new value proposition in place takes solid leadership.
But, to improve success rates, it takes more. We need to equip the leader and team with the frameworks that will allow our leaders to put together a team that has insight, resilience and momentum. Rather than risk scaling resistance, we do the work in the light of day and build support.
We do that by carefully looking at the path of value creation, and assuring that we have precisely the right project, the right team and the right plan.
Right Project
Why it’s Important: Most project selections focus on the internal firm’s capability, not the client’s key problem to be solved. Great projects focus the best energy of the firm on their clients’ most compelling issues.
What a Framework Looks Like: A good process starts with the internal view of the outside world, then systematically expands to include powerful outside viewpoints. Then, this augmented insight is used to provide a grounded starting point to charter an internal project. This work is done in concert with the firm as a whole, assuring that we’ve worked through any questions of internal competition.
How it Moves Results Forward: When the team collaboratively builds insight together, it removes friction and creates buy in.
Right Team
Why it’s Important: Many times we choose the “best available” fractional team members who can pick up the work of this “new initiative.” We need to instead choose team members by their mindset, communication preferences and expectations. We must also make sure that they have the ability to fully commit to the success of the project.
What a Framework Looks Like: For leadership style, we use the “Complete Growth Leader” framework to identify the thought and behavior diversity of the team in advance.
How it Moves Results Forward: By having the right mix of the right committed participants, we move the probability of success much higher.
Right Plan
Why it’s Important: Even the best project with the best members needs a strong plan to succeed. This includes governance and operation of the group over the arc of investigation and implementation.
What a Framework Looks Like: We use the STRIDE model to assure that we have a plan that can move us powerfully from applied strategic work to full commercial implementation.
How it Moves Results Forward: Having a clear path through the difficult hand over from the strategic development work to the full operational scale up allows the firm’s best work to be delivered to the right clients.
When you build your growth teams with this structure, you automatically build scale, as well. If you are missing one piece of this platform, you’ll be sacrificing time, energy and precious resources.
If you’d like to hear more about this approach, please give me a call at 847-651-1014, or set up a 20-minute chat using this link.
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