Blogit

I have many dreams. One of them is figuratively and literally strategic in nature.  This dream is simple: agile crafting, revisiting and implementation of strategy. This dream is about strategy development and implementation that contributes to inspiring employees to fulfil or exceed strategic goals.   It is refreshing to see many companies leaving aside clunky and expensive strategy processes that mostly leave people disenchanted and devoid of energy for the most important part of the process: strategy implementation.   However, we have many steps to take before widespread agile and inspiring strategy processes.

Looking at the marketplace, we can learn about what great companies are doing well in crafting and implementing strategy.  These companies keep speed and agility in mind while understanding clearly the long-term focus.  Within this balancing act of speed and quick wins with a long-term focus, I organize the learnings into three areas:

1. People
2. Framework
3. Mission, Vision and Values

People are the heart of sucessful strategy crafting and implemention.  Great companies are bult by people with desire to collaborate, imagination, motivation, and who are not insulated by success .  These team players can balance excellence and growth, are self-driven and self-organizing, less concerned with politics and focused on results.  Strategic thinking is a competence required by all and not reserved for an elite few.  Similarly, leadership is a service shared by all rather than the job description or responsibility of a few.  These leaders execute with stamina, make decisions, create clarity and come back from setbacks ready to share and act on what they learned.  In doing so, they reflect common values in action.

The framework for the strategy starts with the customer and brings together growth, creativity and appetite for risk and failure.  Companies exist to serve customers.  Profits and shareholder value are derived from serving the customer with excellence.  Therefore, customers need to be the starting point and the strategy should reflect clearly how the company is going to satisfy customer needs with excellence. In the strategy process, great companies reflect their hunger for growth, creative thinking, innovation, appetite for risk and a learning orientation to failure. 

Mission, vision and values are commonly understood, reflected in everyday work and clearly answer the why question. Inspiring strategies go beyond profits.  Strategies that get people excited outline the plan to achieve financial results but do not stop there.  These strategies help connect the company also to bigger and broader objectives, beyond profits.  For example, how to satisfy a market need with safer, cleaner and more sustainable services, solutions and products.  Inspiring strategies outline the plan to reach goals that have a clear purpose and answer succintly the why question.  Therefore, the uniting and driving force is why we are doing what we are doing and then we focus on what we need to do to get there. 

How are you crafting and implementing inspiring strategies?

Laura Vargas

I have been truly blessed to work with inspiring colleagues.  One of these inspiring colleagues, the late Mauri Metsäranta, planted in me the interest in the application of neuroscience research to practical development actions in leadership.  Our conversation started in 2009 and while Mauri left us much too soon, the fascination and his inspiration on the topic is still with me.  It is in the application of this field where I have seen the most concrete development in my own leadership and working methods and in that of my own clients. 

My continuous learning on the topic took me to London in 2013 where I met two more inspiring thought leaders on the topic:  Josh Davis and Caroline Webb.  Both Josh and Caroline are passionate about this topic and have translated their passion and wisdom into recently published books.  Using these two valuable resources, we can learn practical scientifically based ways to help us get the most out of our day.  In order of publication date, I will start with Josh’s Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done.  In his book, he presents five concrete ways to be “awesomely effective”.  His deeply researched strategies, based on solid neuroscience and psychology, are simple, practical and achievable. Caroline’s book, How To Have A Good Day Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life brings together combined insights from psychology, behavioural economics and neuroscience. In her book, she translates the findings from these three fields into every day practical wisdom.  She identifies seven building blocks to having a good day and gives us insight into how to put together each of those blocks. 

I have been working on implementing these strategies and building blocks myself and also with my clients.  The results are very powerful.  One of my clients told me last week “I get so much more done. I am happier and I even lost weight!”  While I have, unfortunately, not lost any weight while implementing these ideas into my daily routine, I can see the power in the application of these strategies.  Mainly, it has translated into increased productivity.  Very simply, these is what I am aiming for:

