The 5 habits holding leaders back from driving growth

Zander: You’re right, Rick. We have the privilege of working with some fantastic organizations. What I think about what they do differently than others when it comes to driving growth and setting up a strategy to deliver long-term shareholder return, there are a couple of things that really come into play.

The first thing is that they are really laser focused on creating a customer centric or a customer driven growth strategy. They are putting the customer at the center of their growth roadmap and organizing their organization internally to support that new and different ways, and creating new and different value.

The second thing is really on shifts in key mindsets, because what got you here won’t be what gets you to where you need to go. And that actually translates into a growth mindset, which is absolutely critical to making these strategic bets actually come to life in the organization.

The third thing they do is they’re really good at rethinking their ways of working internally. How individuals work and perform, how teams work and perform, how the system’s set up to support the ways of working, really gets re-clarified to meet the objectives that they need to hit and deliver on for that growth.

The fourth thing is around capabilities, because as you’re looking to deliver something that you haven’t delivered in the past, the best companies are really good at simultaneously building up the capabilities that leaders need to have in order to deliver that future state.

And the last thing, which is super hard, but absolutely critical, the whole thing gets undone if it doesn’t happen. They’re really smart about how they rethink incentives and performance management. Because as you’re moving into, new forms of growth, you’re realigning your products and services differently, different ways of working, more collaboration and co creation.

If you don’t have a change in incentives, rewards, recognition, compensation, at the end of the day, nothing is going to move. And so the companies we work with do a lot of great things, but they really over invest in those five areas.

Rick: So let’s break each one of those down. The first one you started with, this concept of customer obsession or customer centricity, is one of the things that everyone talks about but is incredibly difficult to do.

Zander: One of the themes across the companies we work with is this idea of what has got us here and made us successful can’t alone be what gets us to where we need to go. We can’t just rinse and repeat that and expect to have different results and the growth that we want.

So there are a couple of things that could be really helpful for companies as they think about this. The first part of it is really about using an outside in lens to help drive strategic decisions. Some of these best companies are letting the customer guide. How does that roadmap get set up? And then they’re reflecting on what are our organizational capabilities to bring together to address those needs in ways that essentially outperform their competitors.

One of the companies that comes to mind have redesigned their strategic priorities around customer obsession. And they’ve embedded that in everything they do to the point that they literally have an empty chair in, I would say, every meeting where they’re making decisions, where they’re having discussions, budget trade offs, strategic discussions, they have a customer chair there in the room that’s intentionally left empty. And they’re constantly pointing to that empty chair to say, how would this be viewed in the eyes of our customer?

Rick: That makes all the sense in the world. So then I guess we’re shifting to mindsets and I think of mindset as one of those things that, truly does separate the great from the average. Understanding our mindsets and what’s holding us back could actually be in our own head more than it is in the circumstances of our marketplace organization.

So tell me a bit more around what you see when it comes to mindset and potentially how we can shift.

Zander: As you think about shifting towards a growth strategy, a growth mindset, several of the companies we’ve worked with, without our urging, they’ve already said this is going to be our key unlock. And that’s because as you think about this idea of building a strategy, that’s unlocking more of your organizational capabilities, that’s a big shift in how individual leaders have operated. Most companies, the high performers have often worked as an individual contributor, as an expert in a specific area.

And now what you’re asking them to do is work transversely across the organization? In order to do that, the growth mindset is such a powerful way. You need to learn and reflect on failure and setback and actually celebrate it. We work with one financial service organizations, they freak out at failure because as the bank, you can’t really fail. So we’ve actually carved out when is it okay to fail and when is it not okay to fail? And there’s a big box of things you can’t fail in, but when it comes to how you work with a client or bring solutions together or really challenge and push for a deal that puts you out of your comfort zone, that’s okay to really push the limits. And, and how do you celebrate and learn from that failure?

The other thing is then learning continuously self improvement, good can always be done better. And you know, that really helps leaders become more resilient and more adaptive.

Rick: Moving down this journey from first taking our customers perspective to drive our strategy then making sure that we’ve really got that growth mindset. And then you were talking about shifting ways of working. Again, that’s another easy thing to say, but many times for many individual contributors, what I do becomes my identity. So when you shift my ways of working, it’s not going to be easy for me.

Zander: Yeah, it’s a great point. Let me highlight too that some of these leading organizations are doing. The first one is that the altitude of the individual leader. And the next one is at the altitude of the unit of the team.

The unit of the individual is important because it’s all around trust. How is trust earned versus given? Organizations that really are good at shifting their ways of working, they’ve over invested in building a culture of trust and psychological safety. Because that really helps that individual feel like they’re in a safe space to shift the way that they do things essentially.

