What was the study recently done on strategic planning?

June 22, 2009 – 11:24 am

I saw your message on Facebook and will put this on the blog. You were looking for the industry survey that showed why strategic planning was a good thing. I think you are referring to the Evergreen project. That is the most popular reference I see. The best overview of the study is in a book called What Really Works by William Joyce, Nitin Nohria and Bruce Roberson. They had some good evidence that four key elements were responsible for success (strategy, execution, culture and structure). Most of the programs out there only had short term success (like total quality management, six sigma, and a few others).

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Strategic planning

June 14, 2009 – 3:59 pm

Before you get lost in the details, take a step back. Outline a clear vision and a coherent set of values for your new business. Develop a mission statement and use it to define some short-term goals and priorities. There are three elements needed in advance of you developing a plan and throughout your life you will need to constantly re-think and redefine these elements.
The first are your values. Values are non-negotiable characteristics that you and ultimately your business will reflect. Values could include respect, honesty, joy, forgiveness, patience, humility, commitment, love, generosity, righteousness, etc. We personally believe each person should have a core set of values. These are values that you have learned throughout your life that guide you in everything you do or say.
Next, a Vision is a clear mental portrait of a preferable future. Vision involves change and focuses on what you want the future to be like. Vision provides direction. We challenge anyone who wants to change the direction of his or her life to take a weekend and think about his or her vision of where he or she wants to be down the road. Think about your personal needs and your professional goals. The two better mesh or you have set yourself up to fail.
Are you living as the person you want to be? What is the point? Building any business involves hard work. But it should also include a clear set of rewards. What do you want? Besides all that, you need to define some concrete motivation that goes beyond the satisfaction of a job well done.
Now, how about a mission for your business? A mission is the grand purpose for which you or your business exists. Be careful not to make this too narrow. Your mission statement is a reflection of who you are, and guides your business. We visited a law firm that had a mission to serve the legal needs of an entire state. Well that is pretty broad based. They wouldn't take any cases from the mountains and they wouldn't do real estate. That doesn't sound like "serving the legal needs of the state".
You are ready to start strategic planning. This is nothing more than a map showing you how to achieve your vision without violating your values. Once you have a clear road map for your business, you can plan your journey with more confidence.

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Should we stop measuring customer satisfaction

June 7, 2009 – 8:30 am

I am going to make a rash assumption that you have already defined yourself (your beliefs, values and purpose for being). How about your business (OK, another assumption is that you own or help run a business)? Have you defined what values will drive your business? What is the purpose of your business? Before we (the Catalyst Group) get started on a strategic plan I always ask and I am frequently amazed at the answers. Following my question I usually get a question in response - why does that make a difference?
Let's look at some possibilities. You have or a partner in a law firm. What do you deliver and who or what creates that deliverable? The answer to that question is usually several different things. One way to prioritize your list is by using the relative return on investment expected from each. One segment of your business is driven by cases referred to you by other law firms that they retain some ownership in. Another aspect of the business would be cases that you own. In both aspects of the business your goal would be to provide client satisfaction. In the first example the "client" was the referring law firm and in the second the client was the person referred within the case.
Now we get to the route of the concern when it comes to strategic planning. Who or what creates the deliverable? Is it a single person (as in the lawyer) or is it a combination of lawyer, case management and paralegal staff support (as in the firm). When you look at the primary provider (lawyer or firm) is it the reputation, the skill, the visual effect, the efficiency, or something else that provides the best return on investment?
When you look at client satisfaction I would suggest that you are better off looking at client dissatisfaction keeping in mind who or what creates your deliverable. If you can address all the potential sources of dissatisfaction I suspect you will have met your goal. Knowing what concerns to address and what processes produce your deliverable is the second input needed to do a good strategic plan.
The next time you get asked: what do you deliver (what do you do, what do you sell, etc.) be ready with an answer that your true "client" can relate to. After our seminars I have seen many creative answers to that question. Here are a few I liked.

