Natural Effectiveness(TM) For Success by Gayla Hodges

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Keeping Your Eyes on the Prize

By Gayla Hodges 

How do you keep your eyes on
the prize – meaning finishing strong all of the goals you’ve set for 2008 –
while also planning and setting goals for 2009? You are faced with two very
critical tasks which can easily become muddled. 
When a business loses focus and allows current year goals to become
muddled with goals for the coming year, the result is often lack of momentum to
finish current year goals and initiatives and a lack of clarity in 2009 goals
and strategies. So how do you do both
at the same time?

The major key to keeping your eyes on the prize and
finishing strong in 2008, while also moving progressively into 2009 is focus. Where are you focusing your
attention?  As a leader of the group, you
will want to make sure there is focused attention on what remains to be done in
2008, evaluating how well you’ve done. But you also need to put a focus on the
next year so people can prepare.

Part of the leadership
challenge is maintaining focus on two related, yet separate, tasks. People can
get excited about what’s going to happen the next year and not want to finish
off the things that need to happen this year. Or things like cultural
initiatives can fall by the wayside in the ardor of trying to complete the production-type
goals you might have set.

As a leader, what you will
want to do is to create different focuses and not try to do everything at one
time. You might bring together your leadership team at this point in the year
and evaluate where you’ve been, where you’re going, and what needs to happen in
order to finish strong for 2008. At this time of year, it is also important to
be looking at whether you will be able to complete everything planned for 2008
or if you will need to roll some things over into 2009?

You will also want to plan a
separate session, which is your
visioning session and your planning session for 2009.  In this meeting, your focus needs to be more
visionary – looking forward to 2009. Your evaluation of 2008 achievements will
inform your 2009 planning and will indicate any goals or initiatives from 2008
that need to carry over into 2009. 

It is important for leaders
to remember (as I’ve said a thousand times) that what you focus on as a leader is what people in your organization will
focus on.  So, it’s important that
you focus on both things, but it’s equally important that you don’t try to
focus on them at the same time. 

In working on your plan for
2009 you might have noticed that a five-year plan is actually more practical.
However, if you want to use this as a communication plan for the people in your
organization, to keep them focused, a yearly plan is really the best method to
do that. Keep in mind that content of your yearly plan is very important; but
the way you roll it out is equally important.

Some of my clients write an accomplishments letter, and this is the
time to start gathering this information. The purpose of the letter is to say,
“Here’s what the 2008 plan was and how well we did on these different
areas.”  As you begin to capture what’s
been completed, you can actually write a letter to your folks telling
recognition.  You will want to use the
letter as an opportunity to recognize individuals who are responsible for
significant accomplishments or achievements. This letter will result from your
2008 evaluation session.

During this time of year,
companies are also beginning to look at performance. You will want to be sure
you have talked with people about where their performance is on track or off
track and what they need to do to get it on track before the end of the
evaluation year (assuming that you are using the calendar year as your fiscal
year).  Your performance updates are a
good way to share information on outstanding achievements and to take note of
performance issues that need to be considered in planning for 2009. 

At this point in the year
many companies have also looked at budgets. They have planned some budgeting.
You will want to have that information for your 2009 strategic planning cycle.
So, for 2008, you’re going to be looking at how close you have been on budget,
on scope and on timing. You will look at what needs to be done to make sure you
stay on budget or that you are able to recoup if you haven’t stayed on track.  You will also need some information for the
2009 plan. This will be: What is the budget for 2009?  What is going to carry over? What do these
things look like?

An example would be things
that are longer-term strategies that you are putting in place. You might have
started a strategy – maybe a safety strategy – that in the first year you have
certain specific areas that you want to emphasize. And maybe in the second year
the emphasis will change. Your 2009 plan needs to reflect this. And, of course,
this goes across the board. Assessing the progress made in 2008 and deciding
what should be the strategy for the next year in those specific areas provides
integration and continuity across time.

You don’t want to
“cookie-cutter” your plan from the year before. You might want to be sure to
hit on each topic to show that you’ve completed what you’re trying to do or
look at where you are going in the next step. Your strategy might not change,
although it might.  If you had, for
example, established a strategy of having senior leaders carry forward with
certain cultural initiatives, like safety or workforce development, and
possibly in the next two years you will roll that out to maybe first line
leaders and/or the employee population as a whole, your plan needs to reflect
that. These are the strategies you need to discuss in your business strategy
sessions for the next year.

