Interestingly, there are several new books and articles on this topic that are hitting the market right now.  In May 2010 Forum corporation released their new book, Strategic Speed.  The book addresses these critical concerns for leaders:

• What role does speed, or lack thereof, play in the high failure rate of strategic initiatives?
• What are the barriers, or traps, to execution?
• Do faster companies financially out-perform slower companies?
• How can I engage people in accelerating our strategy?

The book’s authors found that many change efforts fail because leaders act so quickly that they ignore the people factor.  Conversely, efforts that succeed are characterized by the presence of three people factors: clarity, unity, and agility.

Watch the the video below to see  Ed Boswell, Forum CEO and one of the book’s  co-authors talking about key findings:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In a May 2010 HBR article, Need Speed? Slow Down,  Jocelyn R. Davis and Tom Atkinson, also of Forum Corporation highlight the differences between strategically slow companies and the more successful strategically fast companies.  Among their findings:

• In strategically slow companies, groups move on to new projects without taking time to debrief whereas in strategically fast companies, groups make it a point to capture and communicate lessons learned.
• In strategically slow companies, time is rarely made for training and education whereas in strategically fast companies, even experienced employees receive training when initiatives are launched.
• In strategically slow companies, people work at cross-purposes due to competing objectives whereas in strategically fast companies, objectives and systems are aligned.

What about your own firm?  Is overdrive causing you to be strategically slow?  Is it time to slow down in order to speed up?

Spring is very different at an altitude of 8700 feet in Colorado.  Two weeks ago our aspens and lilacs barely had buds.  Today everything is gloriously green and the lilacs are literally unfolding their flowers right before our eyes.

The difference in the two springs has me thinking about speed and urgency.  The trees and flowers here know that they only have a few weeks to execute so they make the most of every minute.

Earlier this spring, I volunteered on a committee that organized a large community event in less than 6 weeks.  Initially, I and others in the group felt stressed and overwhelmed with the short time frame.  In the end, not only did we pull off a great event, but I learned that the short time frame actually helped.  We knew would couldn’t just meet and talk endlessly – we actually had to act . . . fast.  We kept meetings short and focused. We each committed to action items and we followed through.  We acted with urgency.

Change expert John Kotter has written extensively about how leaders need to instill a similar sense of urgency in order to lead change successfully. Urgency is a sense of pressing importance.  As Kotter writes, “A real sense of urgency is a highly positive and highly focused force.”

The challenge, I believe, is finding the right balance between urgency and overdrive.

As I’ve written about previously, overdrive is the state of dysfunctional momentum caused when leaders put extreme pressure on their people to get things done faster and with fewer resources.  Researchers have found that overdrive ultimately causes individual and company performance to suffer.  In my work on change initiatives, I find that overdrive causes leaders to miss or ignore key problems, to skip the critical communication and engagement phases, and to plow over resistance.

So how do you create a sense of urgency without pushing your organization into overdrive?  Kotter provides many specific guidelines and suggestions in his book, A Sense of Urgency.  It’s a quick and enjoyable read and one I highly recommend for all leaders.

But if you don’t have the time to read the book just yet, start by staying focused on no more than one to three specific and clear goals.  Every day communicate the importance of the goals, ask what progress is being made, reward progress and proactively investigate problems, listen, and address barriers.

In addition, I recommend having explicit conversations with your people about the speed with which you and they are operating.  One technique that works well is to draw a long line on whiteboard.  Label the far left with the word, “complacency”.  Label a middle/right point with the word “urgency” and the far right with the word “overdrive”.  Invite people to place a dot or an X with where they feel the team or organization is.  Talk openly about the results.  Doing so will help you and your team and/or organization operate in a state of energized alignment.

For more on this topic, see my previous posts on Avoiding Overdrive and Is Your Team Psyched Up and In Sync?

In his books, Mojo and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith uses the term “criteria” to get at the concept of being specific.  For example, when coaching an executive who wanted to spend more time with his kids – Goldsmith pushed the executive to be specific.  Exactly how much time with which kid? When?  Committing to spending 4 one-on-one hours with each child allowed this executive to track his progress and truly change.

The authors of Influencer present a similar idea in their book – claiming that for change to succeed, we need to get specific about who needs to change which exact behaviors.  They use the term “vital behaviors” to describe the concept and share scores of examples where change succeeded because the leader got specific.

Most recently, Chip and Dan Heath provided support for the need for specificity in their book, Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard.  The Heath brothers use the term “black & white goal” and argue that a concrete goal of zero defects, zero safety incidents, or zero snacks results in much more real change than a vague goal like reduce accidents, or calories.

There you have it – three books from the experts – saying the same thing (albeit a bit differently).  If you want change, you have to get specific.   So NO sweets for me until I lose the pounds I gained eating BBQ all week in Austin!

I use the term Energized Alignment TM to describe the state of being both “psyched up and in sync.”  The model below shows a simple matrix that can help you visualize the concept.

Think about your own team, department, or entire workforce. A team with high alignment is united by a common goal and agrees on what success will look like. In the two decades that I have partnered with leaders on change initiatives, I’ve discovered that many leaders focused only on getting people “on board” with change.  In other words, they tried to use the old command and control mentality to get people aligned.  

But alignment isn’t enough. Taken to extreme, clear goals and expectations alone may equate to working on an assembly line. Sure, I know what is expected of me, but do I really care? Do I come up with innovative suggestions?  Am I able to react to a sudden change that throws the whole plan off course?

