“There are so many priorities. Different stakeholders want me to focus on their own pet priority. I feel I am constantly running to catch up and no one is satisfied. Frankly I’m stretched thin!”, a CEO confided in me recently. His brow was furrowed and clearly he had run out of steam for the day. It was only 11am.
In a world that is constantly disrupting, with different stakeholder needs, we know that teams and organizations that are agile will be the winners of the future. However, in my work on boards and as an executive coach working with C-level leaders, one of the biggest frustrations for people is the lack of alignment. In a fast-changing world, how do we align on the biggest bets, and quickly change these bets when new information comes in. The key, as a leader, is cultivating an ecosystem with your stakeholders where rapid alignment can happen.
I sat down with Adam Bryant, senior managing director of the ExCo Group, and author of “The Leap to Leader: How Ambitious Managers Make the Jump to Leadership,” to get his wisdom on how the best leaders build alignment.
Henna Inam: In a world that is increasingly polarized, and with so much disruption, one of the bigger challenges I am seeing in organizations is around the theme of alignment. How can leaders and companies create stronger alignment?
Adam Bryant: It is huge issue, especially as stakeholder capitalism has raised everyone’s expectations of what companies should do, and people are very vocal about sharing those expectations. Building alignment starts with an effective strategy document that lays out a simple plan and direction that everyone in the company can understand. That means avoiding some of the big traps I commonly see in strategy documents. One is that they are at a too-high altitude, and often simply describe what the company does, rather than a specific outcome it is driving toward. Another is that the strategy is too granular, and reads like a to-do list for the quarter. A third problem I see are strategy documents that include so many of the big topics of the last few years, including purpose, mission, vision, values, and ESG goals. All those are important, but they should not be part of the strategy document. So the challenge for leaders is to create a crisp strategy document that clarifies priorities and choices, and then relentlessly communicate the plan and the context for why it’s important and why it provides a roadmap for winning. Leaders also have to acknowledge that with so much uncertainty in the world, plans are going to have to change and be revisited, and that people on the team need to share their perspectives in a constructive way to get to the best overall outcome.
Inam: How does your point about the importance of strategy square with the commonly held belief that “culture eats strategy for breakfast?”
Bryant: I see that quote everywhere, too, and it’s usually attributed to Peter Drucker. But it’s interesting. There doesn’t seem to be any record of Drucker ever saying that, and in fact it doesn’t really sound like him. People use that quote as a shorthand to say that culture is more important than strategy, but what it really means, based on a bit of research I did, is that you can have a great strategy, but if the culture isn’t right to act on it, then it’s not going to get any traction. I think a great strategy drives culture, and it’s a point that I’ve heard many others make over the years. “If you have a bad strategy and the best culture in the world, it’s still going to fail as an organization,” Paulo Pisano, the CHRO of Booking Holdings, told me in a recent interview. “Culture is only an incredibly powerful lever if it exists in service of your strategy. If you have a clear strategy, then you can have a conversation about how people should behave to deliver on that.”
Inam: So aside from the importance of developing a clear strategy, what must leaders do to get alignment?
Bryant: A couple of things. The first is that leaders have to communicate the strategy over and over. As leaders move up, they can easily start thinking, “Why do I need to repeat the strategy? I just mentioned it at our last meeting.” But the fact is that you do have to repeat it, because one of the truths of leadership is that you have to say things roughly seven times before people really hear it. At the highest levels of leadership, you almost have to be like a politician who delivers the same stump speech several times a day. Repeating the strategy also provides a constant reminder of the context for people to keep in mind when they are making decisions. It’s a key point that Balaji Krishnamurthy, vice president of the Technical Center at Chevron, shared with me in an interview for my book: “I firmly believe that every single person makes a perfectly right decision given the context that they think they’re operating in and the information that they think they have. It’s up to leaders to provide the right context and information so people can make the right decision for the moment.”
Inam: Alignment can be particularly tricky for large companies with more matrixed structures. How do leaders navigate that?
Bryant: We see that a lot. Those matrixed structures are supposed to help make the company more agile and innovative, but often things get slowed down with complex reporting lines and decision-making processes. A particularly big source of misalignment in companies, too, occurs when senior leaders issue their priorities for the company that carry with them some built-in tension and conflict that the people in the organization have to sort out. Some tension is good, of course, but mixed messages can also make people throw up their hands in frustration. I heard a powerful insight on this point when I interviewed Sowmyanarayan Sampath, CEO of Verizon Consumer Group: “I find that 30 to 50 percent of the work people do is unfocused by nature. Leaders have to provide more focus, because when everything is important, nothing is important. If you are able to clarify a few clear priorities, then you can save a lot of time and drive execution faster. Another key thing with priorities is that they have to come with a trade-off. If you are able to prioritize easily, it probably means they don’t carry any trade-offs, which means the priorities are kind of bogus. You have to have clear metrics.”
Inam: Another big source of misalignment on C-suite leadership teams is where people can fall into traps of competing with each other for resources instead of working together.
Bryant: There are a lot of leadership teams that are teams in name only, and people can approach their jobs with more of a zero-sum mindset – that if they are going to win, their colleagues have to lose. So it’s good to provide an explicit counterweight to that dynamic. I learned of a smart approach from my interview with Bryan Wiener, the CEO of Profitero, an e-commerce software company, for making sure there is alignment and shared interests on the leadership team. “We publish our OKRs [objectives and key results] on a quarterly basis, and all the department heads have to review each other’s OKRs—not in granular detail, of course, but enough to understand what everyone needs from each other. That helps eliminate misunderstandings about what people’s priorities are, but you have to have that transparency from the outset and ensure there are no surprises.”
Inam: There is a paradox at the core of what you are describing – you have to work really hard to create clear alignment, and yet there is so much disruption. How do you balance a healthy amount of certainty and uncertainty?
Bryant: That is one of the biggest challenges of leadership right now. You have to simplify complexity but also embrace complexity and the idea of constant change. It’s another reason why the word “strategy” can itself be so complicated. Strategy documents are often created to convey a sense of certainty – in effect, “We know how the world is going to play out.” That may have worked better when the world was a more stable place, but now it’s healthier to acknowledge that every strategy carries more risk. It may be better in the long run to start substituting the word “bet” for “strategy,” because that does a better job of capturing the spirit of strategy now – this is our thesis, these are the resources we are going to put against that, and we’ll adjust if the world doesn’t play out the way we expect. Having more open conversations from the top about bets instead of strategy would help send a signal to everyone in the organization that they have to embrace the uncertainty of this moment and try to make the most of it. This came up in a recent interview I did with Sasan Goodarzi, CEO of Intuit. Here’s the relevant passage from that conversation: “Four years ago, when we refreshed our company strategy, we narrowed our list of priorities to five big bets for our customers and for the company. And we call them bets for two reasons: It’s about courage and risk-taking. I’ve been with the company for 18 years, and I’ve long felt that we didn’t take the swings that we should have for our customers because we were risk-averse, and we would see more of what could go wrong versus what could go right. My view is that 99 percent of decisions are reversible, which means you can take a risk and, for the most part, you’re not betting the company on it. So we use the word bet to convey that it’s a new chapter for us as a company to have the courage to take big swings, and to know that we are going to take additional risks. We will fail, we will miss, but we will get more right than we will get wrong. To this day, I and my team will correct folks to explain, ‘No, that’s not a priority. That’s a bet and let’s treat it like a bet.”
I encourage us all to learn more about Adam Bryant’s latest book and follow his newsletter on LinkedIn to get powerful insights on how to lead in a world that is disrupting.
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