One of the most underappreciated skills we work on with accountable leaders who direct growth in big firms is the ability to have productive conflict. By productive conflict, we mean conflict that leads to clarity, alignment and resources being applied to the right problem.
We’ve spoken before about how real growth pivots around three elements: the right project, the right team and the right plan (read more here). The challenge, is doing the collaborative work to shape each of these areas.
The reason this is so challenging, is that in most complex firms, we’ve been implicitly taught by the culture that control and keeping the peace is more important than having productive dialogue.
This culture is a natural outcome of the maturing of a firm, and as the work becomes more specialized, the overall coordination of all the actions tends to become more centralized. This in turn creates an environment where leaders become more “directive” and less collaborative. In time, this moves towards a tops down pattern, where leaders govern from their internal snapshot of customer needs, guided by their intuition. In short, they fixate on their view of the client and guide the firm to meet it.
Of course no one actor in the firm sets this in motion – it is a natural dance that has been a pattern in firms for decades. The result of this pattern though is also well known, and that is a gradual march away from the real needs of the client and a centering on the needs of the firm. The more this progresses, that is the more the gap between the firm’s needs and the client’s needs diverge, the bigger the opportunity for disruption.
You see these firms in the headlines (here and here). However, I have seen this pattern in much smaller firms that have been in place for a few years and have allowed central authority to overrule changes in client needs and preferences.
Inside the firm this shows up as people being reluctant to frame the client needs and speak “truth to power.” This “nice” approach to not speaking up when we are mortgaging future growth is the slippery slope that major disruptions are built on.
A 3-Step Approach to Creating the Right Conflict
So just how do we do this?
#1: The Right Mix
There is a really subtle self-selection process that takes place in firms where the early truth tellers, who were peers when the firm was being formed, move up and become the leaders. This works really well when the firm is fresh, and these newly promoted leaders are still close to the client. Over time, however, their internal view ages and the firm tends to replace them with people who love data and optimization, but who are less vocal.
This aging of the internal viewpoint and focus on optimization creates a toxic brew. We need to very intentionally build teams that have a mix of doers, analyzers and truth tellers who are at the peer level. I have built a tool to identify these role preferences, and also teaches them how to work together productively, which I call the Complete Growth Leader (see here and here).
#2: The Right Sponsorship
We organize the project to make sure that we are engaging the client voice with the right lateral stakeholders at the right time for the right feedback. To execute this correctly, we use a governance process that puts an executive sponsor in the role of managing the lateral executive relationships to assure the project has air cover, connection and support when needed. This avoids the dreaded “stall” and pocket veto that can come from deferred conversations (see articles here and here).
#3: The Right Process
Once we’ve got the above two items in place, we need a path for our projects to follow that assures we are getting into the hard discussions at the right time. We use a model that accelerates the value proposition launch, provides the right focal points and prepares the group to hand things off at the right time (for more on this process, see articles here and here).
If you’d like to talk more about how to use this valuable process inside your own organization to make sure programs have momentum, please reach out to me at 847-651-1014 or you can use this link to set up a 20-minute dialogue with me directly in my calendar. Thank you.
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