The cost-benefit of clarity

Mutually confident

This month marks 25 years I’ve been in business as an independent consultant.

As someone who makes his living from helping others think ahead reflectively, it makes sense for me to reflect on what I know now that I didn’t back in 1999.

I used to think that the most valuable outcome of a strategy process were the business results than came from achieving direction and clarity. And, that’s true. But, there’s something more.

It’s heightened confidence between a board and its executive.

Mutual confidence grows when two parties get on the same page on critical, and even contentious, issues. So, in my strategy process, I ask boards and executives to come up with insights, jointly, on four things: their environment (“What’s going on around us?”), their identity (“Who are we, and what are we here to do?”), their focus (“What should we invest effort in?”) and their results (“What does success look like?”).

What I’ve found, over quarter of a century of doing this, is that this deceptively simple process dramatically strengthens two-way trust:

a) The board has confidence in management’s ability to deliver on the strategy.

b) Management has confidence that the board ‘gets it’ and will therefore support and enable their delivery.

My litmus test on this is simple: The CEO is given maximum latitude on HOW she enacts the WHAT towards the WHY. The disclaimer is: “Subject to normal standards of risk and performance oversight”.

As they say in the Mastercard ads, “Priceless”.

Question: What confidence do you want — or need — between your board and executive team?

Marriage counselling

Couples turn up to marriage counselling often because of a truth that can’t be told.

Here’s a relationship worth billions of dollars in Australia and this very clever video (not just for Game of Thrones fans) shows how the conflict between private interests and one’s public facade plays out.

Where else does this conflict of private and public appear in organisational life? Here are a few I’ve seen more than once:

a) A company promotes a high performance supportive culture (publicly), but tolerates toxic individuals (privately).

b) A corporation shows ethnically diverse customers in its advertising (public image) but this is not correlated with the cultural diversity of their directors.

c) A business closely monitors lower level employees (a public commitment to ‘accountability’) while reframing more senior staff’s ‘failures’ as learning opportunities, or even fails to discuss them (privately accepting a much higher level of risk).

d) An organisation lays claims to an inclusive and ‘safe’ workforce (publicly), but internally the same voices get much of the airtime (privately accepted, sometimes unconsciously).

Many people talk to me about ‘authenticity’ and ‘integrity’. I believe that often this is precisely what they’re talking about: narrowing the distance between the private and public presentations of their organisation’s values. Nestle famously addressed this conflict by increasing the payments made to cocoa farmers, heightening supply chain transparency, and offering training to farming communities. It understood that selling a discretionary, even luxury, product in the developed world was not consistent with the borderline subsistence conditions faced by farmers growing the basic ingredients.

Question: What’s an uncomfortable truth that your organisation really should discuss, behind closed doors or publicly?

Shift up or down

When did you last learn something genuinely new about yourself?

A consultant I co-presented a strategy workshop with made an observation about me that I’d never heard before: “Andrew, you know when to lift to a more strategic level, and when to drill deeper. That really helped cut through the most complex issues”.

I thought about what he said, and it occurred to me that not only was this a conscious, learned skill, but I even remembered who’d taught me to do it. A long-ago mentor, Roger, had said, “Andrew, work out when you need to know what A is an example of, and when you need to know what’s an example of A”.

Read that again if you need to, but I hope it makes sense.

What Roger was saying was this: Shift up (“What is that an example of?”) when you want to get to principles, or criteria, and shift down (“What’s an example of that?”) to get beyond the ‘headline’ or ‘motherhood statement’ to tangible expressions of an idea.

Question: How do you know when to shift gears, up or down, to get clarity?

The cost -benefit of clicking the 'Like' button is at least 1000:1, so please take a few milliseconds to do so. It helps bring 5MSM to more people when you do.

And, please clink a glass of your preferred beverage to toast something celebratory in your own life this week.

I’ll see you again next Friday,

Andrew