1. Sleep:  finding the optimal amount of sleep and protecting the quality of that sleep sets the foundation for the next actions to be successful.  Sleep depravation undermines our efforts to be productive and inspiring. 
2. From hardest to easiest:  When I am not working with a client, I start my “office day” with the most demanding task.  With a fresh brain and a full energy tank, I find that those first hours of work are my most productive.  If I need to have a creative session with a client, I try to schedule it in the morning. 
3. No multitasking:  All alarms and indications of new mail, new messages, new anything are turned off from all my devices.  While doing the intense brainwork, my phone is on silent (not on vibration mode but on silent).  I give the task at hand my single focus. The result is that I finish my task sooner and with better quality. 
4. Email as a discreet activity:  Due to the nature of my work, I am out of office several days a week so I need to find concentrated time to tackle the inbox.  And on “office days”, I close my inbox after spending the planned time on it.  Email is not an all you can eat buffet available all the time. 
5. Choose thoughts: Just like choosing what I am going to eat for breakfast, I am trying to choose my thoughts, being mindful of keeping a positive bias in my thinking.  While I cannot control other people’s behaviour, I can certainly choose how I react to it and what I think.  If I think positive, I can do my work much better and also enjoy it. 

How is science helping you improve your day?   

Laura Vargas

Very often in a coaching process a coachee will say: “I need to improve my decision making skills.”  I get excited and follow up with a question: “How do you currently make decisions?” Depending on the coachee, at this point there is silence or a pause followed by: “hmm… interesting question.”  It seems that many leaders fail to understand how they make decisions which makes it difficult to communicate with their team members how or why a decision was made.  Often, the rationale for a decision is built from the decision itself i.e. this is how and why I justify this decision.  How would you be a better leader if you understood how you make decisions, what biases are built into your decision-making process and how can the team members support each other in decision-making? If you are looking for agility in the workplace, this is a topic that may interest you.

The first step is to crystalize the criteria you need to make a typical decision.  This is your decision-making model.  Of course, we face different kinds of decisions that will require tailored thinking but, in general, we tend to be comfortable to make a decision when we have “done our homework”.  This “homework” could entail answering questions like:

What is coaching in the workplace?

The multifaceted use of the word coaching continues to bring some misconception on the topic: what is coaching in the workplace? We could start by thinking about what coaching is not.  Coaching is not mentoring, it is not consulting and it is not therapy.  In the workplace, coaching is about partnering with a colleague or colleagues with the aim of supporting each other to find one’s own way forward and the action plan to get there.  In a coaching situation, not one person holds the “correct answer”.  Rather, the aim is to help the coachee unleash her/his potential through powerful open questions.  Coaching is a “thought-provoking, creative and action driven process that inspires us to maximise personal and professional potential1”.  Excellent coaching requires, at least, deep listening and powerful questioning. 

Participants in our leadership development programs often borrow what they perceive about coaching from the sports world.  Coaching in sports is probably familiar to most people.  Ideally, great sport coaches inspire their athletes and enable them to reach their peak performance. Here there is a good parallel with what a great leader does in the workplace: inspire their colleagues and enable them to reach their peak performance.  The great leader serves their colleagues and coaching is one tool they can use in the service of leadership. 

While there is great variability depending on the sport and the competence of the coach, in general, sport coaches give advice, constructive and positive feedback, and technical guidance.  Sport coaches are experts in their field and they share the wisdom of their expertise to get their athletes to perform at their best.  Here is where we can get in trouble borrowing from sports coaching.  Good leaders have a responsibility to give constructive and positive feedback.  While good leaders may be experts in their field, good leaders know that they do not know all the answers.  Good leaders can use coaching to uncover solutions, ideas, and answers with their colleagues and focus on unleashing the potential of those around instead of just sharing their perceived (correct!) view of the world.  This is probably the most basic difference between sports coaching and coaching in the workplace.  Sometimes, the best coach is one whose expertise is far away from their coachees’ expertise. This enables the coach to create real insight through powerful questions and also helps the coach to stir away from leading questions.  In the complex modern global organization, not one leader holds all the knowledge or expertise. This is why coaching in the workplace can be so beneficial.

