Enabling Great Performance

Encouraging Candour to Boost Team Performance

2012-02-12T09:15:00.003Z

The latest edition of the Harvard Business Review features a column by Keith Ferrazi which laments the lack of effective communication between teams and the price it exacts on performance and outcomes

We've all been there, trapped in pointless meetings where participants are afraid to speak honestly. We twiddle our thumbs through diplomatic powerpoint presentations, waiting for the meeting to end so that the real conversations - which usually happen in private - can begin.

My team interviewed executives at six top banks to gauge their teams' level of candour. We found that the teams that scored the lowest on candour saw the poorest financial returns among those banks during the recent global economics crisis. In contrast, groups that communicated candidly about risk securities, lending practices, and other potential problems were able to preserve shareholder value.Indeed, in our research at more than 50 large companies over the past three years, we identified "observable candour" as the behaviour that best predicts high-performing teams.

True collaboration is impossible when people don't trust one another to speak with candour. It takes work to create a candid environment supported by respectful, open relationships, but it's a challenge every leader should embrace.

The behaviours required to achieve this level of collaboration and candour have been a focus for FranklinCovey's work with teams over the past 20 years. Our Speed of Trust thinking crystalises the value to be gained / lost when such trust is either high or low and also provides strong thinking on the questions to ask individuals at the point of them joining a team so that you create the conditions for high trust interactions.

Within the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, communication is seen a key to truly interdependent relationship, and we develop people's instinct to value the perspectives of others, to listen to understand and to share feedback in a way that balances both courage and consideration.

Finally, FranklinCovey's Helping Clients Succeed thinking recognises the potential for conflict in both colleague and client communication and introduces ways to slow down when 'yellow lights' occur and then to meet 'push pack with enquiry', so that more effective, and collaborative, outcomes can be achieved.

Achieving Your Objectives Through Others

2012-02-10T23:46:00.000Z

Inc.com's target audience is entrepreneurs and business owners, for whom it tries to provide advice, insights, resources and inspiration for running and growing their businesses.

A recent article by Glen Blickenstaff, himself a successful businessman, looked to provide insight into one of the most important topics for organisations of any size - Factors That Define Great Leaders

As small business owners, all of us are leaders. When we dissect the definition of leadership, it becomes clear that it applies equally whether we manage a company with 500 employees o rone where we are the only employee. It can be argued that leadership is an amalgamation of several characteristics or traits...but the bottom line is that leadership can and should stand on its own - the process of influencing an individual or group of individuals to accomplish an objective.

That's pretty straight forward and very significant (and) when we measure our own leadership ability or methods, we should always come back to the simplest definition and ask ourselves; 'Did I influence people to accomplish my objective?". If not, why not.

The desire of leaders to achieve their objectives through others is something most people in business recognise, but the reality of influencing others to adopt new and different behaviours is also something that many leaders we work with find very challenging.

Just this week we addressed the issue with a group of leaders from a number of European countries, drawing on FranklinCovey's work in the area of Organisational Execution. As with the article in Inc.com, we started with the role of a leader to create clarity and engagement around key priorities, but rather than just talking about the 'what' of this, focused on 'how' this can be effectively achieved, while also building trust and engagement.

We then addressed the reality of daily work pressures and urgencies, and how they can deflect even the most well-meaning employee / team member from the bigger picture of contributing to their leader's objective(s). Here again, we were able to provide insights on how to change people's patterns of behaviour and influence the choices they make on a daily & weekly basis. Through these approaches and disciplines, the group learned how a leader can successfully achieve alignment of activity around their most important priorities from the top to the bottom of their organisation.

Lessons from the Best of the Best Companies to Work For

2012-02-08T00:00:00.000Z

For the past 15 years Fortune has conducted an analysis of the '100 Best Companies to Work For' and this years results reveal Google has moved up 3 places to No 1.

The latest edition of the magazine also features an exclusive Q&A with Google's co-founder and CEO, Larry Page, who explains how he built a No 1 workplace - and why it matters

If you're changing the world, you're working on important things. You're excited to get up in the morning. that's the main thing. You want to be working on meaningful, impactful projects, and that's the thing there is really a shortage of in the world. I think at Google we still have that. We've always had that in spades. We have lots of ambition and goals to change the world and make people's lives better, and do it for the right reasons, and I think that makes it a great, great place to work for people.... My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and they feel they're having a meaningful impact and are contributing to society

While Google's size and profile allows it a unique opportunity to attract talent on this basis, the philosophy and approach described by Page - making people feel excited about their contribution - is in fact open to every organisation and every leader. To facilitate this, FranklinCovey's work

provides individuals with a structure and the inspiration to consider their own mission and contribution statements
creates a review process for leaders that enables them to connect team member energies with what is important to the business and
offers Human Resource and Learning & Development communities a repeatable approach to translate the potential of extraordinary / breakthrough performance into a reality for all those who aspire to it

Fisking The Wallet Allocation Rule

2012-02-03T23:59:00.003Z

Wikipedia defines the term 'fisking' as "blogoshpere slang for a point-by-point assessment that highlights perceived disputes in the analysis of a statement, article or essay", and this was the word that came to mind when reading the recent HBR Idea Watch feature Customer Loyalty Isn't Enough - Grow Your Share of Wallet.

The article starts by asserting that "Companies spend a great deal of time and money trying to improve customer loyalty by measuring and managing metrics like satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores. But traditional gauges of loyalty correlate poorly with what matters most: share of wallet" and it uses this as the premise to advocate the Wallet Allocation Rule, which is a method that has been developed by the authors.

In terms of the analysis, what's instantly striking is that

The authors conflate in their first paragraph the ideas of satisfaction and Net Promoter Score, whereas Net Promoter Score itself was established as a concept to elevate customer experience beyond satisfaction, to loyalty or delight.
The claim that 'gauges of loyalty correlate poorly with what matters most; share of wallet' does not reference - or seems to dismiss - the multi year analysis from Bain which demonstrated a specific correlation between high Net Promoter Score and revenue growth

From a behavioural point of view, additional observations are

Share of wallet is in effect a lag measure - something you know you have succeeded at only after the fact. As such, it is not something that you can engage employees to focus on - or influence. Delighting the customer, however, is both a 'lead measure' and also something that you can engage employees to impact.
Share of Wallet asks people to rank brand preference and one wonders how they do this if not by referencing the sum of their experiences in purchasing and interacting with the product or service in question. Measuring this sum of experiences is, in effect, what Net Promoter Score is designed to do.

A final thought on the relative value of Net Promoter Score (and the indication of loyalty / delight it provides through measuring the propensity to recommend) comes from this week's Economist and it's lead article, which comments on Facebook's latest $100billion market valuation - "The commercial possibilities are immense...Facebook is the most powerful platform for social marketing. Few sales pitches are as persuasive as a recommendation from a friend".

