Every year, PROFIT Magazine turns successful entrepreneurs into the heroes of Canadian business through its Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies program. Now, to mark its 25th year, the ranking is expanding to celebrate 500 of Canada’s best and brightest companies. Once again, ViRTUS is proud to be a sponsor.
If your business has grown by just 50% or more in the past five years, apply now at PROFIT500.com.
One of the things CEOs ask consistently is how they can foster more strategic thinking in their organizations.
Simply saying “I want to see you thinking more strategically” isn’t direct or specific enough to help guide people in the right direction. Thinking strategically is essentially a way of being – a mindset, a way of looking at things and linking them together.
Here are eight things you can do to improve strategic thinking.
Understand value creation and differentiation. Leaders understand the business and industry they are in, but it’s more than that. You need to understand how the industry adds value to customers and how your business differentiates that value equation from your competitors.
Connect “me to we” to “they to us” (operations to strategy). As a leader you need to be able to understand the overall corporate direction and strategy in the context of your team and your own personal areas of responsibility. Think of it like this: the strategic moves we make today are setting up the operational successes we have in the future. So the better understanding you and your team have of the connection between corporate goals and the work they do day-to-day, the more likely they and you are to focus on longer-term priorities versus staying mired in operations and shiny objects.
When it comes to creativity, fear of criticism, judgment, of taking risks and putting your reputation on the line is a huge obstacle.
We’re born creative and continually experience the excitement of that creativity as we grow. Over time, our environment and experiences can cause us to fall into thinking patterns that get in the way of our creativity.
Your job as a leader is to help shift thinking and remove these obstacles:
Play is frivolous. We’re told that children play and adults are meant to be serious. This creates the self-limiting belief that if something starts to feel too much like fun then it can’t possibly be productive work. Start by changing your thought patterns around creativity. The more you let go of the existing beliefs and thoughts that limit you in thinking of new possibilities, the more you can explore creativity. Find small ways to be creative everyday while encouraging the same in others. If you’re interested in watching a truly outstanding creative process in action, search “IDEO Shopping Cart” on youtube.com and watch their process. (Thanks to Cactus Club CEO Richard Jaffray for recommending this video.)
Creativity comes from creative people. When people think that creativity is the job of marketing or PR, they disable their own creativity. Once they understand that creativity is a choice for all of us, not part of a select few people’s job descriptions, the realms of possibility open up substantially. As a leader, consider where you might be categorizing others as “creative” or “not creative.” Work on altering that thought pattern to embrace the idea that we all have that capacity by asking people for ideas on projects when you normally wouldn’t seek their input.
Deciding before you start. If you think you know the answer before you start the creative process, then you may be limiting yourself to a smaller set of possibilities. Instead, view your idea as only one possible solution and look at it from new perspectives. Curiosity creates leverage in brainstorming so ask a lot of questions, considering as many different view points as you can.
Believing there is a “right” answer. When we focus our problem solving on trying to find the “right” answer there’s a tendency to have a narrow focus. This prevents us from exploring the problem or opportunity in favour of trying to “fix it” as soon as possible. Try “reverse brainstorming,” where you reverse the problem or challenge by brainstorming answers to the question “How could we possibly cause this problem.” Once you have a number of ideas to solve the reverse problem, reverse them into solutions for the original problem or challenge.
Stinking thinking. The easiest way to kill a brainstorming session is with killer statements: “We’ve tried that before,” “That won’t work in this market,” “We don’t have the resources/budget” (this one’s my personal favourite). Next time you’re in a brainstorming session with your team, take a positive approach by first getting all the ideas out on the table before debating or discussing any of them.
Fear of failure. When it comes to creativity, fear of criticism, judgment, of taking risks and putting your reputation on the line is a huge obstacle. After all, your ideas may be a complete flop, so it just feels safer to stick to the status quo. As a leader, it’s your job to create the space for people to take the risk. Consider failure as feedback; focus on and celebrate learning, how to move forward, and what to do differently next time.
BIV Boardroom Strategy – Creativity are you building it or crushing it – Sept 2012
An enormous amount of time and energy gets devoted to solving problems within organizations, all under the pretence that solving those problems is the best way to achieve success, superiority, a competitive advantage and greatness. The challenge is that growing organizations are constantly changing, which inevitably leads to new and more interesting problems to solve. It’s an endless cycle of focusing on problems that means it’s impossible to solve our way to greatness.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative to the traditional problem-solving approach. Appreciative Inquiry was developed by David Copperrider and his associates at Case Western Reserve University in the mid ’80s. It focuses on doing more of what does work: uncovering the high moments in an organization’s history and using the commonalities of those experiences to build a plan to replicate those wins for the future. Sounds like more fun than constantly problem solving, doesn’t it? Here’s how it works and how it can be applied to your business.