There is a lot to talk
about, and there’s a lot to think about. 
If you are able to establish two focuses you can lead the company in
giving adequate attention to 2008 goals and initiatives to ensure a strong
finish. You will also be able to use the information from your evaluation of
2008 plans and your performance analysis to begin to establish a vision and
create a plan for 2009. This allows you to keep the two sets of goals from becoming
muddled in the minds of your employee population. You will be able to maintain
strategic momentum through the end of the current year and build that momentum
to launch strategic efforts in 2009.

Copyright © 2008 by Gayla
Hodges

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Insights on Successfully Leading Corporate Initiatives

Leaders who work for large corporations at the production level or in satellite or plant locations are often challenged with implementing corporate initiatives at their particular level. They are further challenged to implement them within the context of the local culture and of their own strategic goals. There are several reasons for this. One reason is that corporate strategies seem to be just that -- they apply across the whole company -- and might not seem to apply to the area they are leading, especially if it is a production area.

Since I just came back from the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) Conference in Atlanta, I’d like to use supplier diversity as an example of the kind of corporate initiative that might not seem to fit the strategic plan goals for the site or the type of operations performed. Many large corporations, and many mid-sized and even small corporations, are adopting supplier diversity initiatives in order to give smaller companies and diversity companies an opportunity to do business with them. There is a return on investment, and there are proven results from using this policy/philosophy. However, by the time they reach the plant level it is often hard to figure out how this is going to really help. That’s where the leader comes in.

The leader needs to be the corporate vision translator. In other words, it is up to you as a leader to take the vision your company has for supplier diversity or just about any broad corporate initiative, and figure out “What’s in it for us here at this location?” because this is exactly what leaders do: leaders have a vision.

The first step, then, is to take some focused time and attention to translate the corporate vision into your plant vision or your location vision. Many times that role falls to the people from corporate who might not understand the way you do business and what you are doing well enough to really translate it appropriately and compellingly to your people. But you do understand these things, and that’s why it’s up to you to make that translation.

For example, let’s assume that there is a corporate initiative to get employees throughout all levels and sites of the company to volunteer some of their time to community projects. As the plant manager, you are informed that the quota for your plant is to have people giving 10% of the total number of hours each month to some important project in your community. Your job as translator is to break that out and translate it into terms your people can understand and get excited about. Your approach to achieving this assigned initiative, then, might be to commit your team to give 150 hours of time to a Habitat for Humanity home build in the community. You can easily explain the value of giving time for this kind of cause, both in terms of generally helping someone and in terms of the benefit to the company of local involvement in the community. In addition, you can lead by example by actually wielding a paintbrush and working alongside the volunteers.

Returning to the supplier diversity example, the corporate goal might be to have every division or plant commit 10% of their outsourcing or product purchasing to a minority- or woman-owned business. So you do your homework on the ROI of the initiative, you ask your procurement team to identify a pool of appropriate suppliers of products or services your plant might need during the next year. You identify who it is in your plant that purchases or contracts with the kind of people and services or products offered by minority or diversity businesses.You can then translate the vision of the company with regard to supplier diversity to your procurement, purchasing and HR team.

Once you’ve done that – and your supplier diversity people or human resources people would be delighted to help you define that vision for your specific area of business – you do the second thing that leaders do, and that is to articulate the vision. So you need to share that vision. Many times the vision will come in as an HR program and it will come in through the corporate human resources department to your location’s human resources department. It doesn’t quite bypass you, but it doesn’t get the same attention as the production goals and initiatives that you planned locally.

I’m thinking also of things like the new performance development process. The corporate human resources people come in and train everyone how to do it, and you put your stamp of approval on it. But if you haven’t taken the time to really figure out your vision for how this is going to impact your operation, you’re losing an opportunity to make a new process or a corporate goal make a real difference in your area.

After you have defined that vision and you have articulated it, you still need a small group of people to help you implement the vision. Another mistake I see many leaders make is not including the people responsible for making the processes happen in the process of defining how to make this happen. It is even better to involve them in the visioning process. So these are the people we normally think of, our line management people, as the ones who are going to carry forth the message. And that’s very true, and it’s definitely your job to get them on board and get them to understand. But if you also team with your HR person, your supplier diversity person, your procurement person to build the vision, it shows them the support you have and it also gives them an opportunity to truly support you in making this initiative successful in your area.