Two Contrasting Tales of Trust

2012-01-30T23:57:00.000Z

The business section in this week's Economist magazine begins and ends with two contrasting tales of Trust. At one extreme, the Schumpter column, asserts

Cultural ties matter in business because they lower transactions costs. Tribal loyalty fosters trust. Cultural affinity supercharges communication. Reading a contract is useful - but you also need to be able to read people.

In contrast, its opening article, with the sub heading 'The big business of swindling people who trust you', reports on "affinity fraud", where

The term refers to scams in which the perpetrator uses personal contacts to swindle a specific group, such as church congregation, a rotary club, a professional circle or an ethnic community. Once the scammer gains their trust, the scam spreads like smallpox.

This is a good example of people recognising the Speed of Trust but then applying it to very different ends - one benevolent and one completely self-serving. The work done by FranklinCovey in this area recognises the reality of both and draws the distinction between 'Smart Trust' (as in the tribal loyalty example) and 'Blind Trust' (as in the case of affinity fraud). This distinction also allows us to provide guidelines and development aids for those in business to help ensure they benefit from the former and avoid the latter.

Cultivating Courage

2012-01-23T07:28:00.002Z

One of the words raised most often in association with great leaders is Courage, with some recent examples being

"In uncertain times, employees are prone to looser ethics and mental paralysis. It takes courage to overcome these tendencies and guide the company through rough waters" (Courage in The Workplace, Chief Learning Officer Magazine. Dec 11)
"Ultimately its all about courage. Are your prepared to stick it out" (How I did it - The CEO of Heinz on Powering Growth in Emerging Markets, Harvard Business Review, Oct 11)
"All leaders need courage. It is the lynchpin of effective leadership" (Courage in Leadership, Ivey Business Journal, Dec 11)
"(Lief) Johansson is hardly the only higher-ambition CEO we interviewed who talked about courage. These leaders are taking their organisations on multi year journeys through demanding territory. To navigate the difficult, often unforeseen challenges along the way they need grit, persistence and focus - qualities we believe are best captured by the Finnish word sisu. Nokia's Jorma Ollila, a Finn, refers to sisu as 'guts'". (The Higher Ambition Leader, Harvard Business Review, Sept 11)
"The list of characteristics that comprise great leadership is so long and contradictory, that the aspiring leader is left to ask, 'Where on earth do I start?'. Fortunately, there is a clear starting point. One leadership characteristic - or more accurately virtue - informs and strengthens all others: Courage" (Courage is the Key to Great Leadership, Entrepreneurs Organisation, Oct 11)
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drwon out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition" (Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Address, Jun 05)

If Courage is the 'what', the question then becomes 'how' does one enable this quality in existing and prospective leaders, and in answering this the starting point we often use is the 4 Cores of Credibility from FranklinCovey's work on the Speed of Trust. The definition offered for these 4 Cores (Integrity, Intent, Capabilities and Results), in addition to the support tools and assessments that accompany them, allow those in leadership positions (and those responsible for developing those in leadership positions) to consider how these characteristics feature in recruitment, development, reward and promotion situations and how, when present, they create the inner strength which allows people to do the right thing - especially when it's hard to do so.

Dealing With Horrible Bosses

2012-01-22T13:26:00.002Z

Last year Hollywood released a comedy called Horrible Bosses, which in turn encouraged alot of reflection from the Leadership & Organisational development community on the subject.

One such contribution was made by Rosabeth Moss Kanter in the HBR, who rightly commented that in real life horrible bosses are the stuff of tragedy, not comedy. Kanter's column then suggests a number of organisational remedies, but it is one example she quotes that is perhaps the most powerful indication of what individual people can do when faced with such a situation

A manager I'll call Pierre was sent by his company to lead a turnaround, as COO, of a low-performing subsidiary in a developing country. The country CEO was imperialistic and antagonistic. He gave Pierre a basement office with no staff and proceeded to ignore him. Pierre's corporate bosses told him to work it out. After a few days of feeling depressed, Pierre decided to move into the tiny office next to the CEO and find his own assistant from outside the company, someone with no history with or allegiance to the CEO.

Then he forged ahead with relationship-building. He identified the best performers in the unit who he thought would be most independent of the CEO's power. He met with them in small groups and provided abundant data and ideas for growing the business. Soon they were leading their peers in making changes. The horrible boss couldn't control Pierre and couldn't stop the momentum. The boss became impotent in his irrelevance - and was later fired for corruption.

This example brings to mind a FranklinCovey video, Carry Your Own Weather, which includes the story of a carer who also worked for a horrible (or on her words 'miserable') boss. After attending a session with Dr Stephen Covey on Proactivity this lady came up to him and reflected that the ideas he shared made her realise that it was not in fact her boss that was causing her to be miserable - but herself. Her realisation was that she had become dependent on him and given the power she had over herself to him. However, having realised this, she then also understood that she still retained the power to choose her response and this made her feel as if she 'had been let out of prison'.

This realisation - of the power you have to choose your response - is in fact the critical first step to dealing with horrible bosses. After this, the additional thinking FranklinCovey shares on the topic of Personal Proactivity (for example the Stimulus:Response, 4 Human Endowments, Circle of Influence / Circle of Concern and Transition Figure) can help individuals in this situation to develop alternative strategies and in turn get to positive outcomes, like the ones referenced above.

Telling It Like It Is

2012-01-17T16:08:00.001Z

At the end of last year, the Economist had a feature in its International Section on communication within and between cultures, with a special emphasis on euphemisms and a reflection on the balance we strike in making others feel good and making ourselves understood

Short sharp terms make big points clear. But people often prefer to soften their speech with euphemism; a mixture of abstraction, metaphor, slang and understatement that offers protection against the offensive, harsh or blunt.

Euphemisms can be sneaky and coercive - cloaking a decisions unpleasant results - while politically correct euphemisms are among the most pernicious. But euphemisms can also be benign, even necessary - sometimes the need to prevent hurt feelings takes precedence over clarity.

A culture without euphemism would be more honest, but rougher. Here's a New Year's resolution; scrub your conversation of euphemism for a day - the results will startle you.

The idea of effectively communicating with others through what we say and how its interpreted runs through FranklinCovey's work on relationship management and interpersonal effectiveness. Within our Speed of Trust curriculum for example, we emphasise Intent as one of the 4 Cores of Credibility, the perception of which shapes how others then interpret what we say. Communication guidelines also feature in the 13 Behaviours of High Trust Leaders which we encourage, with a key emphasis on what 'counterfeit' behaviours may look like, so we can look out for them in others and be aware of them in ourselves.

