ep 16 Getting Deep Stakeholder Buy-In to Strategic Plans

It's the Jump Leap Long Term Podcast, Episode 16. You're starting a fresh strategic planning effort, but you're concerned that executives are not doing enough to engage their stakeholders. From prior past experience, you know that plans can fall on their face once they are announced. But what should be done to ensure effective post-retreat implementation or post-offsite implementation? You've heard a number of ideas, but will they fit into the culture of your company? It seems to involve more than just completing a successful retreat, printing out a bunch of copies of a document, sending them to everyone, and then declaring victory. Hahaha. You need your own approach to engage stakeholders, or you risk the whole thing becoming a wasted exercise. Tune into this episode to hear from me and my special guest Anthony Taylor as we solve this wicked problem in strategic planning together. I'm Francis Wade, and welcome to the Jump Leap Long-Term Strategy Podcast. And welcome back. And as you can see, we're joined by my guest Anthony Taylor. But before I introduce Anthony, let me do a couple things. One is let me welcome you as a guest. And if you're not— never listen to this podcast before, you may wonder what the heck is going on. It's a little bit different than most podcasts where a guest is invited on and the guest is interviewed. This is not an interview. This is very different. In this particular case, I've invited Anthony on to Come help me solve this problem. It's a problem that both of us have faced in our work. And we have a number of techniques and approaches and I imagine philosophies that are similar or dissimilar, we'll find out. And we're going to be hacking away at the problem for the next, how many minutes that we actually spend up talking about it. And as we talk, what we're looking to do is to accomplish an insight. Some kind of serendipitous kind of finding that either one of us has never heard before, or both of us have never heard before. That's kind of like the holy grail. We come up with something brand new. But the point is to have a conversation and to come up with stuff that you would not ordinarily or necessarily hear, you know, just in the normal course of things. Maybe a few things that can, I'd say, go against the conventional wisdom. And as we come up with these insights, you're going to hear an insight bell. And I'll put the insight bell in sort of after we've done the recording. But if we get to the end of the conversation, I don't have any insights to share, you'll hear a buzzer, which means that we basically ran out of time. It's all in fun. But we're following what Einstein said. He said if he had an hour to solve a problem, he spent 55 minutes thinking about the problem, and only 5 minutes thinking about solutions. So we're going to be diagnosing the problem in a way that we hope will shed some light, some fresh light on the issue of implementing strategy. And so, Joanne, let me tell you about Joanne. Once again, she's in charge of spearheading her company's corporate strategic planning effort. She is a capable project manager. Okay, PMI certified. And this is her third strategy project. The past two plans had some great ideas, but the bulk of the projects in those plans were never implemented. And each year, executives do seem to be completely supportive of the plans that they have created. You know, there's a lot of good buzz. But in the past, all of the employees lower in the organization have shown little or no interest. So there's no implementation happening. And while the plans do call for employees to play active roles, they're pretty busy meeting some immediate deliverables, the typical short-term targets that they're actually paid and hired to produce, and they never are able to shift gears from short-term to long-term. Also, to make things interesting, why not The board members have also not been involved each year, or each prior planning cycle. They have given a rubber stamp to the strategic plan, and they said they've blessed the new 5 or 10-year plan. They may have read the document, nobody's sure, but not much else. Decisions that they're supposed to make, those kind of just get rolled over from one year to the next. So this year, Joanne wants to make things be very different. Actually, she's up for a promotion. But her boss has made it very clear to her that this part of her job, this whole implementing the strategy bit, needs to be fixed before she can be really considered for the next level. So Anthony Taylor is the CEO of SME Strategy. He runs a consulting firm and also has his own podcast. Entitled Strategy and Leadership. Anthony, welcome to the show.

Hi, Francis, good to be here. Joanne, we're here to help you. Really look forward to our conversation. And it's especially timely for us. Because, you know, we're always looking at how to deepen stakeholder engagement and the work that we're doing. So we're looking forward to digging deep into the problem with you, Francis. Cool.

