Big audacious goals? Huge opportunities? Poised for take-off?
You’ve got the market winds behind you and a product or service offering like nobody else’s. What’s to worry about? My thirty years’ consulting experience tells me that successful executives do worry, and ask themselves, “Do I have the organization that can carry us there?”
Like that wonderful car you loved for many years, be it a beat-up old Subbie or souped-up two-seater Bimmer, if you keep driving what got you this far, it might keep you from getting to where you need to be.
It’s an exciting time when you can see great opportunity ahead. And stepping back from the marketing and operational tasks to look at your company’s capability for change and speed takes discipline. It’s also not that complicated! It involves looking at three aspects of your company: the structure, the people and your leadership.
Winning the Race
I was working for several months with a large media network. The Executive VP wanted to grow the station’s ad revenue profitability. He had the top ratings in news and prime time programming. He even had corporate behind him with new investment dollars. No headwinds there!
So what was he worried about? He wasn’t confident he had the organizational structure or capability (i.e. people and processes) to make it happen fast.
To keep the story short, we designed a plan to enhance the station’s change capability using one big lever: engagement of the people key to realizing the opportunity. This cross-section of people was invited to look at:
- how they were working (including their own experiences and process/cost data)
- whether they had line of sight to the opportunity and its potential impact
- if they had sufficient decision authority (i.e. no hierarchical or bureaucratic barriers) to make changes, test them for results, and then keep moving forward.
In just a few days of collaborative problem-solving, data analysis and dialogue on options, the team not only came to understand what helped or hurt profitability but how their organization structure and processes needed to be reworked, and how to streamline decision-making for faster execution. These weren’t “recommendations sent up the chain.” They were action plans that they signed up to do!
Lessons Learned
When I met with the Executive a few weeks later, he confided that his people had seen some of the same issues he had, but they took bolder steps toward the goals than he would have dared take on his own. They could see how to win the race more clearly, and they had built a faster, more responsive. ‘car’, not just given it a tune-up.
This EVP also learned something about himself. If he wanted to drive faster, he had to take his foot off the brake and trust his people with more information and decision-authority. He had to let them experiment and learn from what worked and what didn’t. He saw greater possibilities with a different leadership approach.
Finally, in this change effort, he modeled and reinforced the behaviors and capabilities he wanted to drive change: focus, using real facts/data, collaboration, risk-taking by leaders and their people, results. This action-learning approach not only engaged and empowered, it demonstrated the kind of leadership and the support people could expect from him. Some change had to happen at the top too.
Whether you are an executive in a large company or a small business owner, when you have great opportunities, pause to take a reality check on the capability of your company to get there with speed and agility. Engage the talent in your company to look at the car they’re driving and how to make it faster, more efficient, and more responsive to the road ahead. If you do, the ride will be exhilarating.