• We (our firm) provide peace of mind. This was a personal injury law firm dealing directly with plaintiffs.


• We (our firm) provide the best return on investment in terms of revenue, time and quality. This was a law firm that handled referred cases where the ownership was fully or partially kept by the referring law firm.


• I provide personal attention, integrity and an honest outcome for my clients. This was a single attorney handling domestic cases.

A strategic plan is nothing more than gathering your wish list, looking at your resources, identifying where you are now and defining the best course of action to get to where you want to be. Oh, and lighten up out there. Add some joy into that plan along the way. So far I have not seen any composite deliverable that had any mention of having fun, being a source of a smile, or a we brighten your day statement.

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What makes a good leader

May 24, 2009 – 2:00 pm

If ever there is a subject that has more opinions and more discussions it is probably what is good leadership and what makes a good leader. Leadership is a skill used to realize a vision through the cooperation and contribution of others. The job of a leader is to motivate or influence people; focus is on the vision and the goal is to move people. Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. But what vision?

The theory of servant leadership is not a new one but one that has become more popular in recent years. Servant Leadership is a theory originally coined by Robert Greenleaf in 1970. It involves a leader making a conscious decision to serve the needs of the people within the company. It implies that by focusing on allowing employees to flourish at their very best level the company will flourish. Recently I had someone expand that theory to say that a good leader serves at the pleasure of the people. I am not sure I can agree with this.

The concept of servant leadership can be traced back, at least partly, to Jesus, about 2000 years ago. Many institutions and individuals have adapted the Servant Leadership approach to Christian principles. The theory is fine as far as it goes but I believe that a good leader serves the company, business, or owner of the vision more so than the people. So my question would be; servant to what or to whom? As it pertains to business I would prefer to say that leaders need to serve the needs of the business or shareholders ahead of the employees. The objective is to enhance the growth of individuals in the organization and increase teamwork and personal involvement.
Every organization, circumstance, or business calls for different courses of action. The success of your leadership will ultimately depend on the way you recognize the needs of the business or the strategic plan for that business, and how you can adapt your leadership style to those needs.

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Who is in control?

May 9, 2009 – 1:15 pm

When we get together for mentoring sessions I have begun to notice a pattern. For a few weeks now I have tried to figure out just what is going on. The symptoms are; something comes up usually with IT or marketing and no one person is in charge. After some investigation I determine that the owner or senior partner has vendored out a piece of the puzzle and the Firm Administrator or Business Manager are focused on legal cases. So I ask who is in charge of this area and I get blank looks back. There seems to be a few things going on here;

1. I do not find an understanding that the business of law includes all the support elements. The most prevalent understanding I find is that the case is all important. This is great for a general focus but there are a lot of elements that go into handling or settling a "case".


2. I find a belief that marketing and IT support are necessary evils in this economy, but the business is settling client's cases.

I also discover that there is little understanding of what is involved to run this law business. Let's narrow it down a little so I can better convey my point. I was called into a law firm that is totally driven by their case management system. That, to me, would mean that their information technology was a key element to their business. On this day their server locked up and to get out of this problem the battery backup system had been powered down. They thought that this was the server. Anyway, when this happened all the servers powered down and they could not get the system back online. Not only did they not know which "box" was their server, they did not know what it controlled or who was responsible for the system. What I discovered was that they had signed contracts with several vendors to provide support on pieces of the IT system to save cost, but no one vendor or person had total control. The Firm Administrator had no idea what all that hardware did. So as long as everything worked (which was 90% of the time) all was well.
This is one of the elements that should have been addressed in strategic planning. Many law firms today have complex IT systems that support their business. These systems are a marvel of modern technology and include hardware, cables, software and many control tables. The systems are self checking and many times self repairing but if an element fails it is not always obvious to someone that has no idea what that system was designed to do. If this is the backbone of your business why would you have an administrator or a business manager that did not understand that system. That would imply to me that this person does not understand your business. If that were true how would you expect that person to administer or manage your business?
Having someone that understands your business and all the elements of your business is a key role. This is not the place to skimp. If you are going to give this responsibility to a vendor make sure that vendor is responsible and accountable for all the elements. I have had a firm administrator call me up to fix a printer that was unplugged and was holding up a client meeting. Take a good look at your "business" not just your deliverable and make sure that you know what drives your business and who is in control.

