#16: Making Strategy Real

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Bill Sanders. Bill is an operational strategist. He has a rare ability not only to see misalignment between strategy, process, and execution, but to work with his clients to align these essential elements, unlocking increased profitability and growth potential. Bill also writes a regular column on work culture for the Huffington Post. Welcome, Bill. I'm so happy you could be with us.

Thank you, Erika. It's a pleasure to be here.

Oh, good. Now, you and I just met recently. You caught my attention at a conference we both attended by mentioning that you help companies operationalize their strategy. I just love that. It sounds so practical. I immediately thought it would be truly valuable for my listeners to have a better sense of how to do that. So you want to just dive in?

Absolutely. I think almost everybody who's been around has lots of great ideas, lots of great strategies out there. They don't fail in formulation. They fail in execution most of the time. So operationalizing strategy is how do you align all of the effort inside the organization toward the implementation of that strategy?

Yeah.

It can take place at the individual level in their mindsets, habits, how they get things done, and how they're tied to the organization, at the team level, Obviously, the interaction of the teams or the breaking down of silos, cross-functional team development, that sort of thing, all the way to full organizational structure redevelopment.

So really, when you say operationalizing strategy, it sounds like you're talking about making it real, taking it from a theoretical construct— this is what we think we should do to grow our business and move forward— to how are we actually going to make this happen?

Absolutely. Very practical.

Okay, that's great. I can see how there's a lot that would come up if you're trying to make what could be good planning, but then make it practical and real to help your organization. So from your point of view, having done this a lot, what most often gets in the way of leaders being able to make this happen, either obstacles within themselves individually or within their organizations?

That's a great question. We've actually identified We have 7 of those and we're publishing a special report in August. Let me just give you 3. One is not recognizing and using speed as a competitive advantage. On the organizational design side, building bridges instead of commissioning armada.

I love that.

And we're hiring for competency instead of enthusiasm.

Wow, I love all 3 of these. So let's just take them in order. Talk to me about speed as a competitive advantage. How does that play into this?

Well, right now, when you finished your perfect 3-year plan, it's already 3 months out of date. The convergence of all our digital technology and our digital advancement right now from, I mean, take your pick, AI, blockchain, any of the big mega trends out there. The real meta trend is that the transaction cost for starting and testing new business models is so low. that you end up with Ubers with a higher valuation than General Motors, with Airbnb that has a higher valuation. And Uber owns no cars. Airbnb owns no property. They have an entirely different structure. And so that insurgent mindset is moving very, very quickly, and the incumbent companies are behind if you put in that much time and effort planning. Rather than building a culture that prototypes, tests, and gets much, much closer to the customer.

Got it. So the obstacle is disconnecting the planning process from the need for speed, and then assuming that once you're done, you're done, and then cool, you have a plan. But you're saying it's a living thing, you have to keep moving.

And it's also how quickly can you make decisions. Jeff Bezos in his recent annual report made the point of does this door Do you have a reverse here? This decision and go forward and it doesn't work. Can we back up? Test it. Go now. If you can't back up, then it takes a little more planning, a little more risk management. What's your upside? What's your downside? If there's no downside, try it.

Okay. That's great. Talk to me about bridges versus armadas.

Growing companies attract more talent with more experience and they come in and they start putting the processes and procedures in place that they learned at other large companies. And those other large companies were built like bridges. They were built like, we're going to start here, we're going to build it over there, and it's going to last for 50 years, or 100, or whatever. And that doesn't exist anymore, right?

Yeah.

We need armadas of teams. It's compartmentalization in large part as well. You know, if one ship gets sunk, that's not the end of the company.

Right.

But they can maneuver quickly. They can change strategies as they need to, and they're much more adaptable and flexible in this new environment. that we find ourselves in economically.

Okay, so people who come from that old mindset— I love the armada metaphor— they just build this big thing, have all the ships in certain alignment, move them from point A to point B in a group. And you're saying that's just not how it works anymore.

You've got to give the individual ships, the individual teams, the individual people that are directly impacting, touching your customers or clients every day The ability to help those people solve their problems with your products and services.

I'm going to come back to that in a minute because I want to find out for all 3 of these things, how do you help leaders do this? So tell me about the 3rd one.

I can take an enthusiastic person that is interested in the business and interested in learning and teach them almost anything.

Yeah, right.

But I can't teach enthusiasm.

Yes.

We have a 70% disengagement in our American workforce right now. 70% of people when surveyed say that they are disengaged at work, are actively sabotaging even. There's like about 7 or 8% that said they're actually not doing their jobs deliberately. How do you solve for that? Well, right now, not everybody can solve for this, but you only hire the ones that are really interested, committed, That meet and fit within the culture and the criteria and the values of your company and what you're trying to achieve, that actually have some commitment and passion around it.

