Leadership Transitions How to Do It Right | Blog Talk Radio

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Leadership Transitions How to Do It Right 05/10 by Business Advisors | Blog Talk Radio.

The arrival of a new leader at the helm of a department, division, or organization typically follows the same ritual. The leader benefits from a few months of relative calm, the honeymoon period, where he or she is not expected to have answers yet or be fully effective. The clock is however ticking and the leader feels increasing pressure as the days go by.  The mature leader will know that this is the period to withhold judgment and decisions and explore as openly as possible the new situation. Meeting people one-on-one ads up to hours and weeks of exploration. The leader collects the many views, often in conflict, and has to decide for himself what is real. We commonly see transition periods stretching out to 6 months.

This process is not effective; our experience is that with the support of the organization, the new leader can be have a fully operational team in a matter of 3 months. Join us as we discuss a different approach.

Every Day Team Building for Leaders

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Join us on Blog Talk Radio

Every Day Team Building for Leaders

Team building must be an every day concern for leaders. Team building exercises at the annual retreat are potentially doing more harm than good; focusing on all getting along has often a chilling effect on the ability of individuals to express openly what is of concern to them.

Staying the Course Implementing Your Strategy without Fail 03/21 by Business Advisors | Blog Talk Radio

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Join on us on Blog Talk Radio on March 21, 2012 at 1 pm EDT

Staying the Course Implementing Your Strategy without Fail

How to make sure that what has been decided and committed to gets documented, tracked and delivered. Teams need to keep practicing how to hold productive meetings that stay focused on what is needed to meet the team outcomes rather than getting lost in the minutia of what they have done so far. Leaders need support too to provide proper guidance: keeping the clarity of vision upfront, resolving the issues that no one else in the team can tackle, and holding regular accountability interactions. Too many leaders get busy on others issues right after the strategy setting, and fail to make accountability a clear priority.

The Fundamentals of a Successful Strategy

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Misunderstandings about the nature and purpose of strategy abound. Some business people confuse the analysis of competitive forces as the strategy itself. Others equate strategy with their annual budgeting plan. For many strategy remains a vague, powerless concept that does not apply to them.

At its purest, a strategy is what you want to accomplish as an organization and the steps you need to accomplish it. Strategy, therefore, is important to all organizations because it gives them a context for the everyday decisions that move the organization in the desired direction.  Michael Porter, the Harvard University strategy professor, states: “…strategy is completely useless unless the result of the strategy process… is understood broadly. The #1 purpose of strategy is alignment. It is really getting all the people in the organization making good choices, reinforcing each other’s choices because everyone is pursuing the common value proposition, the common way…” Continue reading →

Converting your Strategy into a Blueprint for Action 03/01 by Business Advisors | Blog Talk Radio

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Join us on March 1, 2012 at 11 am EST for a new episode of Strategies for Change:

Converting your Strategy into a Blueprint for Action 03/01 by Business Advisors | Blog Talk Radio.

In this episode, we discuss a simple proven approach to convert your strategic decisions into a blueprint for action rapidly. This is a critical step because for a strategy to be implemented, it needs to be understood by those that are to implement it. Why certain choices of direction have been made must be clear.  Yet if you leave it at that, most people will have a hard time reconciling how to get from where they are to where you want them to be. The high ideas of strategy will die on the “messy” realities of everyday issues. For everything to come together, the high level strategy has to be articulated into a blueprint for action drawn with the participations of implementers. The blueprint will identify initiatives in detail: what, by whom, when, milestones, etc. and check those tasks against the organization’s ability to deliver them with existing capacities.

Why Could You Possibly Need a Strategy?

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Why Could You Possibly Need a Strategy 02/17 by Business Advisors | Blog Talk Radio.

Join us as we explore what a well conceived strategy can do for any organization whether business, agency, or NGO. From its conception to its implementation, what gives impetus to a strategy is whether participants are fully engaged with it. A strategy cannot simply be a document that people read for information, it has to be a common agreement that makes it clear to all involved what the ultimate objective is, what each one will do to contribute toward that outcome in their day to day decisions. As Michael Porter, the Harvard University strategy professor, said: “The #1 purpose of strategy is alignment.”

Leadership in Family-Controlled Boards

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A family-controlled business can readily outperform public companies by taking advantage of family cohesiveness, depth of business understanding, and personal commitment that family members accumulate since childhood.

Many family businesses fail to achieve that potential, however, because they stumble over a few predictable issues that are very hard for boards and especially their leaders to overcome alone. Continue reading →

Fear and Self-Protection the Seeds of Team Failure | Blog Talk Radio

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Join us January 16,  2012 at noon EST on Blog Talk Radio

Fear and Self-Protection the Seeds of Team Failure 01/16 by Business Advisors | Blog Talk Radio.

We sometimes hear that fear is a powerful motivator. It may be so on the battlefield, but in organizations, fear, and the accompanying need to protect oneself, is actually what brings teams to fail or under-perform. Continue reading →

Practices for Successful Change Management

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Whether instituting a whole new 3-year business strategy or streamlining the existing service line, the bottom line for leaders and teams alike is for such changes to bear results as rapidly as possible. Our observations and experience over the last few years have been that bringing plans to successful implementation essentially comes down to attending to three team practices:

  1. Keep checking into what the group’s mindset is about the situation they’re working in at the moment;
  2. Check for shared reality on the work tasks;
  3. Keep checking for true agreement on assignments in as visual a manner as possible.

Continue reading →