3 Payoffs of "No-Excuses" Leadership

Too many leaders are quick to make excuses for why their companies aren’t performing to expectations by blaming others or circumstances outside themselves when things don’t go as planned.  However, if you are a true leader, you make no excuses and accept the responsibility for the results you get. By honing your own ability to lead, you will experience three payoffs that lead to success:

Payoff #1: You Know Yourself. As a leader, you have a life-sized laboratory or playground for exploring who you are, what you really want in life, and what you do to get what you want. As you become a more intentional leader, you shift to more deliberate, conscious choices and see more alignment between your intentions and impact. With this level of intentionality, you get the results you intended and don’t make excuses for the results you get.

Feedback is a primary way to get you to a place where you know yourself better, whether this feedback comes from assessments, other people, or the results you get from your actions. The trick is to be able to reflect on this feedback and to integrate it with your experiences. This allows you to know yourself better, which puts you well on your way to becoming a no-excuses leader.

Payoff #2: Align Your Business. Once you are more deliberate in the personal impact you intend, it follows that you would create that same alignment in your business. This alignment is about using your company’s intention (its mission, vision, goals, and values) to craft plans, procedures, processes, and systems that guide your employees to “walk the talk” regularly.

Creating and using a living, breathing strategic plan and current company goals, you and your leadership team ensure that daily work aligns with the company’s most important priorities. Every action taken, every promise made and acted upon reflects what you intended and wrote in the mission statement, your vision statement, and the strategic plan. You cultivate this same alignment with individual employees and teams throughout the company. With the business aligned, you decrease the need to make excuses for the outcomes you get.

Payoff #3: Express Yourself Clearly and Powerfully. The final payoff as a no-excuses leader is clear and powerful communication.  To achieve this, you see communication as a powerful, unifying process throughout your company. You check your own actions and words as well as your company’s systems to ensure the important communications employees need to hear are sent without mixed messages.

As a no-excuses leader you use a mix of stories, facts, and images to engage employees’ hearts and minds. You also learn to use influence more often than coercion to get stakeholders to join with you to accomplish you most important goals.

Socrates is attributed with saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Are you ready to examine your leadership to become a no-excuses leader?

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Beth Strathman works with leaders who are willing and courageous enough to shake up business as usual by understanding themselves, aligning their businesses, and expressing ideas clearly. Learn more about her company Firebrand Consulting LLC at: firebrandconsultingllc.com.

3 Reasons Your Strategic Plan Could Be a Waste of Time and Money

Most people agree that having a plan for the future is a good thing. That's why most leadership teams do spend time and money discussing and creating a strategic plan. Yet most leadership teams do little or nothing with the plans they create other than referring to them from time to time as they gather dust on the shelf. Why?

Simply stated, the plan they created was incomplete.

There are huge costs associated with an incomplete planning process:

• Losing market leader status and falling behind;
• Getting poor or lackluster financial and operational results;
• Wasting time, money, and resources on a strategic plan that went nowhere; and
• Losing credibility as a leadership team.

Useful strategic plans include three components.

If your leadership team omits or fails to execute one of these 3 key components, you won't get the results you planned on. In the end, your strategic plan will be one big, costly "fail".

One: The plan answers the "big" strategic planning questions in plain language - without using jargon from an overly expensive consultant. These "big" questions include:

• What legacy do we want to leave when all is said and done?
• Who are our customers and how can we better serve them?
• Who are our competitors and how can we beat them or do what they're not doing?
• What do we do best and how can we build on that edge?
• What opportunities can we seize?
• How will we recognize and respond to potential setbacks?
• What are potential scenarios that we need to consider for the future, and how will we prepare for them?

Unfortunately, many leadership teams get mired down in philosophical discussions about these issues. Others come up with brilliant answers to these questions, but can't quite bring their ideas into reality with clear, concrete, actionable initiatives that get done.

These big strategic planning questions are worthless if they don't result in a few clear, compelling strategic initiatives to move the company forward.

Two: The plan must set a few clear priorities and an overall strategic theme. A critical outcome of the beginning stages of the strategic planning process is to determine the most important priorities for the organization. After generating what might be a very long list of potential priorities, your leadership team must determine the relative value of each and hone in on only a few key priorities. The discussion that pares down the list of possible priorities can lead to greater clarity about the big strategic planning questions, especially about what the organization actually does best.