When you have built this small group of people to implement that vision, putting the system in place is very important because it is critical for you to spend focused time and attention on each initiative that impacts your operation. That is sometimes a lot easier said than done! Depending on your support people to supply the type of support you need will go a long way in helping you achieve your corporate initiatives as well as your strategic plan initiatives. .

The last thing, then, is to go out and implement that vision. And it is important to recognize that your implementation might not look like the way it is being implemented in other areas, because you are going to customize your implementation to the culture you are in. You are going to find ways to help your people understand why you are doing what you’re doing and how it benefits your operation.

Here’s an example. The supplier diversity folks’ job is to make sure that the company is doing a certain amount of business with minority- and woman-owned businesses. Many times, as leaders, we see a corporate person coming in with a bunch of number goals that don’t fit into our culture.

However, if we switch that and look at the supplier diversity person as a support in reaching those goals, that will shift the whole relationship with them. Their job is to help minority – and woman-owned suppliers to do work with your corporation. Their job is also to help you implement programs and processes at your location that will support that goal. So bringing them in as a partner -- bringing them into your strategic process in that particular area -- will make all the difference in the world. And don’t forget to include them when you celebrate your success at the end of the year.

Another example would be when you are implementing a new performance management system. Many people look at performance management as an onerous extra task at the end of each year when you have to fill it out, and at the beginning of the year when you have to fill it out again. They don’t see it or use it as a tool.

If you as a leader can communicate and work with your HR support team, to articulate the way this tool will help you achieve the results that you want, you can be successful. As intended, performance management is meant to reflect each person’s individual role in meeting the corporate goals of your company. Breaking that down to the level of each individual on your team offers everyone a better understanding of the important role they have in the success of the company and of the importance of their work to the company.

So, going back to the idea of being the translator, if you work closely with your human resources support people you can define “How does this performance management system fit our operation?” “How are we going to make this work here?” “How does it fit here?” “What is going to be the benefit of using it here, and how can we express the benefit?” You will have a more successful rollout and you’ll be using the tool as it was intended to be used, and it will help you reach the results that your company needs.

It might help to think of the leadership role in translating a corporate initiative to the plant or division level as creating a sort of cultural change. Edgar Schein called it creating the “climate” of the organization. The leader’s role in winning acceptance and achievement of corporate initiatives at the plant level or the division level is to use the translating and articulating functions, as well as the activities related to gathering a small group of people to spearhead the effort to change the climate of the organization in order to achieve the goals.

Schein outlined six primary mechanisms by which leaders embed culture changes or climate changes:
§ What leaders pay attention to, measure, and control on a regular basis.
§ How leaders react to critical incidents and organizational crises.
§ Observed criteria by which leaders allocate scarce resources.
§ Deliberate role modeling, teaching, and coaching.
§ Observed criteria by which leaders allocate rewards and status.
§ Observed criteria by which leaders recruit, select, promote, retire, and excommunicate organizational members.*

These six mechanisms can be the actions leaders take to translate, articulate and build buy-in and ultimate success in implementing the initiative. By embracing the initiative, translating it into a vision consistent with the goals and the culture of the specific plant or division of the organization, and articulating that vision through both words and actions, leading corporate initiatives can be enthusiastically embraced and goals achieved.

*Edgar Schein, Corporate Culture and Leadership.

Copyright 2008 by Gayla Hodges

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Leadership as a Talent Retention Tool

The way you treat people is
one of the most important factors in your company’s ability to keep the talent
you want and need to make your business successful. You as a manager, as a
leader, may be one of the most important talent retention tools your company
has. And remember the key to retention success: People don’t leave
corporations, they leave bosses. 

There has been a lot of
discussion and study in recent years about why people leave jobs. According to
the U.S. Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of
people who quit jobs (instead of being fired, laid off or downsized) accounts
for 42-63% of all people who leave jobs in a given year. This represents a lot
of talent leaving corporations. 

Some leaders are content to
glance over an internal exit interview and conclude that the valued talent is
walking out the door because other companies are offering better salaries or
benefits packages or because someone else offered them a chance to advance or
do something different. 