What do you, what do you think of Joanne's situation? Typical? Atypical? Is it exaggerated? Is it— do you see it a lot?

I think I see it in some places and don't see it in others, so it's not always like that, but when it happens, it hurts. Uh, and so especially since, uh, Joanne's career and, you know, future promotion are on the line, the future of the company is effectively on the line. Uh, it's a big problem that we get to tackle today. But yes, it's definitely not uncommon, I'll say.

Well, let's start with that. Because I would say I see it almost always happening. You have better clients than I do. But our clients typically are not used to thinking about spending time on long-term activities. So when the the strategy is done, or even in the preparation for it, and during and after, they honestly— I think they honestly believe that this is like telling someone to work on a project for the next 2 weeks. They treat it with the same level of, I would say, casual kind of, you know, as if it were anything else with a short timeframe where there's a big deliverable that somebody's going to do the job and But they have, it seems to me, they have the wrong mindset. So I see the problem often, but you're saying you don't see that often. You see some who are— Hope you're enjoying this free excerpt from the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast. Interested in finding out more about getting a subscription to full episodes? Visit www.longtermstrategy.info.

Hey, what, why is that? And then why is the board not engaged? So So holistic disengagement like that is a major, major problem. And then what I would say kind of more frequently is, you know, you see it at different levels. The flip side is, is you could have engaged people doing the wrong things. I would almost rather have them be disengaged because it's easier to get them on board than engaged in, call it, contrarian activities. That one's kind of harder to deal with. And we see that as well.

But I, you know, I want to talk about that.

Yeah.

Tell me about the ones that you've seen who are— and I love the distinction you just drew because, you know, in a way, the strategic planning team, Joanne and her company and her executives are kind of working against the flow or against the culture of their organization in many cases. Because most people, 99% of the people in the company, have never been in a strategic planning meeting ever. They don't know what happens inside of it. They don't know the mindset that's needed. And they sometimes just make fun of the whole thing, or they, they say that the whole thing is a waste of time. So some are, some are ignorant of— many are more, I say almost all, because until you get to the C-suite, you don't really know what a strategic planning conversation looks like. And that lack of knowledge could lead you, I guess, to disengage because you don't know what's going on. But it could also make you kind of fearful because you think it's something nefarious, or it's something top-down, authoritarian. So you hear strategy and you could kind of turn off. But what you're saying, you've run into people who hear a strategy and they turn against it. Tell us about that a little bit.

Well, so I know we're not solving the problem, but I really love how you said, and hopefully we get a bell for this one, but it's about the perspectives and beliefs. It's like someone's belief about a thing is true. And so if you think the strategic plan is bad, it's bad. If you think the strategic plan is good, it's good. If you don't know anything about a thing, you're going to put your own beliefs, past experience around it. We call it kind of the curse of knowledge. You could have been at a previous company where there was a strategic plan that happened and then a bunch of people got fired. They could be totally unrelated, but you're putting those two together. Or, you know, you were part of a strategic plan and the last time it didn't go well, therefore this time it's not going to go well. It absolutely has no bearing. But if that's what people think, then that's true. They could also say, oh, strategic plan. I'm going to look up strategic plan and therefore I know what strategic plan means. Whereas your organization could have a totally different context, a totally different perspective, a totally different methodology, but they're filling in the blanks. And so, you know, Joanne would be well served that You know, just checking what is the alignment. And I think that's, you know, you know, jump leap kind of methodology, at least thinking about is being curious about where people are at.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I also imagine that people like you or I, SME Consulting, or someone from Framework Consulting, we walk in and people go like, huh? They check us out on the website and they say, Oh, there's no strategic planning guys. And then they already have like a notion that if you see consultants coming in to help with strategic planning, that these are bad things and that bad outcomes are about to happen. Have you ever— have you had—

I literally this week we're doing, and this is, you know, not public information, but James, if you're listening to this podcast, I'm gonna, you know, call one out on you. But we're doing a large strategic planning session for a university, big, big process. And there's a lot of conflict within the organization. I won't tell you who it is. And we're doing this session, one last stakeholder session. We've had 11 of them so far. We're doing our 12th one, and we're providing the opportunity for these folks to contribute. So we are, along with the university, saying we want to hear from you. We know you have concerns. It's important to us that we're on the same page. You follow so far, Francis? Like, we're doing all this stuff.

