Tag Archive for Leadership

Strategic Planning: A State of Mind

March 25, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Featured, Leadership, Technology

“Leading isn’t doing. Leading is thinking.”

The pace of change in our world is much more rapid than it was a decade ago, and with the influence of technology that makes access to information constant and infinite, combined with the human thirst for knowledge and the new, this pace is not likely to slow in the next ten. In response to this, I am hearing more and more about the need for true leaders, for those who can think strategically and critically, who can develop innovative and creative solutions, and who can maneuver with alacrity. And I agree.

And yet the capacity for strategic thinking seems to be rapidly dying, if not dead already. Thinking beyond the moment is apparently too difficult, too boring, or too old-fashioned. Somehow, being reactive is in vogue. I think about this a lot. The great teachers all preach being in the moment, that there really is nothing else but the present, the here and now. And oddly enough technology seems to line us up well with this credo. The cell phone rings; it is picked up. The email comes in; it is opened. The tweet is posted; it is read. The text appears; it is answered. We are in the moment, responding to each cling and clang of whatever electronic device we are hooked to. And it is as if this constant exercise of responding has spilled over into all areas of work. We race from meeting to meeting, making lists of things to do, arguing over this tactic or that, and struggling hard to check some of them off so we can feel like we are getting something done. But is this what the teachers meant? I think not.

And for leadership, this reactive drive is disastrous. The very meaning of leader, in my mind, is synonymous with vision. Afterall, who wants to be led by someone who is wandering around, or worse still, running in place? Leaders have followers because they are headed somewhere exciting, compelling, somewhere we are not now. And the big leaders ought to be taking us into the future. Into the future, brightly. They ought to be shaping the future with big ideas, big connections, big innovations. What we are getting instead is mostly management.

There’s nothing wrong with management, except when it stands in for leadership. Simply put, managers maintain, leaders innovate. I dare say, we need innovation now.

So what’s the answer? Strategic planning, believe it or not.

Strategic planning was all the rage a while back, but evidently, at some point, people wearied of vision and mission statements. After all, they didn’t seem to work, right? You spent a day writing up a cool vision or mission (and no one really knew the difference), it would get posted in the break room, and things would swiftly go back to normal. Strategic planning became a lackluster, go-through-the-motions exercise, so leadership stopped even trying.

But all strategic planning was ever meant to be was a practice, a discipline, a rigor to remember to think beyond today. Strategic planning was the time out for reflection from the daily distractions, when everyone was allowed to dream, to reach for the impossible, and to develop the steps together to get there. It was a time to flex the muscle of thinking big (being visionary), out of the box (innovating), and getting full buy-in (collaboration). The reason this fell out of fashion had something to do with it not working, but underneath that was the real cause: people not really knowing how to do it. After all, an organization’s ability to recognize the harbingers of change and stay abreast of the change curve is a highly evolved skill - one that often means the difference between average performance and brilliance.

It’s time to reclaim strategic planning as a vital leadership capability. And it is past time to make strategic planning much more than a day or two off-site to write a tag line. It is time to remember what strategic planning was always about in the first place: leaders leading. What else is there on the leadership front than convening a group of diverse thinkers to look out into the world and make sense of it? Make sense of what’s on the horizon. Look squarely in the face of what looks threatening, and reframe it into an outrageous opportunity. More than just a day or two’s dabble, this is the work of leadership every single day.

Instead of the common complaints about strategic planning - that people spend way too much time doing it (I really doubt this); it doesn’t result in anything; and not nearly enough time is spent on getting the real work done, I would cast it more like:

  • people spend not nearly enough time being strategic,
  • the time that is spent is wasted for lack of good process on how to do it,
  • and lots gets done (busy-ness), but has very little real impact.

So how does this get solved? First, being strategic is not an exercise; it’s a state of mind. It is just dandy to take time away once a year, or once a quarter, to rev the engines by going somewhere new, having an engaging speaker to prime the pump, and using a facilitator to open up the process. But this is just the icing on the cake. Real strategic planning takes place every day, in every meeting, in each conversation. To think strategic planning is ever done, or that anyone is spending too much time on it is ridiculous, especially now when the pace of change dictates that a long-range plan must be, by necessity, both six months (to keep up with change) and 100 years (to keep an eye on the effect we are having) out.

