Future-proofing your company is a team sport
There’s an entire generation of leaders today who have never led through a recession. Now, faced with raging inflation, tumbling profits and volatile stock prices, they are flummoxed. While this is not another global pandemic, there are whispers in the wind that troubled times are coming. How can you help your teams work together in an agile way to prepare for whatever is next?There are lessons to draw from winners post-COVID who seemed to nimbly navigate the last crisis, and those that lumbered and bumbled their way through.Among the losers were those that didn’t just get it a little wrong – they doubled down on a single bet. They kept rolling the dice at the same table despite the odds that their “luck” could run out.
- Peloton produced more bikes than people wanted and were left peddling in the wind with quality issues and a saturated market for their product.
- Bed Bath and Beyond bet on branded goods instead of investing in technology that would have brought loyal shoppers online to buy goods for staying home and feathering their nests.
These companies looked like early winners, and yet the falls were more spectacular than the rise. They had a plan. They were aligned. Where they failed was in imagination. Marching in lock step they went right over the edge.Why it’s easy to go over the edgeIn hindsight we can see mistakes. But how does a smart team keep from outsmarting itself? It comes down to a discipline – avoiding the tendency toward group think and coalescing around one possibility.Breaking the cycle to think differently togetherBreaking this cycle of group think is difficult, but there is too much at stake not to do it. The discipline that saves the smartest, most successful organizations in times of uncertainty is a dedication to scenario planning.Scenario planning is both a process and a discipline that enables your team to imagine “what happens if…” by reflecting on the variables for your business and speculating with the best of your current data and experience how those might play out.With this process your team can go deep and long before events occur, playing out how they might respond. They can then agree on the critical factors that they’ll need to consider as events unfold. They put together plausible scenarios – not only Plans A and B, but also plans C, D, E, F, and G.
Scenario PlanningScenario planning is the practice of creating varying courses of action for a business to implement based on potential events and situations, known as scenarios.It enables teams to challenge their own thinking, consider possibilities, and later, respond dynamically to an unknown future. There are many ways the future may unfold with scenario planning, guiding teams to be responsive, resilient, and effective.The process begins when you define your critical uncertainties and develop plausible scenarios.This requires teams to both apply a sophisticated process and develop the team dynamics and characteristics of agile teams.
Scenario planning is a team sport in that it first requires us to acknowledge no one of us is smarter than all of us. When your team develops this capability, you have the ingredients to become agile. Agility is not so much response to crisis as it is planning to pivot when necessary and knowing what you will do. It may mean changing the metrics by which you’ll measure success so that you can manage through a challenging period.There may be no industry that suffered during the pandemic more than the airlines. Many tried and tried again to “guess” when air travel would resume. CEO of United, Scott Kirby told analysts “We’re not going to pretend we know what demand will be.” After spending months pouring over data, they concluded it couldn’t be done.Instead they assembled a “bounce-back” cross-functional team to consider slow, medium, and fast rebound scenarios. Conversations on cutting costs were scuttled for debates on growth. Many had never met each other or worked together. But they set a goal of becoming a “just in time” organization, looking at options, risks, plans. Through that they placed some bets. The result was a different version of success – liquidity – which enabled them to ride out volatility in demand indefinitely.Why can’t more teams do what United Airlines did? The answer is they can if they know how to get there. There are qualities of leaders and teams that give them the capabilities to work together more effectively and thrive in uncertainty, and tools to support them through the churn. Scenario planning is one of those tools – the most powerful way to ensure your team has the debate before there is a crisis. The difficult conversations have been started, the tradeoffs contemplated, so that when it’s time to act, it feels familiar.Leading a future-proof teamThe role of the team leader is to create space and environment for acknowledging what is unknowable and building a process that moves away from report-outs and political debates to alignment around critical factors and criteria for decision-making.The team needs to be empowered and expected to debate constructively and bring discipline to its decision process. We know from research and through our work with agile teams that there are three qualities of these teams that make it more likely they’ll be able to plan for various scenarios, stay current on the critical factors, and be ready to pivot.Seize the power of Both/And thinking
Both/And Thinking is the ability to hold that more than one seemingly conflicting fact or set of facts may be true, or there maybe be more than one scenario, potential outcome, or impact of any decision.Both/And Thinking in teamwork requires all members to hold for the group the notion that seemingly opposing points of view can both contain truths. For example, it can be true that a recession may be painful, but also positive for your company.To encourage both/and thinking, enable your team to embrace the plausibility of numerous scenarios, as well as options for the best actions based on emerging data. Helping your team to explicitly understand and analyze both sides of the seemingly contradictory truth is a key step forward.