External exit interviews and
independent research tell a different story. Corporations that want to be
successful in leading in retaining talent are listening carefully to these
findings. A recent study by the Gallup organization found that “at least
75% of the reasons for voluntary turnover can be influenced by managers.”*

Based on information
gathered over a thirty year period, the Gallup organization reported the following
reasons for leaving:

1. Career advancement or
opportunities for promotion (31.5%)
2. Pay and Benefits (22.4%)
3. Poor job fit (20.2%)
4. Management or the general work environment (16.5%)
5. Flexibility or scheduling (7.7%)
6. Job security (1.7%)*

Since leaders have a direct
impact on the majority of these areas, it becomes apparent that your leadership
can make or break any retention program you devise.

In another study by the
Saratoga Institute, the following reasons for talent loss (based on almost
20,000 interviews) were given:

1. Job or workplace was
not as expected
2. Mismatch between job and person
3. Too little coaching and feedback
4. Too few growth and advancement opportunities
5. Feeling devalued and unrecognized
6. Stress from overwork and work-life imbalance
7. Loss of trust and confidence in senior leaders.**

Again, leadership can and
should have significant impact on all of these areas.

My personal experience is
that many people leave jobs because of the way they perceive the working
environment and their opportunities to do what they love to do in a way that
allows them to be effective, efficient and successful. In fact, in many cases
when people leave a job because of a mismatch with the job, the mismatch is perceived
rather than actual. This perception points to either a poor hiring
decision or a failure of management to provide people with the tools and the
opportunities they need to do the job. 

Often people point to the
immediate supervisor (boss) as the reason for leaving a job. This might be
because the supervisor is not able to adequately communicate expectations or
goals. It might be due to the supervisor’s management style. It is often
because the individual believes the manager is not providing the equipment,
materials, resources or opportunity to perform the job adequately. This may
point to the failure of the immediate supervisor to hear what their team
members are saying; but it could also reflect an unwillingness of senior
management to make those resources and opportunities available. 

Leaders and managers each
see the workplace from a unique perspective. Executive leaders are looking at
the biggest overall picture from the organizational level and with an eye to
external impacts. Middle-level managers are looking at the bigger picture from
an operational standpoint. Front line managers view the workplace from the
actual functional, nuts and bolts operational point of view. This means it
is the front-line manager who is in the best position to evaluate what
employees need in order to do their jobs proficiently. They must then
effectively communicate those needs up the ladder to ensure that all reasonable
needs are met. 

The front line manager also
must be the person who knows each employee well enough to understand the
working environment in which the employee can succeed. Leadership skills become
critical in working between employees and upper management to create the
environment needed for success. This might mean managing resources, it might
mean working with flexible scheduling, but it is almost certain to mean
treating employees with the appropriate respect and providing clear
communication of tasks, roles, expectations and assignments. It also almost
certainly includes providing appropriate growth and advancement opportunities
and coaching for each employee.

Effective leadership from
any management perspective also requires leaders and managers to understand who
their employees are and how they function at their natural best, as well as
what is important to them. 

People with a high
take-charge characteristic tend to assume people understand where they are
going. When their communication is ineffective or inadequate, employees become
frustrated because the targets are unclear. In time, this can create a lack of
respect for the leader or worse, a perception that the leader doesn’t value the
employee for the contribution s/he is making.

People who demonstrate a
“high allegiance characteristic” approach tasks from the leader > process
> procedure paradigm. They look to the leader to provide clear direction
about the process and the procedure, as well as the goal. People motivated in
this way, especially if they are more collaborative and supportive in terms of
the way they take charge, must be able to respect the leader. That respect
hinges upon the ability of the manager to communicate to each employee that the
employee is valued and valuable in reality and not just by giving lip service
to the idea. Clear goals and direction must also be provided consistently. It
is also the line manager’s role to communicate to employees a clear and
consistent understanding of corporate goals, strategies and direction. It is in
this last role that the manager has the opportunity to build team cohesion and
respect, as well as employee buy-in on corporate goals and respect for senior
corporate leaders. 

If employees are engaged in
the corporate and team goals and strategies and they feel valued and respected
for doing their jobs well, they are less likely to leave. Leaders at every
level of the corporation must consistently communicate to employees the goals,
the reasons for the goals, the strategies in place to achieve the goals, and
the valuable contribution of each employee to implementing the strategies
successfully.