In the past month, I have had two unique opportunities: the first was to spend a few days in Boston with one of my clients and Frances Frei from Harvard; the second was a fireside chat with some fellow CEOs and author Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point, Outliers, What the Dog Saw). There were some great strategic nuggets interwoven into both conversations, and I want to share with you what I learned.
Frei is a professor in Harvard Business School’s technology and operations management unit and the chairwoman of the MBA required curriculum. Because Frei’s work focuses on how organizations can more effectively design service excellence, I was eager to hear her thoughts on organizational strategy. I was not disappointed.
Here are some key points I took away from the conversation.
Choose great over average. When you’re considering your points of differentiation as an organization the key is not to try to become five out of five on all aspects of your client value proposition; by diffusing your efforts as an organization among so many things you end up becoming three out of five (average) on everything.
Really great, standout companies figure out what they can sacrifice (areas where they are at about a one out of five), so they can truly be five out of five on the areas that count most to their customers.
Choose differentiation versus “me-too.” For true differentiation you need to do something that the competition can’t properly replicate. Consider the example of the Heavenly Bed Wars. Once Westin hotels rolled
out its heavenly beds campaign, all their competitors had to do was provide a similar quality of bed – a simple yet costly undertaking, the net result being that consumers now get better beds from all competing hotels. But each is still in the same price-competitive space: higher cost, lower margin and no differentiation. The trick is to focus on providing something to your customer that is difficult for your competitors to replicate. Continue reading
More and more, CEOs, Executives, and Entrepreneurs ask me about our virtual office and how it works. For the first 10 1/2 years of our business we had three different offices. For the past year and a half we’ve been virtual. It has been one of the best things we’ve done for the growth of the company. Here is what we have learned along the way:
The Fear of Virtual
It’s amazing the misconceptions people have, primarily that if they were to switch to a virtual office that they wouldn’t know what their employees are up and productivity would plummet. They wonder what their customers would think: one of our largest customers said that our experience with being virtual was a key point in choosing us as a partner – they are actively moving 70% of their workforce to virtual in the next few years: 33,000 employees spread out across Canada and three continents.
If I can’t see ’em, how do I know they’re workin’?
The reality of the knowledge economy is that even if you have everyone in the same business you can’t actually see what they are up to. Sitting at desk for eight hours is not a sign of productivity. Look out your office door right now: can you see what people are up to? Are they working, chatting on IM, updating their Facebook profile, playing online poker, beefing up their linkedin profile so they can leave because you don’t trust them? In a physical office setting it’s easy to confuse activity with results. In a virtual office, results are all we see.
What Will Really Happen
Our experience has been the complete opposite of what most CEOs and Entrepreneurs that are worried about going virtual think. It helps that we ascribe to the ROWE (results only work environment) espoused by Daniel Pink in his book Drive!. Here’s what our experience has been so far:
Viva la Technologie
The key to making a virtual office work is hiring people you trust and having the right collaboration technology. Since we run on Macs we have no need for an IT support budget and everything just works “out of the box.” Here’s a list of software we use and why:
My Favourite Question
As you continue to grow ViRTUS will you get an office or offices around Canada? The answer: no. Going virtual was part of our growth plan. The larger we get, the more being virtual makes sense.
Two Important Behaviours
Closing Thought
If you’re not convinced yet: I wrote this post in Whistler, on a Friday, after a day of virtual meetings in the morning over Skype Video and then skiing in the afternoon with my wife, replying to calls and emails from my iPhone. Right now I’m staring out over the lake watching the sunset…
On behalf of the team at ViRTUS, I’m proud to announce that once again we’re partnering with PROFIT Magazine to find the fastest growing companies in Canada. Think you have what it takes? Continue reading
It is no secret that the world we work in has changed dramatically in the last few decades – the way we work, the type of people we want to work with and the type of work culture that drives positive results.
With all of these changes, Erica Pinsky points out in her book Road to Respect: Path to Profit that the one thing that hasn’t changed is that employers still hold the ultimate power in the workplace; with that power comes an even greater responsibility to build a culture based on respect as the key to sustainable profitability. Studies show that money is not the main factor keeping employees in a job any more; people stay because of workplace culture and relationships. Therefore, with the shifting demographic and opportunities available in the new millennium it is imperative that organizations are aware of the dramatic effect their workplace culture has on the bottom line.
Through case studies and stories about what the top Employers of Choice are doing right, Pinsky encourages us to evaluate the current state of our work environment and empowers leaders to be proactive in building the kind of respectful work culture where the link between culture, job performance and profit is appreciated. The Road-to-Respect: Path to Profit offers key insights and calls to action that change the way we view respect in the workplace.