Coaching in complex modern global organizations delivers many business benefits. While recognizing that coaching is not a “one size fits all” leadership tool, when done well, coaching is indeed a very effective tool.  First, it enables leaders to build the capacity to learn, problem solve and to be creative in their teams.  It is a great tool to harness the potential in people while keeping ownership and responsibility where it should be.  In a nutshell, this translates to delivering better products/better service faster and also helps in partnering with clients to find best market driven solutions. Second, when using coaching as a leadership tool, the leader assumes that individuals are packed with potential and the responsibility of leaders and colleagues is to pull out that potential. This assumption creates a vibrant culture: an empowered workforce in a positive work environment. Third, coaching supports leaders to involve, inspire and innovate in the organizational context. This is the essence of the type of leadership required to succeed now and in the future.  Finally, coaching is results focused.  So while coaching sets off from a positive assumption (individuals are packed with potential), the end result of coaching is a clear action plan with a timeline or at the very least, a more clear definition of the opportunity.  Therefore, coaching enables a leader to support their team members to reach peak performance and crystalize the actions required to get there.  To realize these benefits, organizations need a critical mass of coaching competent leaders.   

How are you reaping the benefits of coaching in your organization?
1International Coaching Federation ICF

Laura Vargas
laura.vargas@pertec.fi
+ 358 45 319 2330
Senior Partner at Pertec Consulting

How to reignite the true business value of performance management?

Performance management is the system that brings together the key elements that make a company successful.  As such, business leaders interested in leading towards success should be excited to design and keep alive the performance management system in their organizations.  Instead, we often observe that performance management is neglected, or perceived as an “HR issue”.  While HR teams should be very proud to have the success of the business put on their shoulders, it is not enough that one team is responsible for such a fundamental part of the business.  In many organizations, performance management is old fashioned, bureaucratic, complicated and, frankly, works against achieving business results and creating employee engagement. Companies interested in success should have a simple up to date performance management system that complements and connects the different key elements of the business and is vital part of an inspiring workplace. 

We define performance management simply as the system that brings together the key business elements required for success.  Performance management is grounded on the values, strategy and core competencies required to succeed in a specific business environment and it is linked with other management systems.  Strategic thinking helps employees create these connections.  At the heart of performance management, we distill this bigger picture through self-reflection and dialogue with team and manager into inspiring unit, team and individual targets.  Through supportive coaching and positive and constructive feedback we pave the way to results.  These results are evaluated objectively, rewarded fairly and areas of development identified.  These development areas are supported and followed up with development plans in a positive way that inspires employees to excellence. The aim is to create intelligent organizations where efficiency, renewal and wellbeing are balanced. This is not a linear system rather performance management is a continuous system, continuously supporting business results.

Business leaders who recognize the true value of performance management and design a system that inspires and supports employees to success will create a competitive advantage in their organizations.  Savvy recruits and current employees will soon demand that performance management systems be revamped to meet today’s business needs and aspirations.  Steven Rice from Juniper Networks “is responsible for leading Juniper Networks’ people strategy of creating an inspired community of people able, committed, and empowered to achieve amazing success.” An integral part of this people strategy is a performance management system that recognizes the whole human at work, is future oriented, based on continuous dialogue and excludes forced rankings. 

How are you creating a competitive advantage through a modern performance management system in your organization?

Laura Vargas

laura.vargas@pertec.fi

+ 358 45 319 2330

Senior Partner at Pertec Consulting

August 14th 2014 was a very special day for our team.  We celebrated our Chairman of the Board’s 60th birthday and the launch of our latest book in a celebratory seminar around the theme “leadership of the future”.  During this day, my dear colleague David and I tried to tackle this exciting question:  How to build a global, agile and intelligent organization?

We agreed that in our current business environment of constant change the answer to build this type of organization rests in the leadership.  The changing nature of our current business environment requires different language, behaviors, and thinking in our leaders.  By leaders we mean the people responsible for implementing the strategy i.e. everyone in the organization. In addition, recognizing that the whole human being comes to work, intelligent leaders have a holistic appreciation of the employee.  Therefore it is intelligent leaders, able to use their five sources of intelligence (practical, rational, emotional, spiritual, and cultural), who will be the most successful leaders. 

What will be the most important characteristics for leaders to lead towards the vision of 2020? In addition to recognizing that the whole human being comes to work and utilizing their five sources of intelligence, these leaders are inspiring.  They understand what is the starting point for inspiration, how to inspire others and how to nurture their own inspiration.  For them, imagination and dreams are important.  A positive view of the future is a requirement.  These leaders have moved away from command, control, correct as a leadership style and coach their colleagues to Involve, Inspire, and Innovate.

