Strategic Discipline Blog

We are diving into Harvard Professor Robert Steven Kaplan’s What to Ask the Person in the Mirror: Critical Questions for Becoming a More Effective Leader and Reaching Your Potential.

I share this because Kaplan’s content mirrors (pun intended) the work I engage with my customers through my Scaling Up, and Metronomics Coaching tools, resources, and accountability. Kaplan’s principles apply to any size business, particularly mid-sized companies focusing on growth, efficiency, aligned and harmonious teams, and purposeful outcomes.

An unconscious value of asking questions is to stimulate the creation mode of your brain. If you stay in this mindset, you become more creative and more open to the opportunities in your business and with your people. Questions stimulate your brain, moving it into creation mode, where possibilities exist, you didn’t know existed.

This exercise, Evaluation, and Alignment from Kaplan’s book is possibly the most difficult because it requires courage to question yourself, your leadership, and your direction. If you recall, Leadership Core Behavior – Productive Paranoia from Jim Collins Great by Choice, Collins shares the story of Gordon Moore and Andy Grove (If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would do?) when facing the difficult decision to move away from their legacy memory chips.

Assess Your Business

Let’s begin by asking Kaplan’s questions:

• Is the design of your company still aligned with your vision and priorities?
• If you had to design the enterprise today with a clean sheet of paper, how would you change the people, key tasks, organizational structure, culture, and leadership style?
• Why haven’t you made these changes?
• Have you pushed yourself and your organization to do this clean-sheet-of-paper exercise?

The wrong time to ask these questions is when you’re already struggling. Standardize this process into at least your annual planning.   Better yet it would be a good idea to separate these questions into a leadership team exercise annually separately from annual planning when so much energy, thought, and forward-thinking goes into the strategic and planning process. Schedule an offsite several weeks or months ahead of your yearly planning meeting. Read Great By Choice Third Core Behavior – Productive Paranoia to grasp the critical nature of this exercise.

Drive Alignment

Clarity of vision with key priorities should be the direction you are always driving toward. Effective alignment should always be measured against success in achieving your objectives.

Kaplan recommends coaching as a critical tool in creating alignment, “Top-down coaching helps junior people work to achieve company goals. In addition, when senior people benefit from junior coaches, they have a built-in early warning system that can signal when the business is getting out of alignment.”

Task Force – ASK

Ask a group of potential successors from different functions in your business to work together as a team, filtering through the questions outlined here:

Kaplan recommends a management level below the existing leadership group will have less emotional engagement and be more objective in assessing the situation and calling for specific remedies.

Seeing the Bigger Picture

Study your competitors' moves through this same lens. Key staff should watch competitors’ actions and consider why they’re doing what they’re doing.

• What does that competitive move do to help that company’s state of competitiveness?
• What do you think they see is causing them to make certain moves?
• Are they just dumb, or are they seeing something you are missing?
• What is it likely to mean for threats to your company’s competitive position, in the future?

As CEO you should read the newspaper, online news services, and relevant trade publications. Do you know what’s going on out there?

Current events and trends— even those not immediately relevant to your organization, can influence market dynamics and change your world.

Two True Tests of Leadership

• Test #1 - You are the “architect.” The architect asks the key questions, constantly seeking clues to determine whether the business is in or out of alignment. This is critical to your company’s fortunes.
• Test #2 - Be an effective change agent when your business is out of alignment. Do you have the wisdom, energy, expertise, and courage to make the necessary changes?

Do you have sufficient knowledge and relationships in the organization to develop a persuasive action plan for successfully executing key changes?

This is why coaching, creating a learning environment, and promoting key people who care first about the organization is critical to successfully implementing change.

To create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best, contact Positioning Systems to schedule a free exploratory meeting.

Let’s help you to turn your business into a growth organization!  

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

As the leader of your organization, are you aware of being a role model? How does your behavior match your words? Next blog we explore The Leader as a Role Model, communicating your values and beliefs from What to Ask the Person in the Mirror.

Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact on the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieves a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $500M+) businesses Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG – Communicate What You Believe and Value - What to Ask the Person in the Mirror