Unlock the creativity that comes with curiosity
In teamwork, curiosity is ability of a team to display humility by soliciting input and other points of view. Curiosity avoids narrow, myopic thinking. It prevents your team from closing ranks at critical moments and helps open the aperture to see all possibilities.To encourage curiosity, insist on questions even from those who have “been there and done that.” Seek to understand, model the behavior by asking questions yourself, even if you believe you know the answer. You never know when the “crazy” idea will be the one that makes most sense.
Make the path forward real through Decision Savvy
All the curiosity and flexibility in your approach won’t mean much if your team can’t make good decisions and move forward together. Agility requires a discipline around decision-making that encourages the team to decide on the criteria for decision before advocating for a point of view. When your team does this, it is far easier to build alignment and get to the right decision.To foster decision savvy requires the leader to insist on taking a step back to ask “what problem are we solving” before the team begins solutioning. This step alone will prevent your team from solving before they get to the heart of the matter. Then, simply ask, “what are the criteria that this decision must meet?” and generate those in writing. Use it as a checklist to consider the various options, and then, tally up how well each potential solution meets the criteria.Scenario planning is not a cure-all for thriving in a recession. But it will give you and your team a multitude of options and a path forward to take now. Perhaps most important, it will change the crisis mentality and alter the chemistry of the team. You’ll be able to meet each challenge head on, with greater confidence, agility, and resilience.
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You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”
Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.
‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’
A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.
Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:
- Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
- Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
- Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
- Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
- Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
- Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
- Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
- Merger integration.
Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.
The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs
Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context? When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.
10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations
With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:
- Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
- Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
- Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
- Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
- Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
- Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
- User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
- Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
- Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
- Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.
Better Results, Faster
Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.
Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination
Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.
Putting Business Simulations to Work
Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.
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I recently read an HBR article discussing why the traditional approach to leadership development doesn’t always work.
It stated that instead of traditional methods, the best way to identify, grow and retain leaders to meet today’s demands is to “Let them innovate, let them improvise and let them actually lead.”
Over the past 30 years, as we’ve partnered with clients facing a vast range of challenges, we’ve seen the truth behind this – that people learn best by actually doing. That’s why business simulations are such a powerful tool: they allow people to do and lead within a risk-free environment, and condense years of on-the-job learning experience into a few days, or even hours.
We also know that learning is not just a “one and done” situation – it is a continuous experience. In many cases, a learning journey, which blends a variety of learning methodologies and tools over time, is the most powerful means of shifting mindsets, building capabilities and driving sustained, effective results.What a learning journey looks like depends entirely on the context of your organization. What challenges are you addressing? What results are you driving for? What does great leadership look like for your organization?
To bring this to life, imagine the following approach to a blended learning journey for aligning and developing leaders – in this scenario, within a financial services firm: Financial technology has “transformed the way money is managed. It affects almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management. Startups are re-imagining financial services processes, while incumbent financial services firms are following suit with new products of their own.”
For a leading financial services company, this disruption has led to a massive technology transformation. With tens of thousands of employees in the current technology and operations group, the company will be making massive reductions to headcount over the next five years as a result of automation, robotics and other technology advances.
This personnel reduction and increased use of technology is both a massive shift for the business as well as a huge change in the scope of responsibility that the remaining leaders are being asked to take on moving forward. As such, the CEO of the business unit recognizes the need to align 175 senior leaders in the unit to the strategy and the future direction of the business, and give them the capabilities that they need to effectively execute moving forward.
To achieve these goals, BTS would build an innovative design for this initiative: a six-month blended experience, incorporating in-person events, individual and cohort-based coaching sessions, virtual assessments and more. Throughout the journey, data would be captured and analyzed to provide top leadership with information about the participants’ progress – and skill gaps – on both an individual and cohort level, thus setting up future development initiatives for optimal success.
The journey would begin with a two-day live conference event for the 175 person target audience, incorporating leader-led presentations about the strategy. The event would not just be talking heads and PowerPoint slides, but rather would leverage the BTS Pulse digital event technology to increase engagement and create a two-way, interactive dialogue that captures the participants’ ideas and suggestions. Participants also would use the technology to experience a moments-based leadership simulation that develops critical communications, innovation and change leadership capabilities, among other skills.
romAfter the event, participants would return to the job to apply their new learnings. On the job, each participant would continue their journey with four one-on-one performance coaching sessions, in addition to a series of peer coaching sessions shared with four to five colleagues. They also would use 60-90 minute virtual Practice with an Expert sessions to develop specific skill areas in short learning bursts, and then practice those skills with a live virtual coach. Throughout the journey, participants would access online, self-paced modules that contain “go-do activities” to reinforce and encourage application of the innovation leadership and other skills learned during the program.
