What happens at work, really?
Organizations evolve over time, they don’t just pop out of the ground. What happens over time is that the organization builds a foundation – the solid ground on which a business can be built. This evolves with applied systems, processes, operating models, policies and procedures. As any good franchise consultant will tell you – you need a system. Financial service companies the same. Systems allow for scalability, without which it would be difficult to escalate growth.

Register for our seminar to learn how to manage strategic conversations for results. Click here to read more. What we then do is employ more people to operate within our systems, according to our procedures and in accordance with our policies and regulations. The biggest variable by far in a business is the minds of its people, not its market. People alone can bring about the success of a business but at the same time are THE biggest influencers that can topple even the soundest organizations. We start out with administrators that conform to our sound procedures and systems. As our businesses grow and evolve we end up with a hierarchical pyramid of leaders, managers, supervisors and ‘doers’ – the people close to the coal face responsible for getting things done. Eventually, over time, we reach a ceiling. We plateau with our extreme efficiencies and bureaucratic semblance of order. It is at this time that leaders realize the only way to continue to grow is to innovate.

If a business isn’t growing it’s dying. How many businesses that you know of will survive another 10, 20 or 50 years by operating in their current status quo?

Growth is a key contributing factor to attracting and retaining talent. Talent is the key to building a business with a better future.

Even more so, no-one wants to jump onto a sinking ship. One way to raise the bar is to introduce the concepts of strategy and innovation, and sometimes both in the same sentence “Strategic Innovation”. What we want as business owners, from our leaders, is for them to ‘raise the bar’ – to help in growing the future of the business. To do this we start to think about the future, but in doing so can easily lose sight of the present. The natural remedy to this business challenge, particularly in good times, is to acquire and leverage more resources.

Unfortunately, most people strive to be competitive and ground breaking, in some or other way. In South Africa, in particular, we are fortunate to have a pioneering culture accustomed to pushing limits, testing boundaries and challenging the status quo. It is this kind of thinking that has gotten us where we are today. On the other hand, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. It can be both destructive and unproductive for a business. People begin to chop ‘holes’ in the foundation of the very environment they have worked so hard to create. These transgressions are not always conscious. It is said that approximately 85% of our thinking happens at a sub-conscious level. However, transgressions of policy, bending rules, tolerating non-performance and political game playing all form part of a malaise that can quickly lead to the demise of a team, and its leadership.

Eventually, fraught with challenges beyond their competence, leaders turn to Human Resources in an attempt to find a way to ‘get their team to perform’. Inevitably HR does the “right thing” and arms their leaders with a cadre of tools, processes and systems – the ultimate of panaceas being a Performance Management System. Now, still ill equipped for the real conversations, and heavily burdened with another toolkit, managers try to implement the PMS in their team. Tragically, what frequently happens is the manager falls through the cracks and finds himself knee deep in the proverbial!

That’s when the AHA moment arrives! Someone in the team, often the leader says “it’s time we did a strategy workshop” and sets off in search of a remote venue where he or she will sit with their team and pontificate all the woes of their current situation, come up with some back slapping ideas and concur that they are all (momentary) Einstein’s. Everyone will commit to the refreshing new strategy, the plan will be documented and – for the most part – that’s where it ends.

Back to the coal face, strategy plan in hand, and team firmly committed to the future goals of the business everyone arrives at their desk to a plethora of e-mails, non-performing suppliers, sick employees pulling duvet days, lack of skilled resources and a need to meet targets because that’s what their KPA’s say they must achieve. Invariably, this is the second hurdle that sabotages the momentum of the new strategy.

All the while, something else is happening. Competitors have been watching you closely, like wolves waiting to pounce – the minute the leader takes his eye off the ball the wolf steps through the door. In little red riding hood fashion, the wolf will arrive with an empty basket and leave with a full one filled with your skilled resources, ideas and even your strategy. Add to the mix a bit of trend analysis, “Generation Y talent” that doesn’t want to stick around for more than two years and a fluctuating economy and you have the recipe for extinction facing most businesses in South Africa today.

In the next discussion of the Strategic Landscape, I will discuss how the outcomes of the Strategic Conversation model can be mapped onto the 5 types of Strategy, and used to enable both the how and the why of implementation.

Nicola Tyler | Thinker