I really like what you just said, because you're not saying to hire people who of their nature are just enthusiastic. You're saying hire people who are really lined up with what you want to do personally, for whom your mission, what you're doing, and how you're approaching things is meaningful. And they therefore will be enthusiastic about it rather than try to enforce that.

Exactly. So yeah, I'm not using enthusiasm in the rah-rah, jump up and down definition of the word. Somebody that's engaged in trying to help solve the problem that you are trying to help solve as an organization, because they bring their best to the game every day.

That's great. I love these 3, and I'd love to hear the other 4. I want listeners to be able to get this white paper when it comes out in August. Okay, so given these 3 obstacles, what are some practical takeaways and key skills or habits that leaders can develop to overcome these obstacles?

Okay, so I would say one of the key habits or mindset that leaders need at any level in the organization is to get very, very clear and distinguish between objectives and goals. They're not the same. You get what you measure, right?

Right.

If you measure people on sales output, or performance improvement, or any of those type things, you end up getting that commitment to achieving goals. That's what gives you Wells Fargo. That's what gives you Volkswagen. That's what gives you a culture of Uber, right, where we can't fire that person because they're producing too much. They're doing massive damage to the culture inside the organization.

Hmm.

Right, so the health of the organization is going down, but the— we're still meeting our goals. So we can't get rid of them. And I see it over and over and over where you've got a bad actor in play, and somebody will not fire them until something absolutely illegal has been done. Right.

So it sounds like in your mind, goals are just really tangible results, and objectives are more, what does success look like? What will this look like if it's successful?

Very well put.

Okay, that's great. I think that's right, because people do get hung up on like, well, this is our EBITDA, and everybody hates it, and nobody thinks this is success. But we got to do it.

And I'm not knocking goals. Goals are very valuable. They're valuable for focus. They're valuable for activity. But they cannot be the only thing you measure.

Yeah.

And you have, again, that mindset of distinguishing between the two so that you know that, okay, yeah, we missed the goal. Why did we miss it? Do we understand why we missed it?

Yeah.

We can learn, right? And are we in a better position to move forward or not?

Yeah, that's good. The way you're defining the objectives really 3-dimensionalizes the effort.

In a practical sense, this also goes back to, I'd say, 2 big things for individuals here. One is personally, where you work, what you're doing, what you're accomplishing, how's that— not your career, how's it moving your life forward?

Yeah.

Right? What's the bigger picture? Is it causing too much stress, too much pressure at home? What are those things that you need to be doing to take care of yourself first, from exercise and eating right and all the other stuff that we all know, and most of us don't do a very good job of, you know, keeping up with? And how do you start building in the tools that help you stay in touch with that?

Yeah.

And so that goes all the way back in the organization as being very clear on what the objectives are in the organization so that you start building in the tools and the mindsets and the cultures. Recently did an organizational development piece of work for an agency. And they had been a media agency for a long time. They hadn't lost any clients, but the revenue was starting to go down. And they called us in to help find out why. Like, canary in the coal mine here, this is starting to change, what's up? We identified a couple of things. One is a lot of media money is moving to programmatic now, of course. But the second thing was—

Uh-huh.

A lot of these clients that they had were shifting to project work. And they'd done a little bit of project work on the side, but they'd never really had a— wasn't a big part of their business. And all of a sudden they found they were hitting 45% project work and they had no tools for it.

Oh, wow.

We had to hire project managers and hire, put in new departments and build new processes and procedures around the whole thing. And the mindset change that it takes for an entire organization to move that direction, It's very different. I could have taken any one of those individual people and dropped them into another agency that was built around a project management mindset that only did projects. And they would have been up to speed and changed their thinking in a month. But it takes longer when you don't have as many examples or you don't have the structure and the institutional attitudes.

And then having to shift the whole organizational mindset to line up with the new. Man, clearly we could keep talking forever and ever, but I always promise my listeners that I'll keep this short. Thank you so much, Bill. This is so helpful and really practical. And listeners, if you're interested in finding out more about how to build and implement clear vision and strategy from the Proteus point of view, you're welcome to go to proteusleader.com/topics/being-strategic. And Bill has offered that when his white paper comes out about the obstacles to operationalizing strategy, if you email proteus@roglingstraus.com, And I'll put that email in the newsletter. He will send you that white paper. Thank you so much, Bill. We really appreciate it.

Thank you, Erika. I look forward to the next time we get a chance to see each other.

Thanks for listening. And until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.

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