*Turning
Around Employee Turnover: Costly churn can be reduced if managers know what to
look for – and they usually don’t, “ by Jennifer Robison. http://gmj.gallup.com/content/106912/Turning-Around-Your-Turnover-Problem.aspx.

**Dealing
with the Real Reasons People Leave, by Judith A. Ross, Harvard Business Publishing. Article
Reprint No. U0508A.

About Gayla Hodges

Gayla Hodges is the
President and Principal Consultant of Change
Agents, Inc., a company that specializes in energizing workforces to
achieve strategic goals. She has extensive experience in instituting corporate
transformational change. She coaches executives and managers on leading
corporate change, facilitating the development and implementation of organizational
effectiveness strategies. 

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Responses sought on Workforce Management Survey

Glendale, AZ – May 23, 2008 – Just in time to release the findings before strategic
planning season, Change Agents, Inc. has announced a new online survey for
businesses of all sizes. 

“Virtually everywhere I go
lately, the hot topic of conversation is workforce management, or some aspect
of it,” says Gayla Hodges, President of Change Agents, Inc.  “Because workforce management is such an
important part of the work we do with organizations who need to energize their
workforces to achieve new strategic goals and to negotiate strategic
organizational change, we are currently planning a cluster of articles, white
papers and products designed to help companies cope more effectively and
efficiently with workforce management in today’s business environment,” she
says.

In addition to the need to do
more with less, most organizations are facing the beginning of two crucial
situations which will dramatically change the way they approach workforce management
issues.  Those situations are (1) the
retirement of the Baby Boomer Generation, and (2) the first labor shortage in
the U.S. in more than fifty years. 

The struggle to deal with
these uncertainties and unknowns is raising a number of issues in workforce
management which must now be addressed in new ways.  Because Hodges and her team of change agents
cannot work with every company in need of their assistance, they are producing
resources to help other companies get their corporate minds around the issues
and the new approaches necessary to survive in the future.  This survey is intended to provide both basic
information about the issues and insight into where the pain is most acute. 

The survey is available
online at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=xVTFOXWjV6LT8AR81UyroA_3d_3d
and is open to anyone in the business sector. 
In fact, Hodges says they hope to reach a number of new people who will
respond to the survey. 

Survey findings will be
initially outlined in the June issue of their newsletter, More Than Small Change (subscribe at http://www.changeagentsinc.com/html/landing_page.html).
This initial report will be largely initial findings.  The results of more intensive analysis and
follow-up with those who raise questions or offer additional comments will be
summarized in a White Paper and the findings will fuel future articles, white
papers and products.  This is the first
insight survey opened to the general business community by Change Agents,
Inc. 

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A Different Approach to Workforce Management

Day after day I talk with clients and with business leaders.  I often ask, “What is the most challenging issue your organization is facing?”  The top answer to my question is “workforce management.”  My second question is, “What is the most difficult part of workforce management?”  The top answer to this question is “workforce planning.”  

Most of us are familiar with the budget-based process of workforce planning in which we look at future resource need and project how much manpower we will need to meet the needs of the future. This can become an intricate and cumbersome process, particularly for line managers who are busy managing their teams and achieving their strategic goals.  The result is that it is often extremely difficult (if not impossible) for the HR staff to get from them the information they need.  

The challenge organizations are facing today is not simply using the budget-based process to project future talent needs.  The challenge most organizations face today is twofold.  First, projecting how many of the organization’s human resources will be leaving with the Great Boomer Exodus. The second challenge is really talent acquisition.  We might know that over the next five years we are likely to lose a certain part of our people to retirement.  We don’t, however, know exactly how many and we don’t know when.  Further, in many industries, we don’t know where we will acquire people with the skills and talent we need.

This is not news to those in leadership and Human Resources ranks.  It is just becoming more real every day as people actually declare their intention to retire, and some are actually walking out the door.  

The planning process is further impacted by the fact that many industries have had such low attrition over so many years that the common practice of using past attrition history to project future attrition is no longer viable.  So, we can analyze when people will reach “retirement age” and have enough years with the company to collect full retirement, but most leaders and analysts I’ve talked with still can only narrow their numbers down to a three-year window.  Add to this mix the fact that many people are choosing to work beyond age 65 and that the structure of Social Security payments in fact encourages people to work until age 70 or 72 in order to receive larger monthly payments after retirement.  Given the need to run “lean and mean,” many companies are reluctant to fill positions in anticipation of retirements until people have signed on the bottom line that they are really leaving and when that might be.

