Whether you work for a company with 10 employees or 10,000, you have a good chance of using structures for large quantities of grain, coal, or wood chips, often called silos. For more than a thousand years, silos have been an effective way to contain and protect valuable materials. Isles are good at keeping things rather than letting go of things. Unfortunately, if you are not a farmer or a coal miner, the silo will not help your company. They separate people from their insights.
Three ways to cross silos keep your organization from achieving greater success: strategic dialogue, strategic capabilities, and strategic printing.
1. Strategy dialogue. Consider how much time you and your team spend throughout the year discussing operational, budgeting, and tactical issues. Now consider how much time your team spends discussing strategies. Is it 10:1, 20:1 or zero: zero? Research from Harvard Business School confirmed that 85% of leadership teams spend less than an hour a month discussing strategies, while 50% don’t take the time at all. Inattentive concern for strategy will have devastating consequences. A decade-long study of 103 companies by PwC shows that 81% of business failures are caused by bad strategies. But for most companies, it’s nothing more than annual events, ultimately in a show on dogs, with no further attention for the next 11 months.
As I helped companies of all sizes transition from annual events to ongoing conversations about their key business issues, I noticed the characteristics of some effective strategic conversations. First, they require dedicated time on the calendar. If you don’t schedule time with groups and other functional groups, then the conversation won’t happen at all – everyone is too busy. Second, effective dialogue is balanced properly, i.e., with a guiding framework to make it productive while allowing for the public surface of new ideas. Third, they occur at all levels. Strategic insights are not the exclusive area for a few senior leaders. Provides forums to discuss business for people at all levels.
2. Strategic capability. A new YSC study of 1,500 executives shows that in the U.S., only 23% of executives have a strong role in strategic thinking. Why so low? If you only play golf or guitar every year, would you play well? Probably not. If you only think strategically every year during the strategic planning process, you will not be strategic. What does this mean for you as an individual leader? Research by 60,000 executives in over 140 countries shows that “a strategic approach to leadership is on average 10 times more important than perceptions of effectiveness and is the importance of all other leadership behaviors.” In other words, if you think strategically from time to time and others don’t think you are strategic, you have a chance to gain greater role responsibilities and be zero. Without strategic capabilities, you will lack the knowledge, tools and skills to lead strategic dialogue and set the direction for your business.
I found that using a hybrid approach to developing strategic thinking abilities consisting of live quarterly workshops, monthly strategic adjustment meetings, video-based training reinforcement and pulsed virtual content (white paper, MP3, instructional video) is an effective menu of options for improving mindsets and behaviors. Another important component is providing managers with physical reminders in the environment to generate, capture and share their strategic insights. This can be done through a mobile application such as a policy vault or a basic laptop. The fact that 43% of managers cannot state their strategy means that your efforts to improve your team’s strategic capabilities may lead to a real competitive advantage.
3. Strategic printing. One of the first questions I asked during my promotion of strategic planning workshop was: “Who can describe the strategy of the other people in the room?” Cricket (for those who don’t live in the Midwest, that means it’s so quiet that you can hear the cricket). If we don’t have a simple, effective and effective way to convey our strategies to others, then we will minimize the collective wisdom of the company. A BSC survey found that 73% of companies outperform peers have a formal process to communicate strategies with other companies in the company. Current CEO Alan Mulally is in the midst of a dramatic turnaround at Ford Motor Company, which has taken them from the brink of bankruptcy to profitable growth, said: “It’s a huge business, and the magic is that everyone knows the plan.”
An effective tool I developed to help leaders set and communicate business directions, which is strategic printing. This strategy printing is a blueprint for the two-page business. Page One captures key insights into business in four areas: markets, customers, competitors and companies. The second page is the action plan, which determines goals, goals, strategies, strategies and metrics. By using a common and concise planning tool, leaders can effectively communicate their strategies to others around the organization so that everyone is in the well-known “same page.” The strategic printing can also help leaders align with others, first finding common ground on goals, and then cascading at various levels of the company. The result is a simple tool that can span silos and ensure collaboration of thoughts and actions.
Isles are used for corn and coal, not for strategy. I facilitated a strategic dialogue, which led to insights that generated $100 million product after three years. This happens because people take time to get together, have a professional framework to guide discussions, and open up new ideas. If you are willing to remove the silo, $100 million can buy you a lot of corn and some coal.
Rich is the founder and CEO of the Institute of Strategic Thought and has helped more than 50,000 managers worldwide develop their strategic thinking skills. He served as Chief Strategy Officer and Professor of Strategy, which brings both real-world experience and practical expertise, while helping groups build their strategic skills. Rich is a best-selling author of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today Strategy and appears on ABC, NBC and Fox. Sign up to receive a free copy of your strategic thinker and read the Strategy Coffee Blog by visiting www.strategyskills.com.
