Category: Starting a Business

Entrepreneurship is as invaluable to large organizations as it is to small ones, perhaps more so. While big companies often can provide the resources start-up businesses lack, they also typically provide all sorts of bureaucracy, slow decision-making and red tape that can stifle entrepreneurial spirits. This can apply to for profits or nonprofits, or for that matter, some departments of government agencies, such as driver’s ed programs, or gift shops at national parks.

The flip side of that is an entrepreneurial person or a group (sometimes called a “skunk works” team) that uses innovative and risk-taking strategies to convert an idea into a profitable finished product in a large organization. Those people are sometimes described as “intrapreneurs” as in entrepreneurs “inside” a big company. They pursue the goals of the organization, working hard to break through the innovation gridlock that prevents many large companies from taking best advantage of their resources. Continue reading “Intrapreneurial Business Plans”

(Adapted from The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy)

In the course of developing strategic plans, organizations often find themselves taking a step back to ask the question, “How can we differentiate ourselves from the competition?” The answer to this question often results in the development of positioning strategies.

In his book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, Michael Treacy defined three primary positioning strategies. He found that the best organizations in the world, while at least adequate at all three, typically distinguished themselves and built their success around one of the three areas. I have added a fourth positioning strategy (marketing dominance) based on my strategy development work.

Exhibit – Positioning Strategies

You can use the four positioning strategies to help your team understand how it is winning today and how it will need to win in the future.

The Process

The process for developing positioning statements includes the following steps that support our overall methodology, Drivers Model – taught in our training, Secrets to Facilitating Strategy.

1	Educate the team on position statements and positioning strategies	After completing the review of the briefing book review and SWOT or just the briefing book (if positioning statements are done instead of the SWOT), educate the planning team on positioning statements and positioning strategies.
2	Define your current and future positioning strategy	Have the team identify which of the four fundamental positioning strategies represents the way the organization operates today, and which positioning strategy best characterizes how it will need to operate in the future.
3	Identify areas for positioning statements	After defining the future positioning strategy, the next step is to identify the areas for developing positioning statements. Positioning statements have two parts: the external trend (“We believe…”) and the action that will be taken (“Therefore, we must…”). There are traditionally two approaches to writing positioning statements. The first approach is to base the areas for positioning statements on the most important external trends from the briefing book review and SWOT. The other approach is to identify first the key actions we know we need to take and then identify what is happening in the external environment that mandates the action.
4	Identify strategies to respond to the trends	With the key trends identified, the next step is to brainstorm strategies to address those trends. For positioning statements, the strategies need only use the “verb-object” format; there is no need to include “purpose” since this will be covered by the “We believe…” portion of the positioning statement.
5	Format the positioning statements	With the trends and strategies identified, you can now create the positioning statements that combine the two. The trend will be used in the “We believe…” portion of the statement and the strategies will appear in the “Therefore, we will…” portion of the statement.
6	Perform a quality check	The final step in the positioning statement process is to review each of the quality check items to ensure that all the checks are met.

More about these steps is outlined in depth in The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy.

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Certified Master Facilitator Michael Wilkinson is the CEO and Managing Director of Leadership Strategies, Inc., The Facilitation Company and author of The Secrets of Facilitation 2nd Edition, The Secrets to Masterful Meetings, and The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy. Leadership Strategies is a global leader in facilitation services, providing companies with dynamic professional facilitators who lead executive teams and task forces in areas like strategic planning, issue resolution, process improvement and others. The company is also a leading provider of facilitation training in the United States, having trained over 18,000 individuals.

In strategic planning, it is important that all voices be heard, and that includes yours. Unfortunately, if you are like most leaders, your voice comes with considerable baggage. When the boss speaks, people listen. And, they listen differently from when other people speak.

Sure, there will likely be some people in the room who treat your voice like every other voice in the room. Whether the idea comes from you or a first-year manager, these people will state their agreement or disagreement with the idea in the exact same way, regardless of the source.

Unfortunately, this probably isn’t the case for most of the people at the table. When you speak, most may be quick to respond when they agree, and very, very slow to respond when they disagree – so slow, in fact, that sometimes they may never get around to it!

As a result of the lack of challenge many leaders experience within their own walls, the views of the leader can easily overpower the group. And even when someone dares to challenge with a question, some leaders, often without knowing it, respond with statements that belittle the questioner or not-so-subtly communicate that challenging the boss is not welcome.

