Can Your Employees Answer These Three Questions? (They Should!)

Welcome to Leading Disruption, a weekly letter about disruptive leadership in a transforming world. Every week we’ll discover how the best leaders set strategy, build culture, and manage uncertainty all in service of driving disruptive, transformative growth.

One day, I arrived at a company an hour before I was scheduled to give a speech. I decided to walk around and get to know a few people.?

As I walked around, I asked employees, “What’s your strategy? How does your role and the company’s mission align?”

You know what I discovered? Nobody could answer those basic questions! Even though leadership was clear on their purpose, it hadn’t been communicated to the rest of the organization.

Now, contrast that with the Navy. I had a chance to spend 24 hours on the aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz.??

When I asked service members why they joined, what their purpose was, and how they played a role in accomplishing that mission, every single person, regardless of rank, could answer these questions with clarity and confidence.

In Tuesday’s livestream , I shared the three questions everyone in your organization needs to be able to answer if you want to run a tight ship like the Navy.

The first one is:??

1. Are you clear on who your future customer is?

Unfortunately, everybody has a different definition of this customer. Someone sitting in your marketing or finance department probably thinks about the customer differently than someone working in sales.

That’s a problem because you need to be thinking about a unified future – and that starts with getting clear on who you want to serve.

One of the most powerful tools to ensure everyone is aligned on the definition of a customer is an empathy map .

An empathy map defines your future customer – not by the demographics (age, location, occupation, etc.) but by what they think, say, feel, and do. It puts you in their shoes so you can better understand what drives them and serve them more effectively.

Sharing an empathy map across the entire organization gets your employees actively involved in shaping the future and serves as a daily reminder who you’re serving, what frustrates them, and what makes them happy.

Take this one step further: Try to define the impact you want to have on your future customer. Ask yourself, “How do we want to interact with them? What experiences do we want to create for them? What impact will we make on them?”

Once you have a clear vision of your future customer, the next question is:

2. What is your strategy to meet future customers where they’re at?

Everyone in your organization needs to know where you’re headed and how you’re doing to get there. They need to clearly see the path ahead and understand what the strategy involves – and doesn’t.

Now, this doesn’t mean the path can’t change or that you can’t explore another route, but it gives everyone a general direction and a destination.

An effective tool to ensure strategy alignment is the “six-quarter walk,” where you walk the organization through what the organization plans to accomplish in each of the next six quarters, and the steps you’ll take to hit those goals. At the end of the quarter, the walk is extended another quarter out so that the plan is constantly updated. ?

A six-quarter walk has two purposes:

• It lets anyone dragging their feet know they need to get on board with the strategy because you’re going to keep moving forward – with or without them.
• It lets anyone who wants to move faster or push harder know that you can’t do that right now. That comes later, and they need to hold back.

With your strategy mapped out, now it’s time to ask:?

3. How does every individual contribute to the execution of the strategy?

One of the biggest challenges when creating alignment is ensuring the strategy trickles down to every member of the organization. That’s because the strategy is often a high-level presentation done to justify an initiative or budget -- and then stuffed into a folder and never looked at again

But when the strategy is widely shared constantly and consistently, everyone knows what is at stake and they’ll feel empowered to contribute to the strategy. They’ll be excited to identify future customers. And they’ll feel connected to the strategy.

Your role as a leader is to help every member of your team be able to say, “This is what I can do to make our strategy successful.”

An easy way to communicate this is giving everyone a metric to measure their success. Tie that metric to the strategy so that their role and responsibilities are in alignment with what you want to achieve.?

It’s your job as a disruptive leader to know the answers to these three questions and to ensure that every team member – from the executives to the new hires – can answer them too.?

Imagine if every employee — from finances to sales to administration to the c-suite could say: “Our future customer is Person A and we know them intimately. Our strategy to meet them where they’re at is to do B and C. My contribution to this strategy is D and E, and here’s how I measure my success.”?

I promise you the effectiveness, innovation and camaraderie in your company will skyrocket. Because when you’re clear on who you will serve, how you will serve them, and the role everyone plays, executing that strategy becomes effortless.

Join me on Tuesday, October 5 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET to kick off my miniseries about 21st century disruptive leadership. I’ll be answering the question: “How do I know I’m a leader?” I’ll see you then!

Your Turn

I’m curious: What are some of the biggest challenges you encounter when trying to create alignment? As I mentioned during the livestream, this is a huge challenge for leaders, so I’m curious to hear about your experience. I shared one I noticed in the comments.