To succeed, teams and the people on them need to have enough energy to keep working toward their goals despite obstacles, setbacks, and ever-frequent changes. Again, consider your own team. How much energy do people bring to work? Are the excited about what they are working on? Do they have the opportunity to contribute new, innovative ideas? Are they invited to unleash their natural strengths and talents in service of the organization’s goals?  

Again, taken to an extreme, all energy and no alignment isn’t effective either. If you’ve worked with a team of people who are enthusiastic about their own ideas and energized about putting them into place but who lack a common focus, direction, and coordination you know it can feel a lot like herding cats. 

Being an effective leader is largely about constantly paying attention to your team’s current state of energy and alignment. It is about developing a style that builds a careful balance. It’s not possible to be perfectly in balance all the time. But it’s an ideal worth striving for.

In future posts, I’ll share some techniques for unleashing energy and accelerating alignment.  And I’d love to hear what has worked for you.

Given this focus on savings are you wondering about your yearly management team offsite?  Should you hold it or skip it?

For help weighing the pros and cons, check out this HBR blog post from CEO coach, Melissa Raffoni:

This Year’s Management Off Site: Necessary or Negligent?

In addition to the posting, I recommend that you skim the reader comments.  Main themes seem to be that the management team needs to be more aligned that ever and that offsites can help to accomplish that.  At the same time, executives should remember to take the time to communicate why they are having the offsite and what the results/outcomes are. 

I believe that employees are craving more direction from their senior leaders.  They want to know where your company is headed, what the plans are for getting there, and how they can help.  Before you can communicate these answers to your frontline, you’ll need shared understanding, purpose, and alignment across your management team. 

If you decide to move forward with your offsite, you’ll also want to read this June 2006 HBR article from  Bob Frisch and Logan Chandler:

Off-Sites That Work

Best wishes for a productive offsite!  Remember to communicate with your entire organization afterwards.

Sign #1:  From Richard Hackman

In the May issue of Harvard Business Review, Diane Coutu interviewed Richard Hackman, Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University and a leading expert on teams.  While the article is titled, “Why Teams Don’t Work,”  Hackman does offer insight into why and when teams do work.  One surprising finding of Hackman’s research is that every team needs a deviant.   According to Hackman,

Hackman argues that deviants open up more ideas and are a great source of innovation.  Of course, the problem is that these very people are often seen as resistant and as troublemakers.

Sign #2:  From Warren Bennis

A month after Hackman’s article, HBR published a piece from Warren Bennis on the topic of transparency.  While the article is worth reading in and of itself, there on page 60 was a sign.  Bennis writes:

The lesson, according to Bennis, is “reward contrarians”.

Sign #3:  Jack and Suzy Welch

The last sign came in the June 8 edition of Business Week.  Jack and Suzy Welch devoted their weekly column to what they call, “The Power of Pushback.”   They write:

Conclusion:

As a driver myself, I recognize that it’s easy to get annoyed when people disagree and it’s tempting to squash dissension.  I think the universe (and business experts) are telling me and other leaders to reframe resistance and appreciate it when people care enough to disagree.  The result will be better in the long run!

Jack and Suzy Welch addressed this challenge in this week’s The Welchway column in Business Week.  In a nustshell, their advice is to focus your change efforts on the founder first, before attempting to change the rest of the organization.  Why?  Because  at least for a while, your employees’ loyalties are likely to lie with the founder and everyone in the company will be looking to see his/her reactions to the changes you are trying to put into place. 

To read the Welch’s article, click here:  Transforming the Family Business.

Executive coach, Meredith Kimbell recently shared a technique for assessing the alignment of your own leadership team.  She suggests asking yourself and your staff three questions:

• How will we know we’ve arrived?
• What results must I and my team contribute?
• How are we doing and what’s next?

To read Meredith’s article, Leading Your Leadership Team, click here.  For more on the topic, check out:

• Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
• My blog posts on Executive Team Alignment
• The HBR article, The New Deal at the Top

There are many aspects of alignment.  Today, I’d like to focus on alignment at the level of the senior leadership team. 

Organization development expert, Tom Wilkes, has worked with many executive teams to improve team performance and organizational outcomes.  As Tom describes it, success hinges on alignment.  He recently shared this simple, but powerful exercise for assessing whether or not your team is on the same page when it comes to priorities: 

• Give each member of the leadership team 3 index cards. 
• Instruct the team to write down the 3 most pressing priorities for the organization (using a separate card for each).
• Gather and post the cards on a wall or whiteboard, grouping them by topic/theme.

One team that Tom worked with had said in advance of this exercise that they were most definitely in agreement on priorities.  After this exercise, they had 36 different topics on the wall – an obviously a lot of work to do to get to agreement and eventually alignment.

For more on assessing and ensuring alignment check out Patrick Lencioni’s book, Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars and Yves L. Doz and Mikko Kosonen’s HBR article, The New Deal at the Top. 

According to the Child Development Reference (Volume 6), Parallel Play is a term that was introduced by Mildred Parten in 1932 to refer to a developmental stage of social activity in which children play beside rather than with one another. Children in this stage may comment on what they are doing or imitate what another child does, but they rarely cooperate in a task.

As I watched the dynamic unfold in this boardroom, it occurred to me that parallel play is taking place millions of times a day in meeting rooms across the country.  In order to function effectively as a decision-making body, I believe that each executive team needs to be able to identify when parallel play is occurring, stop working separately, and start working collaboratively.  Of course, this requires consciously paying attention to the processes that are being used to come to a decision, not just the content of the decision itself.  Doing so can greatly reduce the time wasted in meetings and result in better – and more – outcomes.