It’s also called secure base leadership. It’s something that any leader can do to install within their team for how they work and how they show up and role model that as a leader. And that’s really critical and foundational for any of these changes to happen.

In terms of ways of working at the unit of a team, a couple of the companies we work with take a moment to actually understand how decisions get made in teams. Do we have a culture of escalation where challenges and problems get escalated up or are they made , at the right place at the right time?

Are people empowered to make the right decision? Companies we work with are spending quite a bit of time understanding how the team’s function today. And thinking about the leadership behaviors they’re needing to help them. And that could be just really simple things like, how do we talk straight to each other? How do we seek challenge in the room? It goes back to this idea of a growth mindset, as you work together in teams, how do you surface this ability to celebrate not only the successess but how do you also celebrate those failures of things that didn’t go so well, but we can all learn from them, to progress in the future.

Rick: It makes all the sense in the world. It actually kind of brings us to your next point around capabilities and that whole concept that I, have always thought about as a leader, which is nobody wants to come to work and do a bad job, absolutely. No one wants to be called in and be told that they can’t cut it. And so what do you see these organizations doing when it comes to assessing what’s required to get this job done right now, and how do we make sure that our teams have the capabilities to execute?

Zander: What’s so important in any strategic shift is that the business strategy is linked and interwoven into the people’s strategy and what that means for the talent management and the capabilities that are being developed in the organization.

And if I go back to the examples of some of the companies we work with, this idea of how you move from product selling to solution selling they over index on the tangible things that they can move around in Excel spreadsheets. What often gets missed is you’re trying to make some big strategic shifts.

You want that strategy to look differently than they have in the past and the people get left behind in the process. And what comes out is the company’s done a great job realigning the strategy. But then you’re left with an employee base that have always done things the way they’ve done things in the past.

And the capability hasn’t been built in lockstep. The analogy I always like to use is companies transform. They’re going from a caterpillar that crawls on the ground with a lot of legs to a butterfly that now flies right in the air. It’s a basic analogy, but that shift requires a pretty fundamental change in aerodynamics and requires new muscles that didn’t exist before.

Companies are making the shifts so that the organization can now technically fly, but they left the people behind that they don’t have that muscle developed in the process. So by the time that they really need to get going and ramp up for growth, they’re feeling like they now need to bring in new capabilities or they need to really accelerate the talent management processes.

Rick: Great, and so, point number five, probably the most difficult thing to do. Our comp plan, our reward system isn’t aligned with the way you’re wanting me to work now. So help our audience understand what your best advice is when it comes to aligning incentives with strategy?

Zander: If there’s no change in how things are performance managed and rewarded, we know that there’s not going to be a change in action. What I am not saying is go blow up the entire rewards and performance management process. You’ll have a lot of people leaving the organization if you do that, because they’re used to this.

A lot of people perfecting how they work within their role, to maximize the financial return as part of everything else they contribute to the organization. But if you want to have shifts in the organization to happen, you do need to find ways of rewarding for that.

Change in behavior, change in mindset, change in capability, all those things we’ve been talking about need to somehow be rewarded and recognized. Sometimes that’s just as simple as reallocating some of the resources or adding additional incentives for that new behavior.

But it also means tracking it and putting a measure on it. Even if you don’t incentivize for it, it does need to be measured in a way that is regularly checked in and honestly broadcasted so that people can see and celebrate and understand the progress being made.

What people often forget is the recognition side of it, is one of the most valuable things you can do. And actually recognition is basically free.

Recognition doesn’t cost you anything. And if you’re able to showcase when people have been exhibiting the right mindsets. When they have been working better together as a team. When they’ve been making bigger, bolder ways of going to the market. If they’ve succeeded and, especially if they failed, if you can celebrate that, in a way that’s meaningful and authentic, that’s a huge way of motivating people when they’re going through change.

That is going to bring that growth mindset to life. And it’s going to encourage ways of working that are going to actually look a lot different than they have in the past and do so in a way that’s much more organic for the future.

Rick: Well I really appreciate all of your insights today in helping us think through what’s really required when it comes to setting and implementing a strategy that can actually deliver growth instead of frustration. We’ll have to have you back another time to potentially go deeper with us as implementing strategy is one of those challenges that will just never go away. So I look forward to speaking with you more in the future.

Zander: Rick, thank you so much. It’s a great topic thanks so much for having me.

Rick: Thanks for joining me today. It’s always a pleasure to bring to you our Fearless Thinkers. If you’d like to stay up to date, please subscribe. Bios for our guests and links to relevant content are always listed in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch, please visit us at bts.com. And thanks so much for listening!