As a capstone, six months after the journey has begun, every participant would go through a live, virtual assessment conducted via the BTS Pulse platform. In three to four hours, these virtual assessments allow live assessors to evaluate each leader’s learnings from the overall journey and identify any remaining skill gaps. The individual and cohort assessment data would then lead to and govern the design of future learning interventions that would continue to ensure the leaders are capable of implementing the strategy.
As you can see, this journey design leverages a range of tools and learning methodologies to create a holistic, impactful solution. It’s not just a standalone event – each step of the journey ties into the one before, and the data gathered throughout can be used well into the future in order to shape the next initiative .
Great journeys or experiences like this can take many forms. In addition to live classroom and virtual experiences, there is an ecosystem of activities, such as performance coaching, peer coaching, practice with an expert, go-dos, self-paced learning modules, and more, that truly engage leaders and ensure that the learnings are being reinforced, built upon, practiced and implemented back on the job. We find that these types of experience rarely look the same for every client. There are many factors that determine which configuration and progression will make the most sense. There is one common theme that we have found throughout these highly contextual experiences, however – that the participant feedback is outstanding and the business impact is profound.
Leading with Purpose, Part 1
Most CEOs I speak with are not 100% at peace with their company’s purpose. As the market, their people and their business evolve, so will their purpose. As some of the best companies of past and present show us, there is strength, and even magic, in a great company purpose. What is also clear, however, is that this magic does not come from just having a “purpose” or “vision,” but rather from how well a company is executing against their purpose.
When Southwest Airlines (which has been profitable for 45 consecutive years, and on FORTUNE’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies for 24 straight years) was first starting out, their mission was to make flying affordable.1 They rallied their people on the idea that a grandmother should be able to affordably buy a ticket, at the drop of a hat, to get on a flight to see her new grandchild. This simple mission led to the “Southwest Effect,” which transformed the airline industry, and continued to be a lens with which the Southwest leadership team made key decisions.
Today, Southwest’s vision has evolved: “To become the world’s most loved, most flown, and most profitable airline.” And they are executing on this vision. They continue to drive superior shareholder returns against all industries on the S&P 500 (as they have for the past 44 years), and in 2018 were named the top low-cost airline in JD Powers customer survey reports for the second year in a row.
As the Southwest example highlights, great company purpose combined with a leadership team who will build the work-flows, culture, processes and metrics to live up to it can be an enormous employee motivator. But we have also experienced, both at BTS and with our global clients, that a good company vision and purpose on their own are not sufficient – employees need them to be even more personal to them as an individual. I remember a lunch I had twelve years ago with a 24-year old new hire who was my direct report. After some small talk he looked at me and said, “Why are you here? Why have you spent seven years with the same company?”
I’ll never forget that lunch. It was the first time I had been asked the question, and it was the beginning of a new decade where our employees were much louder and more active about wanting to reflect and spend time on our mission and purpose, linking it to their personal values and the impact they strived to have in the world. Luke, that 24-year old new hire, has made me and our company better as a result of his question.
In the last decade, there has been a growing emphasis in the business world on finding a deeper motivation to unlock greater meaning at work. For some this may sound ‘fluffy,’ or as one executive we spoke to commented, “Is this just the next version of the pursuit of vision and values? It sounds great on paper but too often makes little real difference as it tends to stay on the wall, rather than live in your heart.”
Yet your people spend the majority of their life at work and with colleagues. At its best, a sense of purpose is a way of bringing meaning to their work and understanding the contributions they are making to the company, as well as greater society. It makes sense, then, that employees who are clear on their personal and professional purpose end their work day invigorated and proud of what they’re doing instead of exhausted by mindless work that is bereft of real meaning.
According to a recent PWC study, 79% of business leaders believe that purpose is central to business success – but only 34% use their organization’s purpose as a guidepost for their leadership team’s decision-making. Signs that your workplace may be lacking organizational purpose are distracted employees and a lack of comradery. These are significant factors – so why don’t more organizations devote time to developing clear purpose and values? Well, developing organizational purpose is no easy task, and much of it starts with your own personal purpose. If you’re unsure of what exactly your own personal purpose is, have no fear – in the next two installments of this blog series, we will offer simple steps to help you uncover your personal and organizational purposes and get closer to leading through the lens of purpose.