Second, if you don’t know how to be strategic, learn. There is not a human being on the planet who will not be served by learning the difference between strategic and tactical, since this difference applies in every context no matter how high up or on the ground the person is. To prove it, I heard about a Libyan man who had made the decision 25 years ago to continue studying English after Gaddafi banned foreign language instruction in schools. He told Jason Beaubien, NPR reporter, who was aided by this man on a recent trip to Tobruk, that he kept studying English on his own in preparation for this day – the day when he would have the opportunity to tell his story to the world. This simple man made a very strategic decision based on his long view of the future. And it paid off.

So, there is absolutely zero excuse for any person in a leadership position to say “Well, I’m just not strategic.” (By the way, this is a direct quote from the opening remarks of the leader of a client I was hired to assist with strategic planning some years ago.)  The response to this should be: “You’re demoted until you can learn.” We need our people, but especially our leaders, to be able to flip between the strategic and tactical all day long. We need this precisely because the tendency to the tactical has reached epidemic proportions in this age of instant technology.  And the tactical just becomes busy-ness without the bigger view to inform it.

Finally, busy is a poor stand-in for results. We need all the activity of our workers to have an impact. To make this so, leaders must do their job. Their job is to convene and get to the decisions that then empower their people to do the work. I have never met a human being who cannot be motivated by a clear task, fully within their capability, connected to a desired outcome. If your people are not motivated or producing, one of these things is the problem. And the root of that problem is usually leaders not doing their job. Leading isn’t doing. Leading is thinking. Deep strategic thinking that sets the direction and then checks to see if we’re getting there.

So let’s stop responding to every bleat of our tech gear, every blip of information across our screen, and let’s get back to strategic planning. Better yet, to being strategic, to thinking strategically. If we start looking out regularly to the horizon’s edge and beyond, if we gather and look, we might be surprised at just how amazing what we come up with can be.

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Leadership in Crisis

March 17, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Featured, Leadership

I wrote this blog a few weeks ago, before the recent natural disaster in Japan. This event has added greater significance to the context in which to read it. For a post script on this, see below.

I went to hear a talk on leadership the other night. I love the subject of leadership. It has intrigued me since I was a child. Who gets to make decisions? Who do others follow and why? Is it a matter of popularity? Smarts? Good looks? I have pondered, written about, and worked with leaders and leadership issues my entire career, so when I get a chance to hear someone speak about it, I go.

The thing is, this talk reminded me of so many others on leadership. At the outset, the audience was asked to consider the attributes of a leader. Right off the bat I felt a bit deflated. This question has been asked and answered to death – just look at the more than 800 books dealing with it on Amazon. But, I told myself to be patient, give the guy a chance, and wrote my list. It wasn’t that far off from what various audience members replied when called upon by the speaker. Integrity was first. Then came vision, and a plan of action. Communication – both expressing and listening. Strength of character. All good – the usual suspects. To that list I added what I had written first: compassion. I saw it sitting at the top of my list, and I asked myself, do all leaders really need compassion? But we’ll get to that…

My musings were interrupted by the speaker offering examples of great leaders who demonstrated the group’s identified characteristics. He started with Lincoln and his trials during the Civil War. And from Lincoln, the speaker moved to a discussion of Appomattox and the leadership displayed there by General Joshua Chamberlain. From the battlefield, he transitioned to the October 2010 mining accident in Chile, where he asked the group to consider what their first actions would have been after having arrived on that scene. The story the speaker wove was compelling and dramatic: time was of the essence, the 33 miners’ lives were at stake and every moment was one more nail in their coffins. From the mining accident, the speaker discussed wildland fire fighting, citing the US Forest Service’s Incident Command System as one of the best for dealing with leadership in emergency situations. And there it was: my patience worn thin from one crisis situation after another used to amplify what it takes to be a great leader.

Now, there is no question that leadership in crisis situations is important and, in extremely time intensive circumstances, where lives are on the line, we all want leaders who are at their best. And it is those leaders and the governance process they command that is often the difference between a desired result and disaster. But my point is, if we are in crisis, hasn’t leadership to some extent already failed?

