Have you ever spent a lot of time, money and resources on things that appear to be effective in improving your firm’s competitiveness – only to find that your market position has not budged?
One of the privileges of the work I do is having the ability to speak with C-level leaders in complex firms. One truth we talk about early in our work together is the fact that every firm reaches equilibrium within their markets at a level they are built for. The market is a ruthless truth-teller…it puts firms in a rank order that is very hard to break out of because it is established by the fundamental way a firm is built and the journey that brought them there.
When first faced with this truth, most senior leaders balk, as there is a deep root of self-determination built into the leadership psyche of those that aspire to take the reigns. The breakthrough in thinking comes when they realize that by changing what they can control strategically ( i.e., the internal approach and structure of the firm), the physics of the market has to move them to a new position.
So, to achieve this movement, you need to go to work strategically, and you need to find the resources to do it. One of the shrewd ways to do that is to take advantage of hidden resources that can be activated within the firm: your existing employees.
Bridging the Generational Gap (to Put the Market in Charge)
One very new reality of the emergent workplace is that we currently have five generations active at one time. Each of these generations has very different experiences, insight, and expectations, which typically creates friction and misunderstanding when they need to work together.
In my consulting with multiple firms, the leaders I work with have come to see this reality as an underappreciated challenge and opportunity. With some work, we can get our teams to coalesce and take action that both improves our market positioning and sets up significant payback on our investment. Left unaddressed, however, these teams continue to gridlock and fail to deliver the market-moving results they are capable of.
How it’s Done
In our workshop, we begin this process by rolling up our sleeves and looking at external trends, events, and changes in the client needs and problems. By doing a deep dive on the needs outside the firm, it gives us the ability to have all five generations sit on the same side of the table and address the customer’s need, shoulder to shoulder. With some coaching and the right platforms for dialogue, we are able to activate and harness this generational diversity, rather than having it become friction.
Achieving this requires some new skills of leadership. The group’s leader needs to be very cognizant of communication style preferences, generational mindset and expectations. The firms that get the most from this work put a group process platform and relevant coaching in place to move the group to high function.
Breaking it Down
By working hard to agree on specific client challenges and how to address them, we create an “esprit de corps” that builds the team, rather than pushes it apart. When the group experiences teamwork at this level, they are all free to bring the best thinking from a very deep and rich well of insight and experiences. Here are three ways to get there:
- Put your wealth of the groups experience to use to bring out insights. In firms that are jump-starting their growth journey, we do a deep dive on both key capabilities and leadership differences. We use tools like the Complete Growth Leader to highlight our key strengths and increase our understanding of how we shop up on a team.
- Do the work of having analog conversations to come to grips with key external events for your clients. Next, we set up the opportunity for rich external dialogue. This may take place through trade shows, user groups, ride alongs and other paths that create rich, human to human connections. By getting this fresh front line information, we are able to much more accurately target our work, instead of chasing an older “avatar” composite profile.
- Activate & integrate it. We then put the project in a tight time box and develop those features and characteristics that we know will “wow” the client. We use a tool called STRIDE to do both the creative work and the investment to scale. This model builds the strongest possible cross-functional approach by including all members of the value chain.
One last thought: traditional alignment and change management rarely do the important external work first…an approach that runs the risk of aligning the firm to its internal domain opinions. This can further deepen the functional silos in your firm and delay the robust, fresh offerings that will propel growth forward.
If you’d like to hear more about the process specifics that underly this overview, please give me a call at 847-651-1014 or set up an appointment using this link.
Related posts you can benefit from…
