I read recently that organizations worldwide spend roughly $356 billion on leadership development. And in the same breath, 75% of organizations rated their leadership development programs as not very effective.
This was because many leadership development efforts overlook how leaders think, learn and behave — their mindsets.
Mindsets are the front line of everything.
They are how we view the world. They dictate the decisions we make — the actions we take. The leadership mindset is the beginning middle and end of whether a business will be successful.
Mindsets are the mental lenses that decide what information gets through and, as a direct result, what happens.
Or what doesn’t.
We have to make strategies that work.
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” — Sir Winston Churchill
Whatever the size, the type or the age of your business, the pressures are the same. You have to increase business performance at the lowest cost and without undue risk. And you must do that while ensuring revenue and avoid being disrupted, outspent or dismissed yourself.
The leader needs the mindset to match.
The Decision Mindset
The job of the business leader, is to answer a bunch of irritating questions. Where are we headed? Why? How? When?
They’re a muddle of unfathomable conundrums, paradoxes and ironies. But they all need figuring out. And when they are figured out everything the calculations were based on has changed.
“In reality strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.” — Jack Welch
The Execution Mindset
As Sir Winston Churchill said — results are pretty important.
We don’t get results if we don’t do the work. Doing the work means getting everyone around to help. That requires everyone buying into the plan — one plan that multiple mini — businesses (the divisions) must agree on.
Then, they have to work as a whole on the implementation. The prize is always knowing which work is needed. To do this the business has to perpetually calculate the why and the how.
The Collective Mindset
Another challenge for business, especially the more automated and digitalised the businesses becomes is to execute as a complete unit. It demands a lot more than luck. It calls for weapons-grade orchestration.
Dependencies are everywhere — the more complex the business —the more connected it becomes, inside and out — the more dependencies there are.
The Systems Mindset
We’re at the dawn of the third decade of the 21st Century. In the western world it can feel like we’re going backwards — headed towards a less civilised more brutal and divided society. Business has to work towards the opposite.
Every business is completely surrounded by systems. Almost all of them completely out of our control. There’s no question they should be better understood. Every business struggles to align its own systems to those outside.
Staying ahead feels like an impossible challenge. But at least we know that’s the challenge.
The Framework Mindset
Thinking about the ‘future’ is guaranteed to focus the attention.
Quite rightly it preoccupies the leaders' minds. It will always be the most important construct because it forces the business to think hard about what it takes to get there.
It has the ability to inspire or strike fear.
Of course, we never reach the future — we can’t ever determine or guarantee it. But nonetheless imagining what it looks like and how we get there is the most important tool for the business.
We call this tool a framework for the future.
The Preparation Mindset
“I believe that people make their own luck by great preparation and good strategy.” — Jack Canfield
Being prepared for the future is the new strategy. It’s a profound idea. It means being ready for what may come because you cannot predict what will.
It means reducing risk and making your own luck by thinking critically and systemically. Being prepared requires having some idea what you would like the future to look like. But being prepared — and smart — requires the honesty and humility to accept that you haven’t got a clue.
From there it’s possible to make progress. From there the mind is open enough to track down enough clues to stand a chance. At the heart of it it means understanding the external systems, and the dynamics they cause, that allows the business to be best prepared to take advantage.
Getting its own systems in shape is the baseline if a business is to make the best plans to succeed in the future.
The Visual Mindset
“Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.” — Morris Chang
We set out to make complex questions a lot simpler to deal with.
We break down the challenge to allow everyone to see the opportunity inside it. Quite literally.
From here on this article explains how we’ve dealt with the challenges of ‘making strategy’ over the last two decades. We formed a business called Group Partners to deal with this stuff.
We were clients ourselves and we didn’t like how it all got done.
Strategy is the word we use to describe the plans we make to get to the future.
Even a few short years ago this used to be a lot easier than it is today. Not so long ago the world seemed less dynamic and plans could be made for 5 or 10 years. It was a torrid process. It needed to change
We set about making it more engaging and inspiring.
We learned a lot.
We did that by working with the biggest and the smallest brands on the planet.
Although large enterprise has certain unique challenges — all leaders need to stay real — they need to be curious and alive to what’s actually happening. they need to listen to everything and remember the spirit that existed when they were small and scrapping like crazy.
We saw what worked. We focussed on that.
Making strategy that worked needs engagement, conversation and debate, evidence, rigour, creativity and objectivity. Making strategy needs people to pay attention, commit and think critically.
We made that the basis of how we built our practice.
WE LEARNED FROM EXPERIENCE
In the last 20 years we’ve seen every business challenge.
To put it plainly — it’s been about creating new visions and strategies — making transformation and change work, exploiting new digital opportunities and enabling organisational change, launching new products and services or encouraging mindset and cultural change.
It’s a major privilege to work with clients on these challenges and it only works by becoming a part of the teams. But not being a burden or dependency.
The Trouble With The Future — It’s uncertain.
Everyone has a different perspective on the future. What we knew in the past will likely hinder (not improve) our chances of thinking about the future.
Many of the tools to help us think about strategy were designed for previous eras. In this new world — solving for the future requires fixing current challenges at the same time as exploiting opportunity.
We have to develop new tools to deal with the future.
New Tools
A major understatement but making plans for the future is a challenge.
Making a plan is a risk — not making plans is a bigger risk. New tools and techniques need to respond to the needs of today’s challenges.
That’s a very high bar.
- Tools have to work the way humans do.
- They need to encourage use over time
- They have to maintain the attention of the users.
- Thay must be useful if they are to engage people’s hearts and minds.
- They have to work with a multitude of different user behaviours.
We know they must be visual, intuitive and give the user ‘close to’ immediate feedback.
Tools That Work As Humans Do
Although hard to keep up with the accelerating pace tools need to exploit the technologies of the day. Right now that’s mobile/screen-based devices that rely on keeping the complex simple. This relies on increasingly intelligent management of the data in the background.
The most useful tools are those that allow both face to face and virtual working. These tools will automate many of the repetitive tasks while bringing the complex forward in simple ways as and when needed.
They follow the natural sequence of how thinking and working get done.
Think Visual
Bringing thinking back to work..
Techniques that work align with how people think.
Many businesses use meetings to make people think. The trouble is people think at different times and often the last place they can think is in meetings.
That’s why our process begins with conversations and questions. In fact, it begins with what we call the ‘exam question’ — the anchoring challenge that the process deals with from then on. How things work right now need to shift if the leaders are to take the enterprise on a journey to something different.
Explaining the value of change simply and visually is powerful in order to get everyone engaged and behind the change quickly and meaningfully.
A film or slides are embedded here in the original.
Everyone is constantly battling with change through individual perspectives about what’s important. As change happens leaders have to embrace that as well as dealing with the emergence of new realities.
Leaders have to get everyone behind agreed and practical plans.
Working collaboratively and visually, within structures ensures everyone shares the same ideas and are a real part of the future they need.
Contact john@grouppartners.net
First published in The A-Z Of Group Partners on Medium in 2020. See the original.
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