Part 1 takes us through what respect is and what it looks like as a core competency in the workplace. Part 2 dives into how to create a value-based culture where respect is one of the most important core values. Pairing examples of how some of the most well-respected and successful organizations in Canada are doing this with impressive statistics, we are shown how things like embracing diversity, aligning people and processes with core values, having respectful collective leadership and promoting coaching throughout the organization can transform an organization into an Employer of Choice that attracts and retains the top talent. Part 3 is where the course is really charted. While every organization will find its own path, Pinsky, provides tools on how to assess and evaluate respect in your current culture starting with questioning and information gathering as the foundation.
This easy to read book paints a clear and vivid picture of what the many facets of respect looks like in a thriving organization. Through numerous ‘respectful practices’ we are not just told, but shown how to move toward a culture where respect is a living a core value and success and profitability are the outcomes. It is the “roadmap” to respect and path to profit.
[read time: 4 mins]
Hidden within the fabric of your organization lies a set of beliefs, behaviours and values that form the basis of your culture. Although values rarely need to be changed, if you are interested in shifting towards a culture where successful execution of your strategic plan is the norm, the beliefs and behaviours that are getting in the way of action and accountability do need to change.
Since behaviours are essentially beliefs turn into action, shifting the culture of your organization starts first with uncovering and challenging the assumptions that drive the beliefs and behaviours that are inconsistent with action and accountability and then ensuring that rewards (and I’m using rewards in the liberal sense of the word to include both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards – praise, raise, bonuses, promotion, etc.) are linked to specific performance.
Here are five questions that senior teams can ask themselves to start to uncover the hidden truths in your business to build a culture of getting things done:
What one behaviour do we, as the senior team, need to start modeling that will dramatically improve the behaviour of everyone else in the company? Few people look down the organizational chart for cues to model their behaviour as a leader; most everyone looks up or side-to-side. Behavioural change within an organization is most successful when it starts at the top. Don’t underestimate the impact that even the smallest change in leadership behaviour can make on your entire organization.
What company-wide assumptions and beliefs have shaped what our organization looks like today? Shared beliefs are a large part of making sure everyone is on the same page, aligned, and moving in the same direction. The trouble comes when we fail to stop every once and a while to examine whether or not these beliefs are still true. Take a long hard look at what you may be doing on a regular basis simply because that’s the way “we’ve always done it”. Challenging assumptions that run so deep that they have become the core beliefs that underpin how you run your business day to day will likely uncover some hidden truths that are actually roadblocks to growth.
What do we need to start believing, in order to guide the desired behaviours going forward? What do you need to start believing about your business in order to keep moving in the right direction? These new beliefs will shape the attitude and behaviours that will be adopted by the senior team, and trickled down through organization, to guide a new culture of getting things done.
How can we link performance to rewards? The foundation of changing behaviour is linking rewards to performance, and making the links transparent. This tells people what’s valued, and what they should focus on. If you reward and promote people for execution, your culture will change.
What kind of people are we looking for? Have ever you noticed that when you have a critical, time sensitive, core objective that you need to delegate, there are a few people in your organization that you turn to every time? Take note of what it is about those few key people – the people that get things done – and make sure you include their core attributes and strengths in your hiring criteria.
There is no better time than right now to take an honest look at what’s really happening in your company. Understanding how unchallenged assumptions and shared beliefs are contributing to the behaviours that are holding your company back from really getting things done is the first step in creating a culture that sees consistent growth and achievement.
BIV Boardroom Strategy – Beliefs and Behaviours – August 2010
Posted in Business in Vancouver: Boardroom Strategy, strategy
Tagged behaviours, beliefs, best companies, core values, culture, execution, leadership, strategy
[read time: 4 mins]
As you go about your day-to-day business, it’s easy to get caught up in a flurry of activity that doesn’t really mean a thing to your customer.
Making the decision to be more “customer-focused” is easy, but making the shift toward a customer-focused approach is another story. It requires putting customers at the centre of business decisions, company-wide, and consistently thinking about what you can do to meet or beat your customers’ expectations. It’s not an initiative that can be taken on by one department alone, but one that sees the customer become the driving force behind everything your company does.
A pro-active plan to be more customer-focused can generate trust in your brand and create a partnership between you and your greatest asset: your customers.
Here are five ways to move your strategy toward a customer-focus.
If you’re looking for inspiration from companies that have excelled at making the customer their No. 1 priority, pick up a copy of The Starbucks Experience or The New Gold Standard (about the Ritz Carlton Hotel chain), both written by Joseph A. Michelli.
Mike Desjardins is the CEO at ViRTUS (www.virtusinc.com), an organizational development consulting firm. This column was co-written by Shannon Lawder, content director at ViRTUS.
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Some thoughts on strategy, leadership, and corporate culture. 