The art and practice of leadership coaching phần 8

STRATEGY COACHING 197 become very important for companies to understand knowledge, not only in academics but also as it exists in companies on the leading edge. If I work with five companies in technology and entertainment, the sixth company gets the benefit of what I know from working with the other five. This is not a competitive issue; the strategic insight may, in fact, be better coming from another industry. Consider the competition between Encyclopedia Britan-nica and Funk and Wagnall’s. Both had the same business model, and studied each other’s moves closely. Neither saw the advent of the CD-ROM or the Internet as paradigm-shifting developments that would transform their in-dustry. One of the strengths a strategy coach brings is world-class practices from other industries. Over time, the coach collects more and more of that knowledge. Fourth, it is very difficult for a CEO to have an open, candid, and free conversation about strategy. For one thing, it’s difficult for a subordinate to disagree with a CEO, for fear that the CEO may keep it in mind. The CEO in turn will wonder if that person has an axe to grind. That’s why CEOs like to develop a kitchen cabinet that includes people from outside the company to talk about strategy. If I disagree with the CEO, that’s the only reason I disagree. I have nothing personal to gain and no axe to grind, and I am cer-tainly not hesitant to contradict. As a result, the CEO feels comfortable talk-ing with me about those issues. A strategy coach must have the ability to ask the right questions as well as tremendous listening skills. The coach is trying to piece together many dif-ferent points of view and bring them forward. She must have a broad base of knowledge to bring to bear on the challenges the organization is facing and a distinct point of view about strategy. The coach is thought of as a thought leader because of this point of view and the knowledge he or she has about best practices from inside and outside the organization’s industry. Strategy issues are far too complex for any one person to solve. CEOs need a multidisciplinary kind of team to manage them. One of the skills that a strategy coach brings is facilitation across the top management team. It’s very difficult for members of that team to talk candidly. When two people are dis-agreeing, the coach’s role is to try to make sense out of that and creatively solve those tensions. What I don’t do is solve their problems. I don’t know their business as well as they do. There’s no way I can tell them what their strategy should be. I can inform them about the best thinking on strategy today and provide them with frameworks they should be using to ask the right questions. I can facilitate an open and candid conversation with the top team. I can push them and prod 198 50 TOP EXECUTIVE COACHES them. I can help them self-diagnose their strategy issues and self-discover their solutions. In the end, my job is to provide them with strategic thinking capability. A good client has a deep desire to rethink the strategy of the company in a five-year time frame. Many people mistake strategy for the plan they pre-pare for next year. Although such a plan may be important, it is not strategy. I think of the things that companies do as belonging in one of three boxes. Box 1 is about managing the present. Box 2 is about selectively abandoning the past. And Box 3 is about creating the future. Most organizations spend most of their time in Box 1 and call it strategy. Strategy is really about Box 2 and Box 3. For instance, in the last two to three years, many organizations have fo-cused on cost reductions and improving margins. Strategy is not about what the organization needs to do to secure profits for the next two years, but what it needs to do to sustain leadership for the next seven years. Organiza-tions that engage in cost cutting as though it is strategy are basing their tac-tics on a series of critical assumptions. They are assuming that technologies will stay the same and customers will remain in place. If they are making im-provements, that is all very valuable, but those improvements are only linear and do not take into account nonlinear shifts in technology, customers, de-mographics, and lifestyle, to name a few variables. If an organization is following the trajectory of continuous improvement, it is likely that it will one day wake up and realize that its business model is no longer valid. Either someone or something has completely disrupted the model currently in use; or that continuous improvement no longer provides the aggressive growth needed to reach targets and compete effectively. Even if the organization’s strategy is based on outstanding analysis of how the world is going to behave in the next five years, those insights are still only assumptions. First, the day the strategy is introduced into the organization is the day it starts to die; the only question is how fast. Second, company’s strategies are almost entirely transparent today to competitors and potential customers; the ease with which strategy can be imitated and commoditized makes it possible to stay ahead of the game only by staying innovative. Part of the job of the organization’s leadership is to make money with the current strategy. That is the challenge in Box 1. Part of the job is to make up for the decay and commoditization of strategy. That is the challenge in Boxes 2 and 3. As much as possible, the leadership team wants to make up for the decay as it goes along, not when it has advanced too far. The process of coaching for strategy will not look much different in the next 10 years. It will become even more critical, however, as the pace of STRATEGY COACHING 199 nonlinear shifts continues to grow. Consider what the future looked like only a few years ago. Who could have predicted the collapse of the NASDAQ, the drop of the Dow, the bankruptcy of Enron and WorldCom, 9/11, and war with Iraq? What will the next few years bring? The only safe answer for an organization developing its strategy is that the future is going to be even more interesting. The leaders of that organization had better develop their strategic thinking capability, or they will be in for a big surprise. q Christopher A. Bartlett Coaching the Top Team Christopher A. Bartlett is the Thomas D. Casserly Jr., Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Gradu-ate School of Business Administration. He has published eight books, including Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution, named by the Financial Times as one of the “50 most influential business books of the century”; and The Individualized Corporation, winner of