Human Resources professionals with whom I’ve interacted recently report that they can do the number crunching. The challenge is getting line management to come to the analysis table with all of the competing demands on their time.  Line management input, however, is crucial to the process.  So the question becomes, “How do we bring together all of this information to make informed decisions about what talent will be needed, when it will be needed, and where we will find it?”

I had a recent conversation with some clients who are facing these issues. I heard of a concept that is certainly not very “scientific” but seems to use the art vs. the science of management very well.  They call it the “back of the napkin approach” to workforce planning.  The basic premise of the approach is this:  most managers, if given a short time, could take a napkin (of course, this conversation occurred over lunch) and sketch out who is likely to be leaving, and when, based on their knowledge of the person and what they’ve observed over the last several months. This information from line management, combined with the more formal analysis can provide a basis for decision-making that uses the strategic thinking and decision-making skills of the management team as well as the miracles of Information Technology.  

I like the “back of the napkin approach” for another reason.  While all of the managers with whom I work bring strengths to the table, when using the Natural Effectiveness™ Philosophy at its best, it is clear to me that not all of them will have highly-honed analytical skills or be inclined to put together the structure required by most formal workforce plans.  Most line managers are more intuitive, and many are creative and innovative – great qualities for a leader, but they might not play out well in the analytical process.  This new approach challenges the thinking and gets the necessary input from Line Management that would otherwise not enter the process.  

Those members of the team can then compile the formal and informal feedback and bring it back to the Management Team as a whole to take the next steps of strategic workforce planning.  I believe this method can and will actually accelerate the planning process while honoring and leveraging all of the skills of your management and support teams.  

Whether you take your line management to lunch and actually give them a napkin and a pen, or you use the principle of the approach in another setting, I think you will find that line management will be far more inclined and comfortable providing the information you need and less distracted from other responsibilities. I think you will also find the input from line management more insightful and precise than you might think initially.  In the end, I think you will find that this different approach will both streamline the process and provide better data for your analysis and planning.  

I’d really like to know what you think about this approach.  Please email me at gayla@changeagentsinc.com and tell me your thoughts.

Gayla Hodges

President & Principal Consultant

Change Agents, Inc.

http://www.changeagentsinc.com 

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Essestials for Successfully Implementing Your Strategic Plan - Steps 2 and 3

The second step in implementing your strategic
plan is to get people involved as you communicate. Get workgroups and/or
individuals involved so they actually do something with the strategic plan. In
many organizations getting people involved in doing something with the plan
means there is a performance plan. Creating the individual or team performance
plan is a matter of asking, “Given that these are the goals of the organization,
how does my job fit into these goals? How do I make a difference? How do I help
the company reach toward achieving the goals set out in the strategic plan?”

Communication of the content and the intention of the plan should be
linked with involvement in implementing the plan within the organization so
that, whether I am the CEO or the janitor, I understand clearly how my
contribution helps us meet the goals and implement the strategic plan.

The third step in successfully
implementing your strategic plan is to keep it before the people.  Many
companies create a beautiful strategic plan. It is glossy and colorful. People
look at it and say, “Hey, that is nice,” put it away, and no one ever looks at
it again.  It is critical that the leaders in your organization carry the
strategic plan with them in a printed document. They should bring out a copy of
the plan and say, “This is how what we are doing fits our strategic plan.”  All
reporting on performance goals should refer back to the plan. “This action
supports our strategic goal of people management.”  “This activity supports our
strategic goal of production.”  The point is that people clearly and repeatedly
see the link to the strategic plan.

If you are working with your
personal strategic plan it is even more important that you keep it before you
because it is so easy to become distracted and get off track if you do not have
a performance plan or an accountability partner.  In fact, I would encourage
everyone working with a personal strategic plan to find an accountability
partner.

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Using Natural Effectiveness™ to Sustain Strategic Momentum

Natural Effectiveness™ revolves around your personal traits and characteristics. If we can measure how you work most efficiently and effectively (and we can), and then focus leadership around those characteristics and strengths, amazing things can happen. This is the core of our Natural Effectiveness™ philosophy. It is about defining the way you work most powerfully and positioning you to leverage your natural strengths to meet your goals. You don’t have to figure out how to be someone else. All you have to do is be your most efficient and effective self, and it will give you tremendous power to lead, achieve and develop.