They are also collaborative. They share the leadership as everyone has a leadership role to take and leadership is everyone’s responsibility. They can tap into their emotional intelligence to create connections and network. They enable, support and celebrate success. They coach their colleagues and ask open questions rather than give answers: they collaborate to find the best answer together.  Self-leadership is their strength.  

Our leaders also have a global mindset.  They network, persuade, influence and collaborate at many different points inside and outside the organization with people they have no direct authority over. They lead upwards and downwards, across the matrix.  Command, control and correct really do not work in this global organization.  Leaders in the future will have increasingly complex relationships and these relationships are increasingly with different cultures so their cultural intelligence is essential.  To develop their cultural intelligence, they need self-awareness.

Finally, these leaders are responsible. They are responsible to their clients, their people, shareholders, results, their values, the community and the environment. They are also responsible to themselves and their own learning.  They are future-minded and work for an inspiring purpose. This responsibility driven by a purpose will distinguish exceptional leaders.

In conclusion, building global, agile and intelligent organizations require intelligent leaders who are inspiring, collaborative, responsible and have a global mindset.  How are you supporting the development of these leadership characteristics, in yourself and others?

Laura Vargas

Coaching in the workplace is gaining momentum.  Leaders interested in achieving peak performance are fine-tuning their coaching skills and coaching is an integral part of the best leadership development programs.  Is this enough to embed coaching into the way of working?  

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of listening to David Clutterbuck on the topic of making a coaching leadership culture real in organizations.  He defined coaching leadership as the dialogue that moves mountains.  Organizations interested in “moving mountains” should be paying closer attention to how they develop and embed a coaching mindset in their organizations.  

One concrete way to do this is to have teams jointly develop their coaching skills.  Instead of the traditional approach of sending one or two team members to learn about “this coaching stuff” and having these individuals plant the seed, it is much more efficient to develop the team together.  Through a joint coaching development experience, the team can 

·      share the learning journey with common tools

·      learn a common language

·      encourage, challenge and support each other in developing the skills

·      keep each other accountable for the application of a coaching mindset to a wide range of tasks and challenges

We start from the premise that Command, Control and Correct are no longer the most effective or efficient management tools; rather, leaders need to Involve, Inspire, and Innovate in the workplace to achieve peak performance. Coaching offers an excellent platform for leaders and team members to involve each other, inspire and be inspired, and innovate.  This translates into concrete business benefits. Organizations interested in accelerating these benefits are developing the coaching skills of intact teams.  It will be an exciting journey to be part of a broader and deeper development of a coaching mindset in organizations.  How is your organization accelerating the development of a coaching mindset?

  Laura Vargas

The concept of “workplace” has changed significantly in the last 25 years.  Working in one location with colleagues in the same location is less the norm and more the exception.  The transition from working in co-located teams to working in distributed (1) teams seemed reasonable yet leaders and team members did not always clearly understand what the transition meant in practice.  Can we lead and participate in co-located teams in the same way that we lead and participant in teams distributed across a nation, a continent or the globe with colleagues of same or different business units or partners outside our own organization? 

To begin, working in a virtual team will become even more prevalent.  Our work in the future will clearly require fluency in leading and participating in virtual teams.  There are several reasons why virtual teams are becoming more the norm.  At the heart of the issue, virtual teams are able to create value; therefore, organizations interested in more efficient and effective ways to create value have increasingly turned to virtual teams.  This, by the way, does not mean that if a team is not efficient and effective, making it virtual would solve the problem.  Not at all!  Creating value in the distributed world requires intention, discipline and hard work.  However, it is clear that virtual teams are creating value by

•    Improving efficiency as global teams can literally extend operating hours
•    Providing flexibility for talented team members who would be willing and able to participate in new projects but are not able to travel all the time or relocate
•    Leveraging resources across a wider base
•    Tapping into diverse skill sets, experiences, knowledge and culture.

What is required to achieve high performance in virtual teams?  Research and experience point to four key elements that support high performance in virtual teams:

1.    Virtual teams need to work diligently to establish clarity as this is the foundation for trust.
2.    Virtual teams need to be supported with the right resources to improve efficiency.
3.    Individuals in virtual teams need to be comfortable with the challenge of distributed teamwork.
4.    Virtual teams need engagement to enhance the emotional connection of the team.