the Igor Ansoff Award for the best new work in strategic management and named one of the Best Busi- ness Books for the Millennium by Strategy + Business magazine. In addition to his academic responsibilities, he maintains ongoing coaching, consulting, and board relationships with several large corporations. He can be reached at cbartlett@hbs.edu. f there is a continuum between consulting and coaching, then coaching is much less about providing the answers than it is about asking the right questions—and in the process, helping management find the answers while developing their own skills and personal capabilities. Most company leaders are smart, knowledgeable people stretched by sometimes overwhelming de-mands, and operating in organizations that are incredibly complex. Some-times, it takes an outside eye to stand back from that complexity and see that below the surface-issues lie deeper questions or more embedded prob-lems that may otherwise remain unrecognized or even taboo. And for the 200 50 TOP EXECUTIVE COACHES outsider, it is often easier to challenge the conventional wisdom and question the embedded truths that block creative new thinking. I have another strong bias about the role of a coach at the highest levels of an organization. In my view, an effective coach must build a long-term trust-ing relationship not just with the top leader but also with the senior-level exec-utive team. Since the CEO is the most influential person in the organization, some might argue that a coach should focus solely on that position. But by working with his or her direct reports, the coach can help the leader harness that key group to achieve two benefits. By gaining access to the diverse views and perspectives of the senior management, the coach can better serve the CEO through a richer understanding of both the strategic and organizational opportunities and constraints. And by becoming a resource to the top team, the coach creates value by helping to build its capability and alignment with the leader’s objectives and priorities. The greatest skill a coach can bring to the task is the ability to listen ac-tively. When coupled with trust, careful listening yields information and in-sight that can be used to develop the organization’s own understanding. Essentially, the coach’s role is to hold up a mirror to help the organization see and evaluate its current position and future options, and to decide what path it should align around moving forward. The strategy coach should not be seen as the guru with all the answers; this is a role more often adopted by strategy consultants who may bring diagnostic frameworks and prescriptive models to analyze the company’s competitive position and to develop strategic options and priorities. In my experience, however, most organizations are awash in strategic initiatives and operating imperatives. The problem more often is that their strategic ambitions far outstretch their organizational capabilities, a fact that gives the more organizationally focused, implementation-oriented coach-ing model its leverage. But I’m not suggesting that the coach is a blank slate. There is always a rea-son why an organization approaches a particular coach. In my case, that reason relates to the research and writing I’ve done around the strategy and organiza-tion of multinationals or, more recently, the impact of transformational change on the roles of management throughout the organization. Like other strategy coaches, I’ve also had the benefit of seeing more than a few companies through global reorganizations or strategic realignments, experiences that would be once-in-a-career events for many managers. Although the nature of my research and experience lends itself to providing concepts, frameworks, and models to my thinking, as a coach I don’t lead with these. I don’t want to come into the organization with a hammer and bang away at something that STRATEGY COACHING 201 requires a screwdriver. Instead, I listen carefully, ask questions, challenge, and provide feedback. In my experience, the most common problem facing today’s top managers is that they have inherited an organization designed so that strategy was set by a top-down process of allocating scarce financial capital across the com-peting needs of the business. This organizational model is typically rein-forced by a set of sophisticated planning and control systems created to drive capital requests, strategic plans, and operating budgets upwards to top man-agement so that it could allocate and control capital effectively. And support-ing all this is a corporate staff whose whole purpose is to manage this flow of flow of information up and down. But as we’ve moved into an information-based, knowledge-intensive ser-vice economy, capital remains important, but it is no longer the scarce, con-straining, and therefore strategic resource for top management to control. The new strategic resource is the information, knowledge, and expertise re-quired to develop and diffuse innovation. That information and knowledge exist in people’s heads and in organizational relationships. It can no longer be hauled to the top to be allocated and controlled by the CEO. The task of de-veloping and diffusing innovation is fundamentally different from allocating and controlling capital. This change has driven a decade of delayering, reengineering, and empowerment that has transformed the modern corpora-tion and fundamentally altered the role of top management. In this environment, most organizations are far too complex for the CEO to be conversant with everything. Critical to the success of any organization is obtaining the alignment and commitment of the top team. Almost all or-ganizations hold a regular top management meeting, and one of the first things I will typically do as a coach is to sit in on a few, listening and observ-ing to absorb the state of the business and the dynamics of the team. It’s as-tounding how many such meetings serve as show and tell presentations of information that could be obtained by simply reading the accompanying re-ports. There’s huge value added even just in getting the agenda of those meetings right by balancing operating review items with key strategic issues and development opportunities. There also may be some intraorganizational tension or problem that is causing difficulty in the top team’s effective functioning: a dysfunctional person who needs to be removed; an unresolved dispute that needs to be re-solved; or an unspoken concern that needs to be explored. It helps to have fresh eyes and ears observing the work of the top of the organization. As an outsider, my role is to gain sufficient confidence and respect that I can ... - tailieumienphi.vn