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Friday, August 22, 2008
Is That Clear? Crystal, Sir
Remember Tom Cruise' military lawyer character responding to Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessep in the film A Few Good Men? They were talking about following orders and the murky unwritten laws of military procedure in this classic from the nineties. But, I wonder how many crystal clear affirmative responses you'd get if you asked your staff if they understood your firm's purpose or your company's vision. Not many is my guess.
This is not surprising as research suggest only about 5% of organisations can claim their employees genuinely understand the company's strategy. But what's worse is the seemingly tacit acceptance of many leaders who seem to think this is ok and that they'll still achieve their goals/targets/dreams regardless!
Well if you're a leader, you might be one of the lucky ones and do just that. But just think how much luckier you could be if you had all your team focused on the same destination with a shared vision, clear goals and an understood purpose. In fact just think how much more successful you could be if when you asked your team, "Are we clear?" they all responded with one voice "Crystal",... we'll drop the "Sir".
The best and most successful leaders in business (and in all forms of life for that matter) know how important it is to set out and clearly communicate a vision and purpose for their team to rally behind. But the trap many 'start up' and 'SME' leaders and entrepreneurs fall into is thinking that vision & purpose stuff is just for the big boys. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fail to set out and communicate your vision and purpose and you'll fail to achieve anything much.
So how do you do it? Well as a leader, you obviously need to have a clear view of where you're going and how you're going to get there. This might entail a degree of new strategic thinking, but in most cases in my experience, you already know this, that's why you're an entrepreneur. What you really need to do is to communicate it to everyone else in a way that highlights your goals simply and clearly. In fact alongside your personal dreams for the market size, share and value of your company you should have another key goal: to make sure everyone else in your team shares your vision.
There are a number of ways to do this but the golden rule is to make sure your vision is connected to your key performance measures and that everyone can see this in a unified and connected manner. People need to know what they're trying to achieve in terms of their own detailed targets and how this fits in with the 'bigger picture'. Mind maps of some description are a great way of showing these interconnections. On top of this an eye catching visual will go a long way to grabbing people's attention and getting the point across in a highly imaginative way.
As an example, a new team recently formed as part of a leading UK drinks distributor felt they had a job to do in getting everyone to understand their vision and how their team would benefit the rest of the organisation. The first step was to set out a clear purpose and goals and to underpin this with a set of actions and behaviours that would move them towards their goal.
They did this by drawing a map of their vision using the circle as the foundation, which helped to suggest unity and team spirit, essential ingredients in any form of communication where more than one person is involved. The main ingredients of any vision and goal map are:
• Make it inclusive - not hierarchical.
• Puts organisation and personal outcomes on the same map to ensure alignment of everyone's efforts.
• Make the targets easy to track and don't have too many of them.
The feedback was instantly positive from within the team and from the rest of the organisation. If all that was required was to get everyone 'crystal clear' on the vision and goals, the map would have been enough. But the team leader wanted to really nail it and make it instantly clear right across the business just what his new team was there to achieve.
This is where the second element came in - a dramatic and inspiring visualisation of the vision and ideas incorporated within the map.
Visualisation and the ability of pictures to tell stories and communicate purpose and vision is a massively under utilised area in business and for little effort, can reap massive returns. The resulting illustration engaged people emotionally as well as analytically.
Armed with the vision map to communicate key actions and ideas and the picture to reinforce the story and navigate the route, the new team were well on their way to achieving their vision and goals.
Leadership vision is about people and you can only move people in a particular direction if you can communicate the destination and the path. Remember:
• "Today > 75% of the average company's market cap is attributed to intangibles - brand, databases, information and people" (Kaplan & Norton: Strategy Maps - 2003)
• "Communication enables us to plan, achieve, reflect and share experience. It underpins just about everything that shapes our lives" (Prof. Nigel Nicholson LBS)
• "...the best efforts of the leader come to naught if he has neither the means nor ability to communicate." (Field Marshall Montgomery of Alamein)
This is not surprising as research suggest only about 5% of organisations can claim their employees genuinely understand the company's strategy. But what's worse is the seemingly tacit acceptance of many leaders who seem to think this is ok and that they'll still achieve their goals/targets/dreams regardless!
Well if you're a leader, you might be one of the lucky ones and do just that. But just think how much luckier you could be if you had all your team focused on the same destination with a shared vision, clear goals and an understood purpose. In fact just think how much more successful you could be if when you asked your team, "Are we clear?" they all responded with one voice "Crystal",... we'll drop the "Sir".
The best and most successful leaders in business (and in all forms of life for that matter) know how important it is to set out and clearly communicate a vision and purpose for their team to rally behind. But the trap many 'start up' and 'SME' leaders and entrepreneurs fall into is thinking that vision & purpose stuff is just for the big boys. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fail to set out and communicate your vision and purpose and you'll fail to achieve anything much.
So how do you do it? Well as a leader, you obviously need to have a clear view of where you're going and how you're going to get there. This might entail a degree of new strategic thinking, but in most cases in my experience, you already know this, that's why you're an entrepreneur. What you really need to do is to communicate it to everyone else in a way that highlights your goals simply and clearly. In fact alongside your personal dreams for the market size, share and value of your company you should have another key goal: to make sure everyone else in your team shares your vision.
There are a number of ways to do this but the golden rule is to make sure your vision is connected to your key performance measures and that everyone can see this in a unified and connected manner. People need to know what they're trying to achieve in terms of their own detailed targets and how this fits in with the 'bigger picture'. Mind maps of some description are a great way of showing these interconnections. On top of this an eye catching visual will go a long way to grabbing people's attention and getting the point across in a highly imaginative way.
As an example, a new team recently formed as part of a leading UK drinks distributor felt they had a job to do in getting everyone to understand their vision and how their team would benefit the rest of the organisation. The first step was to set out a clear purpose and goals and to underpin this with a set of actions and behaviours that would move them towards their goal.
They did this by drawing a map of their vision using the circle as the foundation, which helped to suggest unity and team spirit, essential ingredients in any form of communication where more than one person is involved. The main ingredients of any vision and goal map are:
• Make it inclusive - not hierarchical.
• Puts organisation and personal outcomes on the same map to ensure alignment of everyone's efforts.
• Make the targets easy to track and don't have too many of them.
The feedback was instantly positive from within the team and from the rest of the organisation. If all that was required was to get everyone 'crystal clear' on the vision and goals, the map would have been enough. But the team leader wanted to really nail it and make it instantly clear right across the business just what his new team was there to achieve.
This is where the second element came in - a dramatic and inspiring visualisation of the vision and ideas incorporated within the map.
Visualisation and the ability of pictures to tell stories and communicate purpose and vision is a massively under utilised area in business and for little effort, can reap massive returns. The resulting illustration engaged people emotionally as well as analytically.
Armed with the vision map to communicate key actions and ideas and the picture to reinforce the story and navigate the route, the new team were well on their way to achieving their vision and goals.
Leadership vision is about people and you can only move people in a particular direction if you can communicate the destination and the path. Remember:
• "Today > 75% of the average company's market cap is attributed to intangibles - brand, databases, information and people" (Kaplan & Norton: Strategy Maps - 2003)
• "Communication enables us to plan, achieve, reflect and share experience. It underpins just about everything that shapes our lives" (Prof. Nigel Nicholson LBS)
• "...the best efforts of the leader come to naught if he has neither the means nor ability to communicate." (Field Marshall Montgomery of Alamein)
# posted by gopi @ 11:30 PM 
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