Most powerfully, the simple framework we introduce around sharing ideas based on a balance of 'courage' and 'consideration' allows us to effectively strike the balance referred to above - remaining honest while avoiding bluntness or hurt feelings

Critical Skills; Getting The Basics Right Across An Entire Organisation

2012-01-08T19:22:00.002Z

When one considers the basics of education, the "3 R's" (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic) often feature as the core elements at a schooling level. Considering the equivalent of these basics at a corporate level was the subject of a January 2012 CLO article 'The Real Education Gap', and it referenced research by the American Management Association (AMA) on this very topic

The 2010 AMA Critical Skills Survey showed that overwhelming majorities of executives had begun to emphasise a new set of skills that was neither intuitive for most people nor taught in schools. These were dubbed the "4 C's" and consist of
Critical thinking and problem solving; the ability to make decisions, solve actions and take actions as appropriate
Effective communication; the ability to synthesise and transmit ideas in written and oral forms
Collaboration and team building; the ability to work effectively with others, including those from diverse groups and with opposing points of view
Creativity and innovation; the ability to see what's not there and make something happen
The survey (also) revealed that employers are finding the workforce does not possess this mix of skills (between 1/2 and 2/3 of employees were assessed as 'below average' or only 'average' in each of the 4 areas), and as a result cannot do the jobs an increasingly competitive and innovation-based global business environment demands.

The survey found employers have begun assessing workers in the 4 critical skills with regard to leadership development/potential, talent management and succession planning. But below management level, those employees who don't develop the 4 C's will find themselves left behind, as will companies that don't make acquiring them a priority

In terms of FranklinCovey's experience, two things are striking in this analysis. The first is how much alignment exists between these 4 areas and the mindsets, skillsets and toolsets we introduce in our work with clients, for example

Critical thinking & problem solving - avoiding 'reactive' responses, moving away from immediate solutions to mutually explore situations with stakeholders, developing a structured approach for considering issues and desired outcomes and dealing maturely with potential constraining factors
Effective communications - listening to understand rather than respond, sharing perspectives with the appropriate balance of 'courage' and consideration, dealing effectively with difficult conversations and communicating in a way that distils a complex situation into a simple message that can be broadly communicated and understood
Collaboration and team building - ensuring an abundance' rather than a 'scarcity' mentality and developing 'self trust' and 'relationship trust' as the building blocks for effective synergy and team outcomes that have the potential to be transformative rather than merely transactional
Creativity and innovation - ensuring an organisational focus on what is most important, helping people to value and leverage diverse perspectives and utilising a '3rd alternative' process to enable breakthrough thinking

The second thing that is striking is the emphasis placed by the report on development support in these areas reaching not just the top 10-15% of leadership or high potential populations but the majority of the workforce. It is in this space that FranklinCovey also has a special capability, with a range of large scale (and international) delivery methods which we combine with concepts, tools and language that 'codify' higher level concepts and make them accessible to audiences at all levels.

Forecasting (and Getting Real About) Changes in Learning Delivery

2012-01-04T12:21:00.000Z

Chief Learning Officer (CLO) Magazine features a special report on Learning Delivery in its January (2012) edition, which starts with a headline of 'Back to class - New learning methods have their place but classroom learning is still king' and which concludes with the paragraph

As potentially disruptive technologies, self-paced e-learning and online learning may represent cost savings and convenience, but they do not meet all needs. For the majority of employee training at all skill and leadership levels, classroom based ILT, formal OTJ training and coaching / mentoring are still preferred due to the interactions available between instructors and students.

The continued interest in traditional learning delivery methods is evidence that technology falls short when it comes to human interaction. Emerging technologies have the potential to provide new value and maybe even replace traditional methods, but replacing the personal touch is one revolution that may still be years in the making

What we would agree doesn't seem to be in question is the importance that human interaction (and the sharing of experiences) can play in learning. What does seem strange about these conclusions, however, is that they don't necessarily bear out CLO's own research (conducted by the Human Capital Media Advisory Group in 2011) which in response to the question "How do you see the use of these learning delivery methods changing in the next 12-18 months?" reported

Classroom based ILT - Substantial / Partial Decrease @ 44% vs Partial / Substantial Increase @ 8%
Self-paced e-learning - Substantial / Partial Decrease @ 5% vs Partial / Substantial Increase @ 49%
Virtual classroom - Substantial / Partial Decrease @ 2% vs Partial / Substantial Increase @ 39%

These results in fact show a clearer picture of what we are experiencing, particularly with larger organisations where talent and leadership groups are being consolidated across regions in order to develop more international mindsets and skillsets. The reality in this environment is that the opportunities for flying people 100s or 1000s of miles to central locations on a regular basis to experience this learning together are extremely limited and so the requirement is to create online learning experiences (VILT & Self-paced) which offer as much richness and interaction as possible.

This thinking is at the heart of FranklinCovey's work to develop our virtual Liveclicks classrooms, which rely not just on state of the art technology but also the art of specialist facilitation to encourage effective interaction with a virtual audience, many of whom may not share the same first language. In addition, our Insights & Excelerators on demand formats look to make available the richness of FranklinCovey content in a convenient way that is accessible by employees at all levels in a cost effective and non-disruptive way.

Looking at the data presented by HCMAG, and combining this with our own experience, the conclusion we would recommend for this special report is that, while classroom / traditional learning still plays an important role, encouraging the mindset that they 'are still king' could mean that some human resources and talent development functions remain in their comfort zone and miss out on the opportunities provided by new online methods.

Businessperson Of The Year

2011-12-23T22:06:00.001Z

In its December issue, Fortune magazine named Howard Schultz as its Businessperson Of the Year 2011, after returning 3 years ago to 'save' Starbucks and having just announced the best financials ever, more stores than ever and rapid expansion abroad. (In response, Starbucks' stock price reached an all-time high in early November, up more than five times from its 10-year low in 2008).

What's particularly interesting is the 'business benevolence' that Fortune describes as a characteristic of Schultz's and Starbucks' success;

When Schultz returned as CEO, he refused calls from institutional investors to reduce health care coverage. That would have been anathema to the corporate 'ethos' Schultz says, and it would ultimately have been "self-destructive" in "sapping the reservoir of trust" that employees had. For Schultz though, doing the right thing for its own sake - which these days costs a quarter of a billion dollars annually in health insurance premiums - wasn't inconsistent with the corporate mission of turning a profit.

At a recent Nasdaq Q&A, Schultz was challenged about his expansive view of 'corporate social responsibility'. Schultz was having none of it. "Companies should not have a singular view of profitability", he replied, with the conviction of a preacher, rather than the caution of a CEO. "There needs to be a balance between commerce and social responsibility...The companies that are authentic about it will wind up as the companies that make more money

This culmination of Organisational and Social Trust / Authenticity, and its potential to deliver enhanced commercial returns sits at the heart of FranklinCovey's work on the Speed of Trust, and while Schultz is a strong role model of this mindset at a CEO level, he also provides a good example for those at all levels of an organisation as to how they can contribute to these accelerated returns and in doing so establish themselves as leaders of the future.