Once a list of no more than two or three priorities is agreed upon, the leadership team can come up with a unifying strategic theme. This is a one-line statement that conveys the overall strategic push for the organization, such as: "Beat ABC Corp.!" "Expand to India." "0% medical errors." "Become a magnet for talent."

Here is one big mistake to avoid during this phase of planning: Trying to please everyone by settling on a long list of priorities. While a long list of "priorities" makes everyone feel included and valued, it makes it highly unlikely that you will get anything done completely if at all. Be a leader and make strategic choices.

Three: Have the guts to implement it. The biggest complaint I hear about strategic plans is that they never seem to get executed. There are a few reasons why:

The leadership team . . .

• Neglected to commit essential resources to the plan, including capital, training, technology, and people.
• Failed to take things off the plates of busy employees, and instead just stacked more work on them.
• Lacked the will to call a halt to old initiatives that compete with the new.
• Failed to set clear roles, responsibilities, accountability, and rewards systems in line with the plan.
• Wimped out after a few setbacks or initial resistance.
• A sound strategic planning process spends as much time on implementation planning as it does on the more lofty work of answering the key strategic questions and setting priorities. Otherwise, the plan stays in your head and never becomes real work with measurable results. 

Some leadership teams are great at asking the big picture questions, but fail to follow up. Some set too many priorities, and can't say "no" to good ideas, despite limited resources. Others are strong at executing, but lack the vision to develop compelling strategic initiatives.

Which of the above areas is weakest for you and your leadership team?

Click here to get my FREE Strategic Assessment.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR NEWSLETTER, BLOG OR WEBSITE? You can, as long as you include this information with it: Beth Strathman is a leadership coach who works with executives who want to increase their influence for greater confidence, influence, and enhanced leadership presence. Learn more about her company Firebrand Consulting LLC at: bethstrathman.com.

Are Your Meetings a Snoozefest?

What is the difference between a newsletter and a meeting?  You think this is a trick question?  It’s obvious, right? Apparently not so obvious to a lot of leaders.

Like a memo or newsletter, many meetings end up as simply a way to disseminate information.  Those attending go around the horn and update the others in the room about what’s going on in their respective areas of responsibility.  Or maybe during the meeting someone “trains” you on a new procedure, product, or service.  Thus, many meetings are simply newsletters in disguise.  If you are gathering others in a room or in a virtual meeting space to merely disseminate information, send a newsletter or memo instead.

In contrast, you should use a meeting format when there is a topic to discuss that is critical to the long-and short-term success of your organization.  As proposed in Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting, every good meeting needs “conflict” . . . something that will spark all kinds of thought, discussion and disagreement, allow enough time to dicuss the issue(s), and not mix administrative, tactical and strategic topics.

With multiple options for interfacing and communicating with others available today, it is even more important to determine whether or not a meeting (whether virtual or face-to-face) is really necessary. The main reasons to have a meeting:

1.       To check-in daily with those working with you.  This is a short 5-10 minute administrative meeting where a supervisor and her direct reports briefly huddle to exchange information regarding their top priorities of the day.  It allows for quick updates, coordination and coverage if needed.

2.       To report back on the progress of tactics that are being implemented and are based upon the goals generated during a strategy session.  This is a weekly meeting where an entire team meets to report on individual efforts to impact team and organization goals and to make new commitments for the coming week.  In addition to Lencioni’s book, I recommend The Four Disciplines of Execution by Chris Chesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling for a practical structure to these types of meetings.

3.       To discuss the current strategy related to the organization’s current business goals and the progress being made.    These can be held monthly or as needed and usually last from 2-4 hours.

4.       To do more in-depth organizational planning, including to review strategy, industry trends, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.  This can be a two- to three-day meeting held offsite and may include department heads and other senior leaders, who gather to brainstorm, analyze, prioritize, and discuss where the business is going with respect to its market, products, service, or structure.  Sometimes they also discuss internal talent and succession planning.

All of these meeting types require the participation of the attendees around a meaningful topic.

So reflect on the meetings you convene or attend.  If you lead the meetings, what can you do make them more engaging for the others in the room? What topics, central to your organization, need to be discussed more and would lend themselves to lively discussion and analysis?  Assuming little or no discussion is required, what straightforward information currently shared at your meetings can be shared in a way that doesn’t take meeting time?

In short, instead of holding a meeting where others are dragging in a few minutes late, dreading the time they will have to spend listening to the same old irrelevant information and hoping there will be someone else in the room they can text with under the table, what can you do to your meetings, so others can’t wait to come and participate . . . ?