Consider the following strategies.

STRATEGIES FOR GETTING YOUR IDEAS ON THE TABLE WITHOUT OVERPOWERING THE GROUP:

Most people agree that a rigorous business plan is a good idea. Clearly it’s best to research the market and risks as thoroughly and objectively as possible. In contrast, a “creative” plan, one that involves sketchy research, is unlikely to meet with success.

Right? Well, maybe, but perhaps a certain amount of naivety might increase your odds of success. Here’s why: Continue reading “Are “Creative” Business Plans A Good Thing?”

As a strategy leader, you have seven activities to which I recommend you pay close attention to build a strong strategy that has full buy-in and commitment. Let’s examine each of these activities.

1. Gain your team’s commitment and buy-in to the process.

If your leadership team members are like most with whom I have worked, they are stretched for resources and have more on their plate than they can likely accomplish with the time they have. Therefore, for many of them, the prospects of taking valuable time and resources to develop a plan that will come up with more to add to their already over-loaded plates is NOT a welcomed idea.

So how do you gain their commitment to planning and their buy-in to a planning process such as the Drivers Model? I consider this my secret weapon for buy-in: the management briefing. With the management briefing, you will have your team identify the most critical issues facing the organization; then they will make adjustments to the planning process as needed to ensure that the process addresses those issues. The management briefing increases commitment to planning by providing your team with a road map that shows how what is important to them will be covered during the strategic planning sessions.

2. Ensure all voices are heard.

The fundamental secret of facilitation indicates that you can increase buy-in and commitment by having those impacted by the plan involved in the creation of it. However, everyone in your organization will be impacted by the strategic plan. Does that mean everyone should be at the table creating the plan?

No, of course not. Nor is it necessary. Involvement does not necessitate being at the table. For some, just giving them a chance for input through a survey or a suggestion box will be adequate. For others, focus groups, one-on-one interviews or other methods for gaining in-depth input may be more appropriate. One of your important roles is to determine who should be at the table and to put in place other avenues to ensure all voices are given the opportunity to be heard.

3. Ensure key information is brought into the room.

You may have been in the room when a team has made a decision based on the best information available, only to discover that if they had been aware of other information that had not been brought into the room, they would have likely have made a different decision. Sound familiar? Well, part of your role is to ensure that this doesn’t happen with your planning activity.

My company’s work in the area of consensus building has shown that one of the primary reasons people disagree is due to a lack of shared information. Many disagreements can be resolved, and even prevented, by making sure all parties have the same information. With the Drivers Model, the briefing book serves the purpose of ensuring all your team members start with a common set of information.

4. Get your ideas on the table without overpowering the group.

As indicated earlier, it is important that all voices be heard, and that includes yours. Unfortunately, if you are like most leaders, your voice comes with considerable baggage. When the boss speaks, people listen. And they listen differently from when other people speak.

Sure, there will likely be some people in the room who treat your voice like every other voice in the room. Whether the idea comes from you or a first-year manager, these people will state their agreement or disagreement with the idea in the exact same way, regardless of the source. Unfortunately, this probably isn’t the case for most of the people at the table. When you speak, most may be quick to respond when they agree, and very, very slow to respond when they disagree – so slow, in fact, that sometimes they may never get around to it!

As a result of the lack of challenge many leaders experience within their own walls, the views of the leader can easily overpower the group.

5. Ensure that the plan components meet the quality checks.

With the Drivers Model each component is dependent upon the components that came before it. So, for example, if you do a poor job of defining your mission and vision, your goals and objectives will reflect this. Likewise, if your goals and objectives are misaligned, your critical success factors and barriers will also be off. And if your critical success factors and barriers are inadequate, your strategies and action plans will be inadequate as well. Therefore it is essential that you do a quality job every step of the way through the planning process.

The Drivers Model is designed to help you do this. From vision and mission through to strategies and action plans, the Drivers Model provides a specific quality check for each component of the strategic plan. These quality checks help ensure that your plan is comprehensive, robust, inspiring, and implementable. As the leader, it is your role to ensure that each component of the plan passes its quality check.

6. Follow through and hold people accountable.

If you have been involved in strategic planning processes, you know that far too often it is a game in which considerable energy is placed in developing a plan that is then put on the executive’s shelf, only to be looked at when it is time to do strategic planning once again.