The Speed of Trust's '5 Waves of Trust' provides a key insight to this, because it suggests that waves 4 and 5 (Market and Social Trust) are built from the inside out, starting with wave 1, Self Trust / Trustworthiness. In developing Trust at this initial level we introduce '4 Cores of Credibility', the first of which is Integrity, and the definition of which

to live in harmony with your deepest values
to stand firmly for principles especially in the face of opposition
to do the right thing - especially when it's hard to do

resonates strongly with the characteristics displayed by Howard Schultz in the example above.

In our experience, organisations which hire, develop, review and reward people with these '4 Cores of Credibility' as key considerations create a deep foundation on which can be built sustainable Market and Social Trust, and from which are likely to emerge more Businesspeople Of The Year.

Solving the Engagement-Performance Equation

2011-12-21T09:03:00.002Z

The key issues of employee engagement and performance management often go hand in hand, with the goal being to create alignment between the needs, desires, skills and activities of individuals and what the business requires to achieve results.

Many companies, however, find it difficult to discern what managers and employees need to do to achieve this balance, and this was the context in which Aberdeen Group conducted a study earlier this year among 438 organisations to examine the strategies, tools and processes they used to improve engagement and performance and to understand which are the most effective. Key findings were

(We) used the following three performance criteria to distinguish Best-in-Class companies

71% of employees rated 'exceeds expectations' on their most recent performance review.
62% of employees rated themselves 'highly engaged' in most recent engagement survey
11% year over year improvement in employee retention

Based on these findings, the firms enjoying Best-in-Class performance shared several common characteristics, including

Senior Leaders that establish a culture of alignment and ongoing communication
Tools and practices that provide visibility and transparency into individual and organisational goals and progress
Full accountability among individuals and managers for business results

Having identified these common characteristics, what becomes important then is how organisations can replicate and scale them, and what's striking about each of the elements listed above is that they parallel almost directly with the 4 Disciplines of Execution process that FranklinCovey has developed in that it also creates the conditions for

Clear line of sight / alignment
Defined goals that are easy to communicate, understand and translate
Scoreboarding that is highly visible / transparent and links lead and lag indicators
A weekly accountability process where team members commit to each other as well as their managers

What's also apparent from the studies we have done in this area (which includes inputs from >150,000 respondents in > 10,000 workgroups) is that when we the performance measures of 'Clarity', 'Translation' and 'Accountability' improve (often through applying the 4 Disciplines approach) the engagement measure of 'Commitment' does also.

Leveraging Lean and Sustaining Six Sigma

2011-12-18T09:15:00.001Z

Lean Six Sigma is a synergised managerial concept conceived by Michael George nearly 10 years ago to combine Lean's waste elimination projects (which originated at Toyota) and the Six Sigma projects based on the critical to quality characteristics (which originated at Motorola).

FranklinCovey's latest experience of this comes from a current UK client interaction where the lead built his experience of Lean Six Sigma from his time at Toyota and Ford.

The key insight he shared is that many people (mistakenly) think that the primary goal of Toyota when they pioneered Lean thinking was to improve performance (increase quality / reduce cost) whereas the actual goal was to improve the culture, a side effect of which would be increased levels of productivity.

An example he gives for this is Quality Circles and how Toyota approach these as opportunities for team member development, rather than specifically to increase quality or decrease cost. Their approach is to develop and engage the capabilities and energies of the 'whole person', which they believe enables good judgement, which in turn creates the conditions for greater empowerment and allows better decisions to be made at lower levels of the organisation. This, they believe, is the key to creating a sustainable Lean Six Sigma culture.

The connection he then makes with FranklinCovey, is that the mindsets, skillsets and toolsets we develop (drawing from material such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Principle Centred Leadership, The Speed of Trust, Helping Clients Succeed and The 4 Disciplines of Execution) are a perfect fit for the qualities of Self Mastery, Relationship Mastery and Leadership Mastery required to sustain and maximise the returns from Lean Six Sigma through the talent and engagement of those working at all levels of an organisation.

Saying No To Great Ideas

2011-12-08T09:09:00.001Z

When it comes to assessing which is the most innovative company in the world, many lists (including Fast Company and BusinessWeek) have Apple as the Number 1.

While the spotlight has been on Apple for the past 3-4 years in particular, this has been heightened by the untimely death of Steve Jobs and the questions raised as to whether Apple can continue in the same way without him.

Much of this focus will be on the new Chief Executive, Tim Cook, and in trying to assess what distinguishes Apple's approach from that of other organisations, he offered this analysis at a recent conference

We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. The table each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple make, yet Apple's revenue last year was $40 billion

This follows the core principle within the 4 Disciplines of Execution process that FranklinCovey has been applying and refining within client organisations for nearly 10 years, namely that "there will always be more good ideas than you have the capacity to execute".

The challenge (and the opportunity - as highlighted by Apple) is to provide a structured process which helps an organisation systematically focus on its key 'battles' or 'wildly important goals' and then engage the focus and energies of people right down to the front line on this narrow list so they can contribute to the kind of extraordinary outcomes that Apple has enjoyed. In essence, this is exactly what the 4 Disciplines process has been designed to do, in a way that is scalable within organisations of 200, 2000 or 20000.

Meeting the Productivity Challenge of The 21st Century

2011-12-04T23:42:00.001Z

Business Week called Peter Drucker 'The Man Who Invented Management', and on the topic of Productivity he said this

The most important and indeed truly unique contribution of management in the 20th Century was the fifty fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker age.

In meeting this challenge, one comes face to face with the productivity paradox - namely, that in today's world, it's both easier and harder to achieve extraordinary productivity. Research tells us that over the past 50 years, the productivity difference between the top 1% of a workforce and the bottom 1% has grown from 3x as much to 12x as much to now, potentially ∞, which suggests that this top 1% each of the opportunity to make an extraordinary or breakthrough contribution that could be transformative for their business.

A question then to pose is, if 1% are currently in the position to make this breakthrough contribution, how many others throughout an organisation could also be? Perhaps not the remaining 99%, or even 50%, but (allowing for good recruitment and development systems) what if it is 10-20%, and what if it was possible to tune just 10% of this 10-20% in to their potential and help them plan to make this happen. The upshot for any organisation is that rather than 1% making breakthrough contributions, 2-3% could be, and if you double or triple the number of breakthrough contributions being made, it could be transformative for the business.

In terms of where to start, Peter Drucker also provided a clue when (referring to the knowledge worker age) he said

For the first time, substantial and rapid growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time people have to manage themselves and we are totally unprepared for it.

FranklinCovey's latest work in this area has been distilled into 5Choices that enable extraordinary productivity, and as well as creating an awareness in people as to what these choices are, the approach we take of combining 'principles' or 'truths' of effectiveness with a learning and personal change process that is modern and engaging and which people feel they can realistically follow is what seems to provoking the greatest excitement.

The Simple Truth

2011-11-30T07:41:00.001Z

Andy Flower, the England Cricket Coach was interviewed on the Radio this morning and asked about the goal he and his team set to move from No 6 in the world to No 1 and how they achieved this in (what most observers felt) was an impossibly short time frame.