At Change Agents we measure natural effectiveness based on four basic traits:
The take-charge trait
The people trait
The pace trait
The structure trait.

Based on your highest trait, you will likely approach building and sustaining strategic momentum in certain predictable ways.

If your highest trait as a leader is the take charge trait, you might approach your team as the General. This is not to be confused with a dictator. But your tendency will likely be to direct, deploy and conquer. Remember, you can fight some of the battles on your own, but you will need all of your troops to win your vision. You are looking for and trying to inspire allegiance to the vision and the strategy, not necessarily to you, yourself, personally. You must remember that people provide the energy for your campaign. If you ask them to salute, it may make them tense and less energetic and committed to the cause.

If your highest trait as a leader is the people trait, you will automatically build a team. You will connect with people individually, in small groups, and corporately to share your passion and inspire them to want to seek the vision you outline or the future you envision. You will draw word pictures that explain what it will be like when you achieve the vision. Two things that are critical to your success are that you listen and that you take appropriate actions when necessary. Some visionary leaders have failed because they were considered all talk and no action. The key is not to let your enthusiasm overcome your good sense.

If your highest trait as a leader is the pace trait, you will likely lead through encouragement. You will spend more time encouraging action than you do in pushing for results. Your strength is your ability to stay the course. Another plus for you is the patience you have when things don’t go as you planned. Giving people permission to be human and make mistakes allows for creativity and innovation. Meeting deadlines can be a pitfall for you. It is critical that your team trust you. You build that trust by doing what you say you will do when you say you will do it.

If your highest leadership trait is the structure trait, you will likely use systems and processes as the highways to your strategic goal. Effective systems and processes are critical supports in any strategic effort. Remember: people need to know why they are being asked to follow a certain system or process. The best way to engage them is to allow them to create or redefine the systems and processes they need to achieve the results you need.

As you build your strategy-focused Naturally Effective™ organization, you will want to engage the strengths and talents of every person on your team. The bottom line in using your natural effectiveness™ to maintain strategic momentum is this: work from your strengths, employ and leverage the strengths of others, and that will help you sustain your strategic momentum.

To learn more about our Natural Effectiveness™ Philosophy, click here.

To find out about the ProScan® Natural Effectiveness™Survey, click here.

To learn more about Natural Effectiveness™traits, please refer to the audio CD of Teleseminar #1: The Art of Being vs. Doing: Using Your Natural Effectiveness, click here.

Gayla Hodges is the President and Principal Consultant of Change Agents, Inc., a company that specializes in energizing workforces to achieve strategic goals. She has extensive experience in instituting corporate transformational change. In addition, she coaches executives and managers in Natural Effectiveness(TM) Leadership skills and team building. Visit online at http://www.changeagentsinc.com.

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Essentials for Successfully Implementing Your Strategic Plan – Step One

Developing a strategic plan is a critical effort both for corporations and for individuals or families. Developing the plan, however, will not achieve the goals outlined in the plan without certain essential actions and activities by the people who created it.  Far too often, strategic plans are written and then put away and ignored. This approach is almost never successful in achieving goals.

Whether your strategic plan is intended to guide a corporation, a small business, a family or your personal life, successful goal achievement is directly proportionate to the steps taken to ensure systematic implementation of the plan. There are, thus, several essentials for successfully implementing your strategic plan.  The steps outlined below are the most critical for success.

The first step in implementing your strategic plan is to communicate the contents of the plan to the people who are affected by it.  Although this is also a place for involvement, effective communication must occur first. The communication piece is critical because leaders need to understand first what the strategic plan contains – what is the intent of the strategic plan – before they can communicate it to others.

Once the leaders understand the plan and its intent, they should communicate their understanding to employees.  Research has shown that frontline employees prefer to get the information about corporate goals and strategic planning from their immediate supervisor. This is the person they know best and the person they choose to trust.

It is very easy to assume that a personal strategic plan needs to be known only to the person who wrote it.  This is a mistake. It is important to identify the people who need to know what is in your plan. Who are the people who can support you in trying to reach your goals? Who are the people who are likely to encourage you as you strive to reach those goals? These are the people with whom you want to sit down, spend some time, and just share what you put together as your goals for the year.