The Drivers Model strives to end this game. As see in Chapter 14 of my book, The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy, you and your team will assemble a detailed process for aligning the organization and ensuring monthly check-ins, quarterly reviews and an annual update to the strategic plan. This structured monitoring process is intended to help ensure that the plan moves from paper to implementation.

7. Decide if an outside facilitator would be helpful.

With an activity as critical as strategic planning, it is essential that the effort be facilitated by someone who is skilled in facilitation but also has considerable experience guiding a team through strategy. Some organizations have internal resources with both the facilitation and the strategy expertise. But others choose to bring in outside professional facilitators with years of training, experience and proven results.

When should you bring in an outside facilitator? It is your role as the leader to make this call. Get help making that call with these guiding questions.

________________________

Certified Master Facilitator Michael Wilkinson is the CEO and Managing Director of Leadership Strategies, Inc., The Facilitation Company and author of the new The Secrets of Facilitation 2nd Edition, The Secrets to Masterful Meetings, and The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy. Leadership Strategies is a global leader in facilitation services, providing companies with dynamic professional facilitators who lead executive teams and task forces in areas like strategic planning, issue resolution, process improvement and others. The company is also a leading provider of facilitation training in the United States.

Here are a few habits for growing your business during the early years:

• Be Consistent With Side Tasks (create checklists, follow up on them)
• Clean and Tidy Up (literally and figuratively)
• Keep Books (too often overlooked or underemphasized in startups)
• Prepare for Tax Season
• Schedule Interviews (forSstaff) Before You’re Desperate
• Create and Follow A Business Plan

Source

These are all very simple habits, but easily overlooked. As the old adage goes, “mind your pennies and dollars will flow.”

What do you think?

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A major difference between leading and facilitating is that a leader often tells; a facilitator always asks. In my book, The Secrets of Facilitation, 2nd. ed., I describe how I learned what I call the fundamental secret of facilitation.

I began understanding the secret during my career with the management consulting division of what was then one of the Big-8 accounting and consulting firms. In the eight years I spent in that consulting practice, we had a standard way of addressing a client problem. We might be called in to review a particular department or activity.

We would arrive with our army of bright people, interview those whom we believed were the key stakeholders, develop a set of recommendations based on our interviews and experience, and create what might be called the “100% Solution.” We would go away and come back a year later and perhaps, if we were lucky, 15% of the recommendations would be implemented.

In my final years with that organization, the practice in which I worked began taking a different approach. We would come in with a smaller group of consultants and work shoulder to shoulder with client personnel. Together we would convene group interviews (facilitated sessions) which typically included 8-20 people. In the facilitated sessions, the participants would create the recommendations, not the consultants.

In most cases, they would only come up with what we might consider the 60% or 70% solution. So we would float ideas based on our experience. Some they would accept, others they would reject as “not beneficial” or “not implementable” in their environment. When all was done, they might have created what we would consider “the 85% solution.” Yet a year later, when we came back, amazingly 80-90% of the solution would be implemented!

Why wasn’t more of the “100% solution” implemented? Why would the “85% solution” gained through facilitation achieve far greater success? Therein lies the secret and the power behind it.

As an expert consultant, we were “telling” our clients what they needed to do. As a result, there was very little buy-in by our clients and their people. When we began “asking” the questions that resulted in them creating their own answers, the difference was staggering.

Dr. Robert Zawacki from the University of Colorado in his book “Transforming the Mature Information Technology Organization” put the secret this way:

ED = RD x CD
Effective Decisions = The Right Decision times Commitment to the Decision

Dr. Zawacki’s point is that the multiplication sign in the formula means that even the best decision can be rendered completely ineffective if commitment to the decision is lacking. (And, this is critical to consider in the process of strategic planning.)

Hence, the key difference between leading and facilitating strategy…

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Certified Master Facilitator Michael Wilkinson is the CEO and Managing Director of Leadership Strategies, Inc., The Facilitation Company and author of the new The Secrets of Facilitation 2nd Edition, The Secrets to Masterful Meetings, and The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy. Leadership Strategies is a global leader in facilitation services, providing companies with dynamic professional facilitators who lead executive teams and task forces in areas like strategic planning, issue resolution, process improvement and others. The company is also a leading provider of facilitation training in the United States.