At the conclusion of the interview, Flower was asked for the one piece of advice he would give to leaders of any sport or business organisation who were looking to enable change / achieve stretch goals. His response was "the search for simplicity and the answers in simplicity".

This in itself seemed to be a simple, yet profound, insight and reflected the famous observation by Oliver Wendell Holmes that "I wouldn't give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity". It also reflects the approach FranklinCovey takes in helping leaders, team members and individuals in organisations to deal with issues such as building Trust, enabling Execution, stimulating Innovation, growing Client Relationships or achieving Improved / Breakthrough Productivity.

Essentially what FranklinCovey does (and has been doing for the past 25 years) is to work with individuals and organisations who are looking to get new and different results and who recognise the need to develop new ways of thinking and new ways of working in order to achieve these results. Our experience and capability is then to 'codify' these new ways of thinking and working in simple / structured terms so that they can be made accessible to the majority and the overall performance level improves while the variation between high, medium and low performance narrows.

Addressing The Failure of Leadership

2011-10-30T16:41:00.001Z

A previouspost referred to a survey of employees by Korn/Ferry Whitehead Mann which found that most British leaders do not exhibit the key skills of good communication, integrity and the ability to motivate, and which was reported in the press as 'Failure of Leadership among UK Bosses'.

While these results reflect a country specific sample, the issues they describe reflect an international reality, and in the 2011 Human Capital Institute's Employee Engagement Conference in Chicago, Stan Slap (author of Bury My Heart at Conference Room B) suggested that a key ingredient in addressing this failure of leadership is - selfishness. Talent Management magazine reported it thus

"As a manager your most important responsibility is to the company. In leadership, it's responsibility to yourself", said Slap. "You will never really work for your company until your company works for you". Leadership at its heart is a selfish activity even though leaders appear to do selfless things, Slap said. Leaders want to know where their values can be fully realised, and are most effective when they turn those values into a cause that engages and motivates others to follow them. Leadership skills are far less important than the emotional commitment that comes from following an inspired leader. Failure to encourage leaders to follow their values compromises their integrity and decreases their own emotional commitment as well as that of their people. The result is decreased shareholder value. "To not live your deepest personal values is a crime. What's worse, it's an unnecessary crime", Slap said.

This focus on helping leaders develop an awareness of their own values and then using them as a 'compass' by which they lead themselves - and others - has been at the heart of FranklinCovey's work for over 20 years, and the tools and structure we provide are drawn from a variety of the frameworks we have developed, including the 4 Cores of Credibility, the 4 Imperatives of Great Leaders, the 5 Choices to Extraordinary Productivity and the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In fact, whatever the format they encounter this thinking through, we've seen 1000s and 10,000s of people leave these interactions profoundly impacted, perhaps reflecting the final observation that Talent Management cites from Stan Slap - "This is your one and only precious life. Somebody is going to decide how it's going to be lived. That person better be you".

Improving Employee Retention & Well-being

2011-10-24T08:49:00.000+01:00

Kenexa's WorkTrends survey gathers input from more than 31,000 workers in 28 countries, and a recent summary report, entitled Trust Matters, highlighted connections between the trust employees feel in their leaders and increased levels of productivity through higher retention of key talent and improved employee well-being.

The WorkTrends 2011 survey indicates that trust in leadership is important in retaining employees, with those who distrust their leaders about 9 times more likely to seriously consider leaving their organisation.

The WorkTrends research also shows that trust in leadership may be important to employee well being, as employees who distrust their leaders are 7 times more likely to report they are mentally and physically unwell and the odds an employee who distrusts leadership will report unreasonable work stress are 15 times higher than the odds for an employee who trusts leadership.

In terms of providing insights as to how leaders can best create higher levels of trust, Kenexa's findings reflect almost exactly FranklinCovey's experience and approach.

According to organisational scientists, what makes us trust or distrust people is largely a combination of
Competence (Can they do the job?)
Benevolence (Do they care about me?)
Integrity (Are they honest)
and to maximise the trust they receive from their employees, leaders should demonstrate all 3 qualities. However, some of these qualities are more important that others to employees' trust in leadership - integrity is the most important at 41%, followed by benevolence at 34% and then competence at 25%

The 3 characteristics described here map almost exactly to the '4 Cores of Credibility' - Intent, Integrity, Capabilities & Results - which FranklinCovey focuses on when developing Authentic, Trustworthy leaders, and we likewise encourage an 'overemphasis' on Intent and Integrity as the foundation (or the 'root system') of those able to develop and extend trust and in turn reap the productivity gains it enables.

Execution - Multi Unit vs Multi Divisional Organisations

2011-10-20T10:11:00.000+01:00

In their HBR article on The Multiunit Enterprise, David Garvin and Lynne Levesque reflect the following realities of the Multiunit organisation

Multiunit enterprises have become the norm in several industries, such as apparel, banking services, consumer electronics, food, general merchandise, hospitality, mail & package delivery and toys and sporting goods. Many of them are large organisations, with with international footprints (and) by our count they include 10 of the 25 largest employers in the world.

(Yet) despite its prevalence, the multiunit enterprise has received little attention from academics and consultants over the years. Instead, they have associated the operation and management of large corporations with the multidivisional organisational structure.

Garvin and Levesque then reference their research which involved interviews and data collection from 12 large multi unit organisations, including Staples, Borders, CVS, Sovereign bank, Starbucks and Victorias Secret and which identified the challenges faced in a the multiunit environment, the first of which is that

Multiunit enterprises find it hard to maintain consistency, because they are agglomerations of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of branches, service centres, hotels, restaurants or stores. To create one company out of so many units, managers must pay a great deal of attention to implementation. They must focus continually on aligning priorities, plans and practices across a highly dispersed field organisation. Since these companies promise customers the same brand experience everywhere, employees must adopt common operating practices, serve customers in similar ways and present a uniform image. While flawless execution is the goal, it's difficult to achieve. That's partly because it isn't easy to design the communication, control and deployment processes necessary to deliver consistently high levels of service.

FranklinCovey's work also recognsies the challenge of 'flawless execution' within multiunit organisations, and developing a process that can support them in the communication, control and deployment of company wide priorities has been a key focus for our Execution practive in recent years. This short video provides an introduction to the approach we take.

Maximising Customer Loyalty Through The Sales Experience

2011-10-11T09:58:00.000+01:00

The HBR Insight Centre recently published a 4 part series on Growing the Top Line, and in one of the posts which focused on sales, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson referenced a survey of more than 5000 business customers, in which they found that of all the possible factors that could drive customer loyalty - including brand, product / service quality and price-to-value ratio - by far the biggest driver is the sales experience, accounting for 53% of the overall total.

Dixon and Adamson then reflect on what the key components of a good sales experience are, and start by focusing on 'the one question that is probably asked by more people in a given day than any other' - "What's keeping you up at night?"