Yeah, the right things.

The meeting is coming up in a week and a half. The invite goes out yesterday or 2 days ago. Late last night, somebody replies all, and there's like 20 or 30 people in this invite saying the only thing it says, how much are these consultants being paid? And so, and so like, I, I sit there with my colleague and we say like, what do we, what do we do with this? But it's, it's, it really speaks to what you're talking about because this person is more concerned, or their concern is us as consultants or external people getting paid money versus us coming in to provide them a platform to talk, to try to help make their lives and works better, to be able to help them be successful and have their shared outcomes and to like actually make sure they feel heard. They have a past experience that they've either hired consultants that were overpriced, that they should be getting money instead of somebody else. Just like everything that's loaded into that question just shows the mentality that my team and I are going to be walking into next week, having that conversation with people who are in the organization saying they want to change.

Yeah, I had a variation on the theme similar to that, a university, but they actually had people on staff who were pretty sure they could do a better job than we could at a lower cost. Now, for all I know, they, they could have, but, but the CEO was very smart and said, well, I want you in the retreat in a seat. I don't want you out of the seat facilitating. I want you to be a participant. So that, that was how he defused the whole sort of move to this place. Us with, you know, inside expertise, which also can happen in companies. It's— I don't recommend it. It's not because I just like— I like to get paid. But in terms of the approach, I believe that we bring an outside perspective, and I'm sure you do, that actually is neutral. And that neutral approach helps. We can say things that people who are on the inside can't say. It's as simple as that.

Yeah, anyway, I mean, but if you think of Joanne for a second, like, that, that's in her case, you know, she could be so focused on trying to corral everybody that she's not able to participate as well, which, you know, maybe her participation is really what's needed. Like, so her potential biggest impact would be as a participant versus as a facilitator, um, and that might help her move it forward, right? Exactly.

She could— maybe she thinks that outsiders should be used.

Reach out to Framework Consulting, they'll set you up.

SME Consulting, reach out to SME in Canada, they're good at this kind of thing. But anyway, the overall problem is that she wants the strategic plan to be used, to be implemented. You know, the company is investing time and effort, and usually there's a lot at stake. They're not doing this just because they have some spare time on their hands. And as she goes through the process, she starts to get a little bit anxious because she senses that some of the same resistance is probably still there. People remember that, "Oh yeah, I mean, we're doing it again, like the last two times. We're going to waste our time again." And her stakeholders, they have that tone in their voice as if to say, 'You wasted our time twice, and now you're what, three times the charm?' You know, they're hinting that— so in a sense, they're really playing that sort of villain role, but she's responding to it because she's human. You know, this is not an intellectual exercise only. This is a social exercise. There are real people who have real emotions around this, and she probably thinks, you know, 'I'm not the only person going through this,' you know. In my company, doesn't everyone who, who has to sponsor a strategic planning effort, everyone must deal with engagement? And here's the excerpt from our next episode. It includes some brilliant new ideas which should shake up your industry and even introduce the world to a brand new category of products and services. But you are a bit wary because prior strategic plans barely made it off the PowerPoint pages. They weren't implemented due to a common complaint: no one had time. You have every reason to be worried, but what should you do about the problem? Tune into this episode to join me in tackling this wicked problem from two perspectives at once: task management and strategic planning. You've reached the end of a complimentary clip from the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast. To hear the full episode, go over to www.longtermstrategy.info and grab a subscription or a free trial. See you there.