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Do you have an effective team?

March 31, 2009 – 1:58 pm Many times I will look at a business that claims to have teams or even claims to be a high performance organization only to find employees that do not understand what they are expected to do.  You may wonder, what are they doing all day?   Well they are being reactive, These people are not working on or from a plan, they are completely reactive.  They do not know how they fit into the big picture and many do not even realize that they are part of a team. Nobody has communicated clear expectations related to any business goals or vision.  What they get are expectations related to technical skills. Kind of like do not make any mistakes writing this letter. That is OK, but they have no idea why they are writing the letter.  This sounds like a simple flaw to fix but it is not.  I find this in almsot every business I evaluate.   I suspect that the reason for this is that the leadership is really focused on the old management model and not really focused on teams or high performance.   They never see the full benefits of a well coordinated team.  They lack trust of the team concept. They are so focused on the day to day activities that that nice strategic plan they did or the nice speech they made about going to high performance teams have been forgotten. The end result is they claim that a team approach just will not work for them.  It is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.

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The implementation problem

March 26, 2009 – 5:12 am

There are many theories and class on how to be a leader, manager or even a skilled employee.  I have found books and classes on how to do strategic planning.  There is even a book dedicated to Execution theory (Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy , Ram Charan , and Charles Burck). 

 

The question you need to ask is, "do you have any strategic plans that have not been implemented?"  Well of course you do.  To implement any new idea you have to address three areas; people, strategy and operations. Basically, who will do the job, what is the real vision of this project, and how does this project support the overall strategic plan.

 

So we can define what a leader is and write a great strategic plan but until we have an honest discussion about the project and reality, the plan never gets implemented.

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Why do some groups have trouble with high performance teams

March 16, 2009 – 3:41 pm

I often wonder why some businesses have such trouble implementing a High Performance team. Over time the meetings start to be canceled in preference to real time task resolutions.  Sometime between eight and twelve months the project is stalled.   The group refuses to get out of there comfort zone.  What they are used to, is starting their day with a to-do list and tackling task. There is no vision, no excitement, and no passion.  Thoughts of a high performance team are put on the back burner.

Here is an example of one group that really wanted to become a high performance organization but just could not get over the first hurdle.  Within the first three months we went through the definition of a high performance organization, completed self mastery training, and started work on their strategic plan.  Around month four or five, the strategic plan is ready for implementation.  We deliver the plan to the full team, start leadership training, define teams and assign missions.  In short order we discover the teams getting stalled and implementation being challenged or canceled.  The strategic plan is never approved by the full team and they want to quit.  What happened?

When we completed a full review we discovered that they still did not have a common vision, a clear purpose or even one mission that was linked to the vision.   All these things were discussed and documented but never really agreed to.  There was a breakdown in leadership.  Within the first six months we had failed to develop a passion within the group.  We go into recovery mode and start looking at training and team development.

So, I have this big question - Why didn't the teams take off?  They buy into the concept but it seems to me that the day to day focus on deliverables shuts them down.  They do not want to give up control to a team.  It is a matter of trust.  Many times people have said that they know it would be faster and more efficient using a team but they just did not trust that the team would deliver.  All the performance reviews we looked at were focused on individual deliverables. There status reports for the business were many times focused on a single financial metric instead of being balanced.   When I am asked I would say that the business was focused on traditional management instead of high performance leadership.

There is no one answer to this question. I would like to hear what you think a solution would be.  This does not happen often, but when it does it is frustrating. 

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