Note: Our case studies are presented as an opportunity to learn from the successes and setbacks experienced by other companies. We hope the reader will learn not only from the point of view of a manager considering similar initiatives, but also as an internal resource who may be supporting management as they introduce such initiatives. Since no company or individual is perfect, and we can learn a great deal from the missteps of others, we will openly discuss errors, mistakes, and false starts. For this reason our clients are not identified.
A number of years ago I had a call from the owner and CEO of a mid-size company in a global service industry. He explained that he would like us to help his executive team develop and implement an aggressive growth strategy. He was confident that he had a unique service that was difficult and expensive for competitors to replicate. He therefore had a valuable competitive advantage that he felt he hadn’t yet realized. In his eyes, his management team had not in the past been aggressive or innovative, and all he needed was a strong growth strategy to spur his managers and guide his business to enormous success.
We met and discussed his goals and agreed that the business did indeed have vast untapped potential that could be realized through an appropriate strategy. We mutually agreed to proceed, and the first step in the process was to interview key managers. The purpose of the interviews was to listen to individual managers’ views on both the current situation and the future. We also wanted to introduce managers to our strategic planning process which was a little different to those they may have encountered in the past.
During the early interviews we discovered that our client had twice before taken his management team through an exercise in strategy development and very little had changed as a result. We discussed this with the client and he explained that he had completed these strategy sessions with what he thought was an excellent plan. He expected his managers to “pick up and ball and run with it”, but agreed that very little had happened. We emphasised that strategy implementation is often more difficult than strategy development and that his involvement must continue beyond the completion of the strategy.
However, a second crucial trend emerged from the first round of interviews. There were worrying indicators that many of his key managers had neither the skills nor the potential to manage strategically. Given that these were suspicions based on only one meeting we mentioned our observations to the client but phrased it as “some managers requiring coaching and support”. He agreed and we proceeded to the next step.
As the next step we held a two day retreat for the executive and mid-managers. This was designed to lay out the strategic process and to emphasise that this time there would be a focus on implementation and the continued involvement of the CEO. This session went extremely well. Most of the mid-managers saw a career for themselves in this organization and were excited about the concept of business growth.
It was subsequent to this meeting that the process began in earnest. It was also during this next phase that our earlier suspicions were confirmed.
To put the issue into context let me first outline our approach to strategy. We believe that an effective growth strategy is based on ideas and implementation. A management team can work through the popular “mission, vision, values” process, but the process can only be successful if, by the end, they have ideas about how you’ll do things differently and the skills to follow up and implement the ideas. Too often, management teams work by rote through the process of vision; values etc and believe that’s all that’s required. Unfortunately all too often, the output of such sessions is a reconfirmation that “we’ll continue doing what we’ve done in the past, only we’ll do a better job of it”. For some successful organizations, such “tweaking” of a successful business model is all that’s required. However, for the majority of organizations operating in a rapidly changing world, such an approach rarely leads to success.
Getting back to the case in question, we moved into the first strategy session with the executive team expecting to dutifully work through the “mission, vision, values” exercise, but with no ideas about how to grow the business. At the end of the session we spoke to the client about past strategy sessions, and he confirmed that they were very similar to this one. So we tried again.
Ideas, strategic or otherwise, don’t suddenly arrive at a strategy session. Ideas occur when you are in the shower, walking the dog, or jogging through the woods. The strategy session is simply an opportunity to share and discuss these ideas. So we met with each manager again and described how important new ideas were when we were building a growth strategy.
We asked them to take a couple of weeks to think about the business, talk to their department heads, and prepare to discuss their ideas at the next meeting. Unfortunately, at the next meeting, only one of the executives had ideas; the other three were still talking about doing the same things differently. They appeared to be excellent managers in a maintenance mode, but patently unable to generate ideas. After discussions with the client he decided he wanted to give each executive another opportunity, and asked us to facilitate individual sessions with each of the business units in an attempt to generate ideas that could become part of an aggressive and innovative growth strategy. We could go on with this case, but the learning point is emerging. Instead we’ll fast forward three years in this company. The owner/CEO had become the Chairman and had brought in a new CEO and COO who were both dynamic individuals with lots of ideas and the persistence and tenacity to implement them. Three of the four previous members of the executive had departed either through early retirement or resignation. The company had trebled in size and was still growing. The Chairman had found and implemented the successful growth strategy we had discussed a few years earlier. But he did it with a different executive team.
Learning Summary: The primary learning from this case is that sometimes companies just don’t have the managers they require either to develop a strategy or to implement change. At the time, as someone with a background in Management Development, I believed (or hoped) that, given the appropriate development, these managers would come through. However in this case, as in several other experiences since, I was forced to admit that any amount of coaching, support, and training won’t do it. Some managers simply don’t have the aptitude; or they refuse to accept change, and would always act as an anchor dragging the organization back to the past. I haven’t abandoned my bias towards management development. I try to ensure that a manager has every chance to perform effectively early in the process. But if it doesn’t happen, then there may not be a fit between the manager and the job expectations, and something more drastic may happen. Often the survival of an organization depends on a new strategy and resulting change. If you don’t have the horses, then you won’t win the race.
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