While these success elements are also required to succeed in co-located teams, creating them in distributed teams requires intention and disciplineas distributed teams have a smaller margin of error.

How does your organization build high performance virtual teams?

Laura Vargas

(1) Team is  “a small number of people with complementary skills committed to a common purpose, a set of specific performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” (The Discipline of Teams, J. R. Katzenbach, D. K. Smith).  A virtual or distributed team does this while being in different locations, separated by time, space, or even organization.  For our purposes, a virtual team is the same as a distributed team. 

Coaching has become an integral part of leadership development.  AMEN!  As I look behind on all the leadership development programs that I have delivered with my colleagues this year, not one was delivered without coaching.  While many organizations have recognized the value and need for leaders who are excellent coaches, many leaders still struggle with recognizing the value of coaching.  Invariably, at least once a month, one eager participant will ask why do I need “this coaching stuff”? This question inspired me to write this blog.  

Since coaching is one of those abused terms, we could start by getting on the same page about what we mean by coaching.  The International Coach Federation defines coaching “as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”  Inside organizations, this could be translated to partnering with colleagues instead of clients.  I define coaching as partnering to unleash the potential from within.  This partnership requires, at the least, active listening and powerful questioning.  If we understand that Command, Control and Correct are no longer the most effective or efficient management tools, how do we as leaders INVOLVE, INSPIRE, and INNOVATE?  Coaching seems to offer an excellent platform.

Using coaching, leaders can INVOLVE their team members and colleagues to be part of the solution.  A leader in coaching action can INSPIRE others to become part of the team seeking to unleash potential from within.  Coaching can help us deepen our awareness about what motivates us.  Using coaching rather than directing could also increase our abilities to INNOVATE.  

Coaching is also a great tool to help people connect with organizational values and to lead and facilitate the kind of strategic thinking that I referred to on a previous blog.  Coaching is also an excellent tool to help people work across generations.  In general, coaching is an essential skill of the Intelligent Leader.     

2012 has given me the opportunity to be a small part in the leadership journey of over one hundred and fifty leaders.  Those leaders who have embraced coaching as a tool for their own growth as well as a tool to unleash potential in others have really made an impact in their organizations and the kind of organizational cultures required to Involve, Inspire, and Innovate.  I do hope that more and more leaders become fluent in coaching… what do you think?

 Laura Vargas

Last week, my colleague, David, and I facilitated a leadership workshop with a group of talented leaders working at one of Finland’s largest companies.  When discussing and defining strategic thinking, one participant contributed “seeing the whole field” as the definition of strategic thinking.  This definition inspired me to write our blog on the topic of Strategic Thinking. 

So, who needs strategic thinking?  To answer this question, I think it is useful to reflect on one of the key attributes of strategic thinking in practice:  systems perspective, or as our savvy participant put it, “seeing the whole field”.  Liedtka states that "a strategic thinker has a mental model of the complete end-to-end system of value creation, his or her role within it, and an understanding of the competencies it contains."[1] In short, anyone who is part of implementing a strategy (plan) needs to think strategically. Indeed, strategic thinking is not a competency reserved for top management or even just for the makers of strategy.  Rather, strategic thinking is a competency required from anyone involved in the implementation of strategy.  There are three levels of strategic thinking individuals in organizations need to master.

On a general level, understanding the strategy, strategic goals and the role of the business unit in achieving these goals creates the frame for meaningfulness in the workplace.  Ideally, each individual should be able to express quite succinctly what is the plan of their organization to accomplish their dream?  In other words, what is the strategy that takes them to their vision?

At a team level, individuals need to understand how their team contributes to the plan of the organization and what are the interdependencies between and among teams to reach that plan.  This insight builds individual awareness of the network of efforts required to fulfill the strategy.  

At the most essential level, at the individual level, we need to understand the connection between individual performance and the organizational strategy.  As individuals, we need to understand how our work and the objectives contribute to the strategy.  How do I contribute to the implementation of the strategy and fulfillment of the vision?  Clarity in this area creates individual responsibility towards the organizational strategy.  

Continuous strategic thinking at these three levels is essential to build the meaningfulness, insight and responsibility required for rational and emotional commitment to the strategy.  When we learn to think strategically across all levels of the organization, we will be able to implement organizational strategies with the mind and soul. Is it time that we all do some strategic thinking?  

Laura Vargas