The Anvil Swing: Gain efficiency, productivity and improved performance with the 4 P’s

I’m a huge fan of business author Jim Collins, so it pains me to say he missed the boat in his book, Good to Great. While Collins’ seminal work has profoundly influenced and impacted the business world (including mine), his use of the metaphor “getting employees in the right seats on the bus” has a subtle but important shortcoming. Sitting on a bus as a passenger is a passive activity that can’t possibly move a business forward. After reading The Boys in the Boat last year, I had an epiphany, which included defining a metaphor that is more powerful, relevant and actionable than being a passenger on a bus.

Reading, The Boys in the Boat, a book about the 1936 Olympic 8-man rowing team’s journey to a gold medal was truly awe-inspiring (think Unbroken meets Seabiscuit). One particular theme stuck in my mind as a key to the crew’s ultimate success: achieving the “Swing” more often than any other team. Since I’ve never been part of a crew, I will let quotes from the book, describe the Swing:

“When you get the rhythm in an eight, it's pure pleasure to be in it. It's not hard work when the rhythm comes--that ‘swing’ as they call it. I've heard men shriek out with delight when that swing came in an eight; it's a thing they'll never forget as long as they live.”

“There’s a word for that in the rowing world: “swing,” when it feels as if the boat is part of each rower. Rowing then becomes a kind of perfect language. Poetry, that’s what a good swing feels like. It’s the fourth dimension of rowing.”

Put simply, the Swing is a moment of complete harmony and synchronicity amongst a team. While the term was coined in the world of rowing, I felt it could be applied elsewhere. More specifically, I wondered if the Swing could apply to my business. What would my measurable marketing agency, Anvil, look like if the Swing was in full effect? What changes would have to have happened to make the Swing a possibility at Anvil Media? One of the first thoughts I had was Collins’ “seats on the bus” and how “seats on the boat” made infinitely more sense as a management metaphor. I decided to set a goal to develop a Swing Plan that included getting my team on the right seats on the boat for optimal business performance.

Introducing The Anvil Swing

The first step in developing a Swing Plan at Anvil was to get the employees on board. At our annual strategic planning retreat on Mt. Hood, I introduced the concept of the Swing and engaged the team in a series of exercises. I asked the team to write down what they thought the Swing would look like at Anvil, and they came up with a plethora of wonderful descriptions, including the following:

• Playing to everyone’s strengths
• Anticipating our clients’ needs
• Intuition takes over and effort becomes 2nd nature
• Work is fun and enjoyable, not ‘work’
• More collaboration and connectivity among the team
• Anvil is greater than the sum of its parts

The Anvil team clearly understood the concept and was open to further exploration. A few months after the retreat, I tackled the next step of developing a draft Anvil Swing Plan to share with the team. I quickly realized the best way to get the team to embrace the Swing Plan was to clearly illustrate the benefits of contributing to its development, implementation and long-term success. I reviewed notes from the retreat discussion and created a list of Swing Benefits for employees, including:

• Enhance ability to delight and elevate our clients (Anvil’s mission)
• Produce the same output with less effort or produce more output with the same effort
• Reduce stress and increase happiness
• Increase earning potential and expedite career path
• Build camaraderie and enhance the company culture
• Create more freedom (of choice)

Creating The Swing

The next step was identifying how we would go about creating the Swing at Anvil. I again revisited notes from our retreat exercises and discussions and put together a list of suggestions from the team regarding initiatives that would help make the Swing possible:

• Foster greater levels of collaboration & trust via transparent communications
• Cross-training the team and understanding each other’s roles
• More brainstorming and knowledge-sharing
• Understanding each individual team member’s strengths, unique abilities and motivators
• Increasing face-to-face communications
• Pay attention to what makes and keeps the rhythm, then adjust

The Anvil Swing Framework

The Swing planning process inspired me and I began to share the concept with a few close associates, including a business coach. I recommended reading The Boys in the Boat and a month later, he let me know he finished the book and found a related book that he suggested I read: Will it Make the Boat go Faster? I bought it that day and finished it a week later. This book was very complementary, in that it was the story of the 2000 UK Olympic 8-man crew’s journey to gold in Sydney, augmented with business application elements.