I know this may seem like an almost blasphemous kind of question, and I also know that sometimes, life does just happen and the unexpected takes us all by surprise, even when we think we are well-prepared. But, I do believe that leadership is first and foremost about preventing crisis - the disastrously unexpected, and this is accomplished by being strategic. And by “strategic” I mean looking out into the future for the possibilities of what might occur and being prepared. Planning for how risk will be minimized and how opportunity will be leveraged. This exercise of looking out beyond where we are is one of the most important qualities of a great leader. Think about it. Every game-changing leader there has ever been was someone who saw something, had a vision of something that did not yet exist, that may even have looked impossible. That vision can be of something to be strived for or something to be averted, but vision is what all leaders have, without exception. Without vision, a leader is really a manager, and in the event of a crisis, a crisis management expert. And that may be exactly what is needed, but I would like the general discussion of leadership to get beyond crisis situations that, hopefully, are the exception and not the rule.

Leadership in crisis, or great crisis management, is the stuff of mythology. The ones who take charge are our heroes. We love to tell the battle stories of their accomplishment because they are exhilarating. The decisions, the moments of deliberation, the pressures all make for great theatre. We celebrate the leaders who save the day, who narrowly escape disaster, and who do so at great sacrifice, sometimes even die for it. But what of those leaders who have a vision of something far off on the horizon – something few people see, who strive to bring people together for a common purpose, who maintain momentum over months and years, and who arrive at an innovative solution that the group fully owns? Is this kind of leadership festooned in glory, written and sung about, lauded as heroic, feted with a ticker tape parade? Not often.

As Lao Tse said: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” And this may be exactly why true leadership is most often anonymous. True leadership dies a healthy death under the rubble of the followers dancing with glee over their own triumph. A true leader teaches only common sense, for that is what prescience becomes when it is recognized by many.

So, how do we teach something so invisible? How do we encourage this kind of leadership when it brings no promise of fame or glory?  How do we celebrate what this leadership accomplishes when so often its greatest achievement is something awful, that few saw coming, prevented? These are tricky questions. But at the root, I believe, is the notion of service. Service to the common good, rather than to the self.  And that is where I think many of our leadership conversations, classes, programs, bootcamps, and workshops are failing us. They are busy teaching about glorified leadership, the glory of being the individual leader, the star, the hero. While that is certainly a part of getting there, this curriculum is not reaching high enough.

I remember a client once asking, when he’d achieved the position of chairman of the board, “So does this mean I finally get to have my way?” I looked at him and replied, “Nope.” “Well, when will that be?” I looked at him kindly and said, ”That would be never. Your job is to lead the group to find and have their way.”  This is what Lao Tse was getting at: the leader is BEST (in other words, the ultimate mastery of leadership) when in service to those being led, whose reward is their arrival at a destination they learned first to dream of and then to achieve. And that brings me back to that first quality on my list of leadership attributes: compassion.

What I meant when I wrote “compassion” was care for others, for the greater good, for the big future. This compassion balances the ego that is so vital to a great leader. The ego is what much of our leadership talk and teaching seems to appeal to: the lead dog gets the best view, and all that. And the ego is extremely important to leadership. To stand up for what is right, to describe what others are not seeing, to question the status quo, to throw off the blinders of habit – this takes the fortitude from which ego is made. But compassion tempers the drive, the charisma, the force of the ego, and makes the true leader a most powerful engine for good. And it is compassion that enables the leader to stand down, when it is time, and to cheer from the sidelines before turning quietly away to the next thing.

Will everyone achieve this selfless service? Doubtful. Should our leadership institutions and gurus teach it, talk about it, even model it? Absolutely.

PS: In light of the Japan earthquake and its aftermath, some comment is warranted about how to view that situation in the context of this blog. Japan is recognized as one of the best prepared countries in the world for disaster response, which came as a strategic decision following a series of earthquakes (1923 Tokyo, for example) and Hiroshima. The earthquake last week is a poignant example of how even extraordinary preparation can be thwarted by the unexpected, calling for exemplary crisis management capability. This cannot be overemphasized. At the same time, there are important lessons about strategic leadership in other areas to consider. For example, site placement of nuclear power facilities is exactly the type of decision that requires a long view and consideration of a broad range of complex issues and perspectives. Hopefully, this tragic event will serve to inform future such decisions throughout the world.

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