While it seems innocuous - maybe even the right thing to ask a customer - its a question that simultaneously prevents sales while also destroying customer loyalty. To understand what makes this question so destructive, we need to first understand where it comes from. For year, most sales training has focused on a single core principle; the shortest path to sales success is a deep understanding of your customers' needs. If we can understand what's keeping customers up at night, we can build tight linkages between their problems and our solutions, thereby improving our chances of selling something.

As a result, companies have poured money into teaching their reps to ask better questions. But while it sounds great on paper, this approach suffers from two major problems. First, improving reps' ability to diagnose needs on the fly proves colossally difficult - especially among average performers. Second, and more to the point, this approach is based on a deeply flawed assumption; customers actually know what they need in the first place.

But what if they don't know what they need? What if a customers' greatest single need, ironically, is to figure out exactly what they need. If this were true, the better sales technique might be to tell customers what they need.

In our experience, it can certainly be true that a customer may not in fact have a full view of what their needs are, which does make it sub-optimal to simply 'accept' what they say. However, while there may be value for a sales professional to share insights they have gathered (or which reflect core competencies of the organisation they represent) in the course of a customer conversation, we would also suggest that the approach of 'telling' customers what they need is also sub-optimal.

The 3rd alternative we encourage is one of 'mutual exploration', where by a sales professional learns to facilitate a client conversation in a structured way, such that they illicit what a customer knows 'top of mind', what a customer knows / feels 'subconsciously' and what details may be 'unknown' to the customer. This then creates the opportunity to engage more widely with those who would be able to input on these 'unknown' details, thus creating a broader understanding of the needs while at the same time building a sense of partnership with the customer, as a result of which they are open to a wider and deeper solution recommendations that can exactly meet their needs.

Effective Execution - From the 'Classroom' to the 'Workplace'

2011-10-10T10:09:00.000+01:00

In the past, when we have asked senior leaders of their experience in studying 'Strategy' as part of their business education, the vast majority indicate this has been a focus for them. However, when we have then asked about the number who have studied 'Execution', the number has been much reduced. (In one session, only 5-6 people in a room of 80-90 EMEA leaders raised their hands in response to this question).

The opportunity to study Strategy Execution at business school is developing, and 3 of the top 5 global schools identified by the Financial Times now advertise the following offerings

INSEAD's new Strategy Execution Programme provides the insights and tools to bridge the gap between the rational development of strategy and real-life execution. It helps to identify hidden traps, balance the rational with the emotional and build the internal capability to continue implementing strategy successfully
Wharton's Making Strategy Work gives you a broad view of implementation and a thorough understanding of each piece of the implementation process so you can make more informed decisions on efficiency and effectiveness. You will learn how to properly align corporate structure with corporate strategies and how to integrate strategy formulation and implementation
London Business School's Executing Strategy for Results is a hands on programme, which provides managers with practical frameworks for successfully executing strategy in today's ever changing world. Over five intensive days, you will learn the latest tools and knowledge to effectively execute strategy against a backdrop of market changeability

All of these offerings (as you would expect from the institutions offering them) look strong, but each seems designed to take one or two leaders from a business, teach them a series of 'tools', 'frameworks' and 'knowledge' and then rely on them to translate these ideas from the classroom to the workplace.

By contrast, FranklinCovey's approach to this issue of Strategy Execution - which has been a focus of ours for nearly 10 years - is to engage primarily in the workplace with intact groups of leaders, to provide them with 4 principles (or'Disciplines') of Execution and then to start the work with them (ie 'in the moment') as to how these 4 Disciplines would apply to their Strategy and their Goals. We then extend this practical approach by 'accrediting'each manager to facilitate these discussions in turn with their teams (which involves a step by step process they can follow and a combination of online and coaching supports), so they can feel confident about translating / scaling this execution capability down through the organisation to the frontline.

Influencing Change With Effective Habits

2011-10-08T14:12:00.002+01:00

Christine Wijma (from the Open University of Netherlands) published amaster thesis last year on the topic of "A Study of the Influence of the 7Habits in Middle Managers with regard to Change on a Departmental and OrganisationalLevel", which examinedthe influence of the FranklinCovey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Peopleon change at the middle manager level.

Tonarrow the research field it was decided to focus on one organisation, namelyAtos Origin (one of Europe’s largest providers of IT services, which operatesin 42 countries with over 78,000 employees) and its Manager Operationsdivision. The research group consisted of all middlemanagers within Atos Manager Operations. Of the 290 managers, 138completed a 3-part survey online that asked them to self-report about theirrole in the company and about their knowledge of, and use of, the 7 Habitsas they affected organisational and departmental change. The literaturereview covered studies on the personal characteristics of leadership,leadership styles, successful change, and the 7 Habits.

Analysisof the quantitative data showed that the central research question ("Towhat degree can it be shown that change took effect as a result of the 7Habits?") was answered in the affirmative, with 19.1% of the variancein change being explained by the 7 Habits.

In itsconclusions, the thesis asks 'Is this enough', and on this question theinstinctive response would be 'yes', for two reasons

“Change” is a complex concept, involving such sub-categories as adoption or actual use of the new change; value of or the advantage of change to people; commitment or devotion to the organisation or department; resistance to change; and efficiency, that is, making the proposed change on schedule. In such a complex environment, with so many influencing variables, any one such variable which in and of itself accounts for 1/5th of the variance in change is highly significant
As part of our work on effective execution, we regularly encourage teams, leaders and organisations to identify two or three key bets which could have the potential to deliver 80% of the impact they are looking for. This again puts the research findings into context and positions the 7 Habits as one of the elements that is capable of producing 20-30% of the change variance, which would in turn position it well to be a candidate 'key bet'.

Creating Higher Ambition Leaders

2011-09-30T06:35:00.003+01:00

The author team for the book Higher Ambition; How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value is impressive in that it includes Michael Beer (Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School), Flemming Norrgren (Professor of Management at Chalmers University in Gothenburg) and Nathaniel Foote (who in 19 years at McKinsey served as leader of the Organisation Design practice, Director of Knowledge and Practice Development, and leader of the European Organisation practice).

The ambition that the book has for itself is also a high one in that it aspires "to become a management classic in the tradition of In Search of Excellence and Built to Last" and as well as identifying and grouping the characteristics of 36 High Ambition CEOs from a variety of countries and industries, it also looks to unlock the secret of educating and developing High Ambition Leaders of the future

Recently (we) interviewed dozens of higher ambition CEOs all of whom taught us a valuable lesson: integrity is at the heart of great leadership.With all too few exceptions, this is not what is taught at business schools. Most business schools do not teach students how to design strategies or policies that are grounded in their personal values or how to test solutions against those beliefs. What's needed is a coherent, integrated approach for developing future leaders. If we continue to teach and study in silos, with ethics over here and finance over there, then students - understandably - will perpetuate this siloed view of the world within the companies they go on to lead.