While the book was entertaining and informative, I didn’t find myself taking as many notes. Will it Make the Boat go Faster? was inspiring, but it mostly served to validate assumptions I’d made from The Boys in the Boat and provided important framework for developing the Swing Plan. Specifically, I directly applied the book’s planning framework to Anvil:

• Align on goals: to achieve Most Valuable Partner (MVP) status with our clients
• Set behavior expectations: as defined by The Anvil Credo and Core Values
• Build trust and reliance: via transparent communications and fine-tuning processes
• Measurability: utilizing various operational tools
• Accountability: owning outcomes including client case studies, testimonials and referrals

The Swing Action Plan

With the framework defined, the next step was to define key steps and a timeline for developing the Anvil Swing Plan. Highlights from our action plan included:

• Host brown bag workshop to present Draft Plan
• Gain insights and alignment from team to finalize Plan
• Hand over key elements to internal workgroups for implementation
• Ask the question “Will it make the boat go faster?”
• Practice, practice, practice (via Anvil University)
• Encourage timely feedback from team for improvement

The 4 P's of Anvil Swing

As a long-time adjunct professor, I’ve learned to break concepts down into smaller components to improve cognition and long-term application. For the Swing Plan, I developed a 4P framework under which all components would fit nicely. The four core elements of the Swing Plan are: People, Process, Platform and Partners. I’ve broken down each element in greater detail below.

1. People (Team)

In the agency world, your people are your product. For the Swing Plan, people on the team are the single most important ingredient. The first and most critical step in the Swing Plan is to create alignment and shared goals across the team. At Anvil, we leveraged our existing framework, including The Credo, mission, vision and core values to create alignment. We also relied heavily on our internal workgroups and Anvil University training and certification to create a level of competence parity.

1. Process

If you read either book about gold medal rowing teams, you quickly notice the importance of rhythms, both in and outside of the boat. Both teams bonded outside of the boat, in terms of physical training and bonding via regular interaction. They developed training regiments that became rhythmic and helped synchronize the team. At Anvil, we focused on building a rhythm through process, including revising meeting timing and format, improving the onboarding process for new employees and ensuring the culture inside and outside of the office was consistently more lively and fun.

One component of rhythm through process we found to be impactful was celebrating each other’s wins. We revised our weekly staff meeting kudos to focus more on remarkable acts and renewed our focus on awarding spot-bonuses to high-performing employees. Other key process touch points included enhancing documents, professional development opportunities and strategic planning across client accounts. One important action item from the Swing Plan to ensure we maximized effectiveness of our meetings was requiring the team to read Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.

1. Platform (Tools)

In order to make the 4 Ps a reality, I had to get creative in order to work tools into the mix. I felt Platform aptly described how we look at tools: a foundation that allows the team to measure and manage efficiency and productivity improvements inside of Anvil’s walls. We identified tools on both the internal/operational side of the business as well as external/account management side. The goal was to ensure our platforms were helping make the boat go faster, and if they weren’t we needed to evaluate alternative tools.

1. Partners (Clients and Strategic Partnerships)

The fourth and final component of the 4 Ps is Partners. Without our clients and other strategic partner/vendors, Anvil will not be able to achieve the Swing. Beyond ensuring we have the right clients on board that value our ability to move their businesses forward, we felt it was equally important to align with partners and vendors that could help make the boat go faster. We evaluated our client and partner mix and ended up retooling both. We outsourced a few non-strategic clients to a partner that could better support their needs and swapped out a few partner relationships to ensure we were getting the best products, services and support.

The Swing: Areas of Focus

Anticipating the reality that the Swing Plan would be a significant undertaking and require a meaningful commitment over time from all involved, I determined it would be important to take a phased approach to implementation. Pulling from best practices in other disciplines, we elected to focus our initial effort on any initiatives that fell in the ‘sweet spot’ intersection between all four Ps (see illustration below). The idea was that any improvements we experienced would be amplified across categories and initiatives; in essence, creating swing with the Swing.

The initiatives we identified that fell in the Swing ‘sweet spot’ included the following:

• Team Onboarding and Development: implementing Anvil University training and certification
• Communications: increasing face-to-face interaction and collaboration
• Culture: proactively designing a fun and energizing environment
• Service Delivery: improving the value of deliverables while increasing efficiencies
• Strategic Planning: leveraging the Anvil Marketing Index (AMI) to improve account performance
• Capacity Planning: improving tools, training, education and resources allocation
• Results: focus on improving our ability to delight and elevate clients via exceptional customer service and measurable marketing programs

Implementing the Swing Plan

Having learned years ago that my strength lies in creating a vision and not so much in the actual tactical implementation, I made sure the team was fully-committed to implementing the plan once it was clearly defined. After revising the draft Swing Plan based on initial input from the team, I handed it over to my executive team to build out a critical layer of detail that the team would need to implement effectively at a workgroup and personal level. The executives outlined specific tactics under the 4 Ps strategic framework, including the What, Why, How, Who and When for each initiative.

In order to effectively manage and measure the impact of the Anvil Swing Plan, we developed a Matrix. The Swing Matrix provided line-item detail, including: Objective, Strategy, Tactics, Timeline, Primary Owner, Supporting Team members and Metrics. The key components of the plan are all owned by one of the members of the management team to ensure proper oversight. We’ve incorporated regular check-ins into our meetings, including weekly staff meetings, monthly workgroup sessions and quarterly team and client account evaluations. While The Swing is a work-in-progress, the Anvil team, clients and partners are already feeling the impact and we’re just getting started.