In a corporate setting it is even more important that everyone get on board and know the goals of the organization. In this context you simply cannot over-communicate your strategic plan.  Doing a session with smaller teams and groups within the company gives individuals an opportunity to look at the strategic plan in detail. They can ask questions, they can pick it apart (not in order to edit into something different) and ask all the questions they want to ask about it. It is vital to have someone in the session who was involved in creating the strategic plan. This person can explain what was intended by specific words and ideas.  

My experience is that we spend a large amount of time finding just the right words to put in a plan. Too often, however, we do not spend enough time communicating what we meant by those words.

-- Gayla Hodges

President and Principal Consultant

Change Agents, Inc.

www.changeagentsinc.com 

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Sustaining Strategic Momentum

Sustaining strategic momentum is a leadership function. In our last two-part article, Essentials for Successfully Implementing Your Strategic Plan, we mentioned what leaders do.

“Leaders have a vision. They build a small group of people who share that vision. They have the ability to articulate that vision and to build buy-in from others. Then they implement the vision and the small group of people they have gathered can move mountains and make many, many things happen in an organization.”

Your most important role as leader of an organization is strategy. The best way to sustain the momentum you created by following the guidelines of the Essentials for Successfully Implementing Your Strategic Plan is to continue to deploy the small group of people who share the vision and are engaged in helping you implement it. If they have taken their leadership role seriously, they will have engaged a group of people who share the vision and who are energized to implement the strategies needed to reach that vision. So the amount of strategic momentum you can attain will be directly proportionate to the amount of energy and attention to strategy that is applied by those key individuals who share the strategic vision.

Think of this group of key individuals who share the strategic vision as strategic channels throughout the organization. Those who share your passion should be kept in the know about what’s going on strategically, how it affects them, and how it affects the people they work with. Your role in this effort is to be constantly in front, leading the way. As we said in the last article, you can’t over-communicate the vision; neither can you over-communicate the strategy you are employing to achieve the vision.

The biggest enemy of strategic momentum is distraction. Early in my change management career, one of my mentors taught me that leaders need to be relentless and boring in communicating their vision and strategic direction. It is critical that you stay on track and focused because your ability to stay focused and keep your team focused will directly impact the amount and quality of the results you achieve.

According to Edgar Schein, in his book, Organizational Culture andLeadership, what you focus on as a leader is what the people you lead will focus on. Let us say, for example, you have written your plan, outlined your strategies, started building momentum, and the corporate office sends you a new program that is strategic at a higher level which you are expected to implement or you encounter a barrier you didn’t anticipate in executing your defined strategy. This is a monumental strategic leadership opportunity for you. This is the time to bring your strategy team together. If the potential distraction is a program in support of higher level corporate strategy, your task is to evaluate the new program and look for ways the new program or process integrates with your strategy. If applicable, incorporate it with one of your existing strategic initiatives or develop and implement an initiative to integrate the new process or program into your strategic plan. If the potential distraction is an unexpected barrier, bring your strategic team back together to devise a strategy to either overcome or circumvent the strategy. Then deploy people and resources in the same manner as you are implementing the rest of your strategic plan. It is now part of your strategic plan and you can lead accordingly.

As your strategic leaders work with the strategic initiatives, there are some questions they should be asking at all levels of the organization:
1. How will this support our vision of the future?
2. How closely does what we are doing or planning to do fit our strategy?
3. Is this the most efficient and effective way to reach our strategic goal(s)?
4. Are we leveraging our strengths and organizational capabilities to have the greatest impact on strategic achievement?
5. Is this a temporary support to help us implement change and/or is it designed to become a permanent part of our strategic direction? If it is temporary, how will we determine when it has served its purpose? If it is designed to be permanent, how does it integrate with other systems and/or processes to complete the vision?

As the leader with the vision for the future, it is your role within the organization to step out and build and maintain the momentum to implement the strategies that will achieve the vision. You must communicate – in fact, you must over-communicate — the vision and the strategies to the point of boredom to every level of the organization to maintain focus, to incorporate new strategic goals and modifications necessary to keep all eyes on the vision and to keep everyone working with energy and enthusiasm toward achieving the vision. By having your strategic leadership team consistently and constantly asking questions that keep the focus of all in the organization on the vision your organization can build and maintain the momentum that will result in strategic success.