If you are a senior leader, how do you create standout results? You become the leader of choice to find, form, and execute on true value.
And how do you do it? By investing in your best leaders’ transformation capabilities.
For this cycle, I’m encouraging senior leaders to think differently about how to structure their investments as we accelerate out of this wave of the pandemic.
First, I’d suggest taking a step back and examining diagnostically, where you are strong, and which capabilities may need some additional support. Secondly, I’d encourage you to think about investing to elevate your leadership team above strong operational leadership to transformational leadership.
Since transformation can be one of those words that has lost its weight, what we are talking about is leadership that can establish a custom approach for your firm to put in place fresh products and services, predictably and reliably.
To make this jump, you’ll need to step beyond run rate budgeting and make some differential investments.
What is Transformation Capacity?
Simply stated, it’s a measure of the firm’s ability to find, form, and complete fresh projects, products, and initiatives that have significant paybacks.
The uniqueness of our work is twofold in that we let the diagnostic lead the way, and we don’t set a specific functional boundary that helps us identify cross-functional opportunities across R&D, development, marketing, manufacturing, and distribution.
We use a model that parses through the main elements and develop an agenda that harnesses the firm’s hidden resources. We measure it against nine dimensions on a 1-10 scale to allow us to get a specific sense of where the strengths and challenges lie. We then use this to validate a business case for investing that is anchored in the economics of the firm.
It’s a Team Effort
The process begins by identifying the key participants and holding 1:1 discussions to fill in the details of the diagnostic and get a specific sense of where to best invest our development time together. We then build custom developmental workshops to set the content, framework, and vocabulary for this effort. Once the initial workshops are completed, we co-invest in individual and small group coaching sessions to unlock the power of the new work in real execution environments.
In our workshops, we talk about two teams and clarify the roles that they both play in making this possible.
The first team is the senior leadership team. In their role to create fresh value, we need to have them lead in a variety of important ways:
- Communicate the big picture of stakeholders, mission, and vision
- Decompose the high-level vision into grounded strategic intent that connects to the functional teams
- Partition and apportion budget, talent, and resources for both ongoing operations and growth projects
- Serve as “air cover” and sponsors for the leaders that are guiding cross-functional efforts
- Invest in equipping their teams to be more adaptive and faster responding than their competitors
The second team is the Transformation Leaders and their team members. This group is responsible for catalyzing the strategic intent of the senior leaders in practical ways that will lead to value for the firm. We need them to do three things:
- Catalyze leveraged direction by integrating the project and the plan – being sure that the direction is both actionable and those actions are efficient.
- Create actionable confidence through joining the project and the team – having a plan that creates the assurance of a quality investment.
- Install internal clarity – be sure that the team and the full scope of the firm are clear on what this investment is intended to do and they all benefit.
As part of this work, we go through the precise interaction of these teams, identifying key information flows, meetings, review points, and specific agendas and points of emphasis. This jumpstarts the transformation process and sets the groundwork for the group to hit the ground running.
When these two teams work together, remarkable results follow. We have had several teams develop fresh manufacturing efficiencies, products and services.
Wrapping Up
There is no more important work than serving our clients through adaptation at this point in the recovery process. There is also no better way to be a standout contributor to your firm than either being a Transformational Leader or a senior leader who consistently grows them.
If you’ve read this far, you know implicitly that you are on one of three tracks. The first track is you’ve kept this material at arms length in an academic way, and you’re going to repeat what you’ve been doing. This will result in drift, and not get you closer to your goal. The second path is to take bits and pieces of this note and append them to what you already know, which will likely tweak your results, but not lead to the breakout that you were hoping for. Finally, you can hit the link below and start a journey that could geometrically improve your results.
Here’s the bottom line: you’ll never be closer to better results than you are right now. Keep in mind that with time, those three paths get increasingly more divergent – and a jump from one level to the next takes more and more energy and effort.
If you’d like to know more about the strategic assessment and the implementation framework, please select a time on the calendar with this link for a personalized 1:1 call with me.
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