We need to encourage higher-ambition leaders to help reshape business education. A great example is Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic who has refocused leadership development at HBS on student self-reflection and clarification of personal values. His groundbreaking course encourages students to examine the crucible moments in their lives and then explore the implications of the problems they will face. If schools encouraged this type of reflection along with ideas about how to build higher-ambition institutions, they would help students integrate their personal values with policies and practices that will govern the enterprises they will someday lead.

This focus on character, integrity and values is not new to FranklinCovey. It's been at the heart of our best selling books The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Principle Centred Leadership for over 20 years, and this thinking also acts as the foundation for the '4 Cores of Credibility' in our recent work on the Speed of Trust. While we recognise that Competence (defined by 'Capability' and 'Results') is a necessary part of business success and credibility, the '4 Cores' give equal - if not increased - weighting to Character (defined by 'Intent' and 'Integrity') and provides practical insights for how this can be developed at both the individual, and the organisational, level.

"Don'ts" and "Do's" of Persuasion

2011-09-29T21:52:00.000+01:00

The Harvard Business Review recently sent through a 'Tip of the Day' entitled 3 Don'ts of Persuasion, the overview of which was

In today's business environment, it's not enough to tell employees to do something. You need to also explain why they should. This is why people who've mastered the art of persuasion rise to the top of the ranks. When trying to influence others, avoid 3 of the most common mistakes
The hard sell: Being insistant and exuberant at the outset gives potential opponents something to grab onto. Use finesse instead of brawn
Resisting compromise: Compromise does not equal surrender. Listen to others and when possible, integrate their ideas into the solution.
Assuming you have one chance: Persuasion is a process, not a one time event. Get results over time by listening, proposing a position, testing it and then refining it

Using these ideas as a starting point, the work FranklinCovey does in this area would reflect 3 '"Do's of Persuasion", some of which build on, but some of which run counter to, what is described above

Influence from the point of understanding - Rather than 'finesse' (or brawn), the key ingredient we recommend for influencing others is doing so from the foundation of understanding their perspective. For many people we work with this can be one of the hardest instincts and skills for them to develop, but when done well, it allows you to then position your ideas / suggestions / recommendations in the context of what is real and important to the other person, thus increasing greatly the chances of influencing them to your point of view.
Aim for 'beyond compromise' - having taken the time to understand the other person's perspective, it can (if you are open to it) provide an additional input to your own thinking which may allow you to come up with a proposal which is not their way, nor your way but a 3rd alternative. If people come to recognise this capability in you (ie that you enter a situation in a more open minded way, genuinely looking for a solution that is a win for all involved), your reputation will build and they will be more open to being influenced by what you say.
Be aware of how others view their relationship with you both over time and at the point in time when you are trying to influence - if we are to consistently achieve good results over time with others, we must realise that we are constantly making 'deposits' and 'withdrawals' in our relationships. At a point in time when we are trying to influence another to our perspective, the way they feel about the 'balance' of those deposits and withdrawals will have a real impact on how they interact with us.

Bridging The Leadership Gap

2011-09-25T23:07:00.000+01:00

Executive Recuiters Korn / Ferry Whitehead Mann recently conducted a survey of over 1,000 UK employees, the results of which indicate that the majority of leaders in the UK do not exhibit the key skills of good communication, integrity and the ability to motivate. As a Financial Times article on the report summarised

Being a good communicator was the quality most commonly associated with an effective leader among the survey sample, but just 21% felt their boss had this skill. A mere 13% felt that their boss was a good motivator, although this was seen as the second most important attribute for effective management. Only 14% of those aked felt that their company had integrity and 9% felt their boss was inspirational.

There's no indication of whether the researchers attribute these issues specifically to this current genertion, or whether they see them as perennial shortcomings at leadership levels. What's interesting, however, is that at the same time as this report releases these findings, FranklinCovey in the UK has noticed an increase in number of requests for leadership development programmes, with population sizes ranging from 60-70, to over 1,000. Often the capabilities identified by different organisations highlight different areas of priority ('motivation', 'inspiration', 'integrity') but most (if not all) come from a common core of character based mindsets and behaviours that FranklinCovey has been studying for over 20 years.

Our capabilityis to then ‘codify’ these new ways of thinking and new ways of working so thatthey can be made accessable to the majority, such that the overall performancecurve of the organisation moves‘righter and tighter’ (ie the overall level of performance increases whilethere is less variation between high and medium level performers).

Getting the Best From Virtual Instructor Led Training

2011-09-24T18:07:00.001+01:00

General Physics and Training Industry.com recently published the results of a study from over 100 learning professionals in a range of industries, which explored current perceptions and realities of providing Virtual Instructor Led Training (VILT) within their business. By way of overview, their report summarised that

VILT is growing quickly in popularity and use, with the vast majority of respondents increasing their usage levels, and 33% increasing their number of VILT courses by over 25%. However, 80% of respondents who use VILT did not think their companies were "very effective" at it. Their top two reasons are (i) Difficulty engaging learners (ii) not fully using VILT tool functionalities

This instinct to enagage increasing number of learners through virtial formats parallels FranklinCovey's experience, where more and more clients are looking to feature this as part of their solution mix, especially for dispersed and international groups. This has meant, in turn, a big focus - and a lot of learning - for us about what combination of technology, engagement tools and facilitator style can deliver the best participant experience, and we are now at a point where we can confidently offer FranklinCovey's Liveclicks modules in a way that engages learners to a very high level, with elements which include dedicated phone lines for highly interactive discussion, streaming video, file download capablity, chat pod & polling pod facilities, shared screen options, fully integrated break out rooms and electronic participant toolkits with writable notes sections.

As an example of the engagement levels this approach can achieve, we recently received a summary of participant feedback from a cohort of emerging leaders who attended 3 FranklinCovey VILT sessions as part of a bepsoke programme of development, which described that

Overall the FranklinCovey sessions went extremely well, and our programme participants found them beneficial for their learning and training. Two thirds of the group rated the FranklinCovey sessions "excellent" (a further 27% said they were "very good") and 100% agreed that the knowledge and skills learned during these courses would enhance their ability to lead others. They were highly impressed with the material, but even more impressed with the instrutor and his ability to work through the group while engaging the participants.

High Stake Decision Making

2011-08-08T21:09:00.006+01:00

Amy Gallo, who is a contributing Editor at the Harvard Business Review, recently posted on How to Make High-Stakes Decisions, in which she referenced some of the thinking of Sydney Finkelstein (the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and co-author of Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions) and Michael Roberto (the Trustee Professor of Management at Bryant University, and author of the classic HBR article What You Don't Know About Making Decisions).

