style="font-size:15px;"> It's not only the job of executive management to think strategically and creatively about implementing strategy. We all must. The following chapters in Part 1 (M = The Middle) will give you the tools to contribute, at a more strategic level, to getting your own team ready to lead your part of the transformation to move the business forward. And by contributing to the forward progress of the business at a more strategic level, you'll add real value and develop your career in the process.
Now that you have started to consider what needs to happen in the Middle, define it in terms of concrete outcomes that will make specific actions obvious.
Read on…
CHAPTER 2
CONCRETE OUTCOMES
STOP ADMIRING THE PROBLEM AND DEFINE SOME SPECIFIC ACTIONS
You know what you want, and you want your team to do it. You have made the goals clear, and now you are expecting your team to work it out and get it done.
But now somehow there seems to be a stall before you even get started.
You are getting frustrated because your organization does not seem to be moving forward in the new direction even though they all agreed how important it is, and were brought in and even excited about it.
You are beginning to feel that your team is not strategic enough or not taking enough accountability. They are not leading. They are not taking action. They are waiting for more specific operational direction from you, yet you are expecting them to provide that operational direction.
What Everyone Is Thinking
This strategy sounds great, but I haven't heard what the new initiatives or priorities are yet. I'm not sure how we are going to achieve this strategy. I haven't been given any different performance objectives. And I haven't been given more resources. It seems that there are a bunch of decisions that executive management still needs to make. And I am fully booked already with current stuff. I'm happy to support the strategy. I'll support it when I know what I'm supposed to do.
Simply telling people what is important will not cause the organization to start doing what is important.
What Happens in the Middle, Exactly?
This is one of the most interesting things that I find in my work with companies on executing their strategies. The problem is not just a communication gap between the executives and the team....It's that no one anywhere in the organization has articulated what the team needs to do to implement the new strategy.
Once you launch your new strategy, when everyone wakes up the next morning, what is different – specifically?
A company can be really clear about what it wants to accomplish, yet struggle to articulate the specific tasks that will make those goals come true.
For example, if your goal is to improve market perception, and everyone agrees on that goal, you can't just tell your team, “Go forth and improve market perception.” You need to do some work to clarify in what manner you will accomplish that. Will you train your salespeople to engage differently? Will you change your marketing message? Will you improve your relationships with market analysts and media? Will you change your product? Will you create a new customer service offer?
When I take management teams through my Strategy into Action program, this lack of clarity about what the organization needs to do in the “Middle” is what we focus on the most. We shine a big spotlight on defining what the specific approach is in the Middle to make the end goals come true. I have taken countless leadership teams through this process, and this basic idea about strategy always works:
A strategy must describe what you will do, including how you will measure and resource it. Strategy must clarify specific action.
An end goal, no matter how inspiring it is, is not enough to mobilize an organization. What it gives you is a list of wishes, not an actual strategy. But by insisting that your strategy describes what you will do, you will by definition be making it clear what things need to happen in the Middle.
Moving from Big, Vague End Goals to Actionable Strategy
Think about the really important goals your team talks about all the time. When you talk about them everyone agrees they are critical: We must improve quality. We must innovate. We must respond to a competitive threat. We must evolve our business model to provide better service.
Talk vs. Action
To move your team from talking about important stuff in a vague way to actually making progress on these things in a real way, the first step is to realize that you are stuck because you are still only talking.
You need to change the nature of the conversation to become one that drives action, instead of just more talking. One of the biggest hazards to watch for is a concept called “smart talk.”
The term was coined by Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer in their Harvard Business Review article, “The Smart Talk Trap” (May–June 1999), and it so richly describes what happens when smart people substitute talking for action:
We found that a particular kind of talk is an especially insidious inhibitor of organizational action: “smart talk.” The elements of smart talk include sounding confident, articulate, and eloquent; having interesting information and ideas; and possessing a good vocabulary. But smart talk tends to have other, less benign components: first, it focuses on the negative, and second, it is unnecessarily complicated or abstract (or both). In other words, people engage in smart talk to spout criticisms and complexities. Unfortunately, such talk has an uncanny way of stopping action in its tracks. That's why we call this dynamic the smart-talk trap.
This is a specific and unfortunately common type of corporate behavior where people substitute sounding smart in a meeting for actually contributing work. I'm certain you know some of these people!
These people will come to meetings with lots of insight and data. They will always be ready to shed more light on the problem by providing details, benchmarks, and customer examples. They will have lots of smart stuff to say. Everyone will think, “Wow, they're really smart.”
Describing the “Situation”
It's vitally important as a leader to recognize when your team is falling into the pattern of accepting smart sounding ideas and inputs instead of measurable forward progress. The most effective way I have found to break through this is to recognize when you get stuck in a pattern of smart-talking about the “situation.”
Groups of people have a very strong tendency to discuss the situation – a lot. Over and over again. For a really long time. Situation conversations are the easiest conversations to have because there is no risk. You are simply stating facts. You might contribute facts that no one else knows, and you might sound really smart while saying them, but the fact of the matter is that there is no forward progress because you are simply describing what is happening.
Situation discussions describe what we are doing, what the market is doing, what the competitors are doing, what the investors are saying, what the problems are, what the costs are, what the customers are demanding, what the changes in business model are causing, what the opportunities are, what the employees are doing and not doing. Situation discussions don't go anywhere; they only gather more detail. With a ready supply of smart talk, the situation discussion will
