I’ve been having a great season of connecting with many clients and colleagues and it’s given me a great opportunity to think deeply about how to work with you and your teams so that you can take your results to the next level.
A really important dialogue thread that has come up several ways is this: we are all pushing to a new level of activity and somehow, in all this busyness, our firms are asking us to deliver on breakout growth programs, as well.
This immense tension is more than stress inducing, it’s killing our long-term results. In becoming overly focused on the core, we limit ourselves to the underlying growth rate of those offerings and miss the rich potential of exploring and unlocking the geometric growth in adjacencies and new markets.
Contributing to this tension is an increasing preoccupation with the “now.” We look at our phones every 10 minutes for updates and work tirelessly at eliminating those little red circles. We shudder when our phone vibrates with a new text or an update from slack. Our stakeholders want to know what we’ve done for them today, and what the earnings will be this quarter.
It’s time to “live outside the digital feed” and think deeply about our next steps personally, as a team and as a group and commit to incremental strategic action that leads to powerful outcomes. Yes, we need to operate the current business with excellence, and, as leaders we need to have an equally well developed skill to lock in strategic vectors and take action on them.
Knowing this, how can we use this intense focus as a lever to make us more strategic?
The anecdote is much crisper and efficient strategy work. Rather than allowing the white heat of the urgent to consume all our resources, the need is to build very compelling future states and walk that back into the same systems that are pulling our talent into the short term.
I’m having great conversations about how to insert “digital accelerators” into everything from improving speed and accuracy in bid and quote, to designing better enterprise offering bundles. This “next level” thinking combined with rich detail in planning allows work to move from whiteboard to the P&L.
What are the specific actions to get to work on this?
We’ll the bad news is that it’s more work for the leadership team – once. The great news is that when this work is done, you will get more of the right growth work developing organically. Yes, talent will be drawn to your teams magnetically, and projects will get done on scope and budget. Customers will step forward to work with you and your sales team will get more meetings.
My coaching to firms is always to “prime the pump” and put one, really well-structured strategic growth program in place. The magic of one is that your best and brightest will quickly take note, and by investing your attention in this way, you are sending a powerful signal that you are serious about escaping the gravitational pull of your core offerings (for some tips on how to do this check out previous posts here, here and here).
Take advantage of this potential by doing some diagnosis and opportunity seeking. This doesn’t need to be long and drawn out – my usual process involves a series of short interview dialogues with key leaders using a question set that I’ve vetted to expose those blind spot inhibitors and opportunities. Out of these, we will draw out several specific hypothesis areas and prepare a custom workshop for the team.
Next, plan a one-day session where the guarantee is that we’ll both leave that room with significant new knowledge, clarity and some new opportunity.
Finally, we’ll then wrap up this work with a set of notes and recommendations that you can use to get started in decomposing these into the action-oriented systems that your team uses for its main workstreams.
Restoring the Ability to do Both + And
Pulling your team from the tyranny of the urgent to real strategic progress takes a significant act of personal and organizational leadership. Every firm I work with has unique internal elements, and together, we find the short list of precisely which ones will result in high-value outcomes. The differential rewards are significant for you, your firm and the communities that you take part in.
If you’d like to talk, give me a call at (847) 651-1014 or use this link to set up a 20-minute, (no-strings-attached) consult.
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