| Have you seen the effects of success
blindness?
It is a condition where success can be your greatest
impediment to growth and succeeding in the future. Success hides many ills. It masks
fundamental weaknesses in the business. And can lead to poor decisions - decisions that
could end up fatal to your business. We've all heard the adage - they're throwing money at
the problem. Well, today money is scarce for many. And simply stated many businesses
literally can no longer afford to throw money at the problem to fix it.
We need a better approach, and it starts with creating a
sound strategic vision as we work our way out of this recession. While your leadership
team works on creating a "new" strategic vision, be careful to
avoid these 3 mistakes that most organizations unknowingly make...
3 Top Mistakes Business Leaders Make While Creating Their
New Strategic Vision and Direction
1. Failing to look at the organization's current strategic
vision for relevance and how the market has changed.
Before you even start thinking about creating a new vision for your organization, you need
to think about these two things...
- Is your past/current strategic vision still relevant in
today's economy?
- Has your market changed: for the better or for worse?
If you were selling sub-prime mortgages or providing goods
and services to the real estate market then your market has changed for the worse. If on
the other hand, you are selling goods or services to Apple, Walmart or Target, then you
are likely doing reasonably well.
Strategy is multi-dimensional and what was successful in
the past may not be successful in the future. Context and situation require change, at the
very least, re-evaluation and validation. Without a current, sound strategic vision there
is no direction for your company and forward momentum will become unlikely. Defining a
strategic vision is the starting point as business growth resumes.
2. Failing to ask eight fundamental "business health
check" questions.
You see, far too often, small to medium size businesses fail to take an objective and
dispassionate view of their operations when planning for their future. In many cases, they
focus on only one component of the business, such as sales. How does this help you
determine how to best position your organization for the future? You must ask these 8
questions...
- What's working now and how do you know?
- What's not working and how do you know?
- What do you want to achieve?
- What do you need to avoid?
- What do you need to eliminate ("stop doing")?
- What do you need to safeguard/preserve?
- What could you be doing to better prepare if an ongoing
recession, and for the eminent rebound? (What else could you do to prepare for worse/best
case scenarios?)
- Then, what are your next best steps to sustain you now and
position you for the rebound?
It is critical to ask (and listen to your team's responses
to) these questions when creating your new strategic vision.
And lastly, mistake number three is highly interdependent
with number two, and most critical to execution - that is, "operationalizing"
your vision to results:
3. Failing to "align" your leadership team with
the new strategic vision of where you are headed.
If only you or a few of the executives address the questions above in framing out and
defining your strategic direction, it results in a gap - a lack of knowing by the very
staff that will be making it happen (AKA: EXECUTING). Not knowing organizational
priorities results in disarray due to individual agendas and priorities. (Think of
individual employees as arrows pointing in different directions, verses focus and energies
in a clear and common direction.)
For example, one of our leadership consulting clients was
running a successful research business in the medical industry with a strong client base.
The work product was good, as were sales. And for the most part clients were satisfied.
What wasn't working well was the leadership team. Why? Talented researchers were promoted
to leadership positions with little (or no) management experience. This created a
"learning curve" both for the newly promoted manager (learning how to be a
manager) and their employees (learning how to cope with the new manager's learning how to
be a manager). The new managers that were thrown into a leadership role brought their
baggage with them. That is the politics, behaviors and opinions they had as subordinates.
No time was spent working to align the leadership team with the organizational vision and
to align the team with itself. As a result, frustration grew - in both the new managers
and the employees - and employee turnover became high. In a short time, clients felt the
impact.
Lack of a commonly understood strategic direction
leads to misaligned efforts and frankly poor decisions - and this can end up fatal to your
business.
The recession has changed many businesses forever. What
were opportune and successful strategies in the past will no longer work for many
organizations. And believing you will soon return to business as usual is dangerous
thinking.
Through addressing these 3 mistakes, you can re-surface
from the recession by taking an intentional, dispassionate look at your current market
situation, asking the tough questions, and defining a strategic vision that is desired and
doable by you and your staff. |