The key advice from this blog distilled down to 2 key elements (i) Involve others, but own the outcome (ii) Trust - but challenge - your gut reaction (including, Be wary of past experiences & Recognise your bias)

On element (i)

Big decisions shouldn't happen in a vacuum. "You have to have a team. You can't rely on yourself" says Finkelstein. By consulting others, you expose yourself to differing opinions, which will help you make a more informed choice, and give you a better shot at winning buy-in from those who will be affected. At the same time, beware of the risks. "If you have a lot of people involved, almost always a small subset take control and make the decision", which can make the larger group's contribution negligible, Finkelstein says. Also, while important issues, such as changing the strategic direction of the group or hiring a new manager, typically require input from many sources, at the end of the day, one person needs to be accountable. Ultimately, "the leader has to decide", he explains. "I'm not a great fan of consensus".

On element (ii)

Many people make big decisions by relating the current challenge to what they've done in the past. It can serve you well to make these connections, but there are drawbacks as well. Finkelstein says people tend to rely on their past experiences even when they're not relevant. Roberto concurs. "The problem is that when we reason by analogy, we focus on all the similarities, and we often ignore the differences between related situations. And the differences often are where the problems are, where the challenges are". Bring in previous incidents (including 'first instincts' you may have) as a source of data, but question how pertinent and useful they truly are.

There are clear parallels between the 2 key elements highlighted here and the work FranklinCovey does with leaders to enable better decision making. For instance, in terms of involving others (while still owning the outcome), the Synergy process we work with encourages leaders to value diverse inputs and overcome group characteristics which lead to strong individuals asserting their perspective over others. It also highlights specific barriers to the synergy process and provides a repeatable process for generating 'third alternative' ideas. Balanced against this, the thinking from FranklinCovey's Disciplines of Execution process seeks input from others in terms of translating key high-level goals to the front line, but re-inforces the leaders role in being responsible for setting these goals in the first instance.

Likewise, when it comes to Challenging gut instinct and Being wary of past experiences, FranklinCovey's 'Basic Change Model' encourages leaders to constantly assess their 'autobiography' and accumulated paradigms as the filter through which they see things, and our thinking on Proactivity provides a structure for critical thinking between any given stimulus and the corresponding response. This structure for critical thinking is then added to within the 'Enquiry' / 'Opportunity' process we advocate leaders and teams use when trying to make decisions and get to solutions which will help them succeed.

Relaxing The Reptilian Brain

2011-07-28T08:50:00.003+01:00

A colleague of mine, Scott Miller (who is FranklinCovey's General Manager of Facilitation Services) recently attended the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) annual conference in Helsinki, and reported back on one session in particular - Robert Verheule's Brain Facilitation; What can we learn from modern cognitive psychology and neurology about facilitation? - which caused him to shift his own thinking on the topic

(While) your human has many sections or compartments, from a learning perspective let's focus on the human and reptilian parts. The 'human' brain is responsible for our higher order cognitive functioning, such as reasoning and emotional response. The 'reptilian' brain is responsible for our "fight or flight" instinct - in essence from a reptiles point of view, "Who am I going to eat, or more importantly, who might try to eat me?"

Out reptilian brain is on high alert in new settings, such as a workshop where you don't know anyone in the room...and as soon as they walk in the door, participants are making judgement calls about the credibility and likeability of the facilitator and they're scanning and analysing the room for the profile of other participants, subconsciously establishing a pecking order and where they fit within it.

Until as a facilitator, you've relaxed the participants' reptilian brain, they're not ready to use their human brain, and that's where they make connections that lead to learning. Essentially, participants cannot process vital information - they can't learn - until the reptilian brain is calmed. That's your first job as the facilitator.

In this context, FranklinCovey's recommendation would be to avoid what is sometimes the traditional facilitators opening of "Good morning. Let's start by standing up and meeting five people you know and sharing something about you". Rather, some of the specific suggestions we make include

When crafting your opening, making sure to immediately establish your credibility as a facilitator
Allowing people to get a sense of what's going to happen early on
Taking a moment to de-stress learners, by a personal greeting, appropriate music or quickly learning and using first names
Posting a warm up question so participants can focus on an individual task while they get comfortable
Provoking positive emotions using challenging activities, showing dramatic videos, using humour and telling resonant stories and making sure to avoid threatening emotions (such as shame, fear or anxiety

Assessing Sales Mastery

2011-07-25T10:10:00.003+01:00

In a previous post we explored 5 Levels of Sales Development, Training & Execution and reflected how the 20% of the Sales Force that produce 80% of the results typically operate at Levels 4 & 5.

To help clients assess what levels their sales people are at and what is required to move them to Levels 4 & 5 we can identify and contrast the behaviours that exist at Levels 1-3 and Levels 4-5, for example

Level 1-3, Learn and be able to articulate the key differences of your product / service VS Level 4-5, Learn to understand client's issues by asking the right questions in the right way
Level 1-3, Learn the answers to the most common objections VS Level 4-5, Learn how to uncover objections and resolve them with the client to everyone's satisfaction
Level 1-3, Learn the 'cold-call' script VS Level 4-5, Develop rapport-building conversations for initiating new opportunities that are relevant
Level 1-3, Receive their territory and begin making calls VS Level 4-5, Understand the problems and results that prospects face. Use these as dialogue builders
Level 1-3, Fill out forms addressing number of prospects in the pipeline VS Level 4-5, Use a process and tools to identify the right opportunities amd where to spend their time
Level 1-3, Develop / deliver Powerpoint slide decks to "tell your company's story" VS Level 4-5, Develop effective questions that discover needs, build trust and develop a business case with the client
Level 1-3, Examine sales forms to determine who the key decision makers are VS Level 4-5, Engage current contacts to identify and enable contact with decision makers to understand their specific needs
Level 1-3, Position your offering against the competition VS Level 4-5, Discover / develop key differentiators in the mind of the client based on evidence and quantified impact
Level 1-3, Get opportunity to give a proposal / present a solution VS Level 4-5, Pre-test key elements of your solution with the client to discover areas to improve
Level 1-3, Apply closing techniques VS Level 4-5, Remove barriers to allow clients to select you
Level 1-3, Wait to hear if you have won the deal VS Level 4-5, Get specific feedback during your presentation to ensure you can address their concerns

Making 5 Choices to Enable Extraordinary Productivity

2011-07-23T22:05:00.011+01:00

The front cover of the Harvard Business Review May Edition reflected an issue that applies to all organisations around the world - "How to get more done. A complete guide to making yourself, and your team, more productive" - and amongst a series of articles and features was a debate between David Allen (author of Getting Things Done) and Tony Schwartz (author of Be Excellent At Anything) as to whether the secret of effectiveness lies in the right system or the right state of mind.

This area of personal productivity is also one that FranklinCovey has developed extensive expertise in, with a heritage of best selling books such as What Matters Most and First Things First, and planning systems used my millions of people around the world. While looking to build on our existing thinking, FranklinCovey have also spent the past 12-15 months integrating the latest research on productivity into a new framework which references not just systems and mindsets, but also the habits and the human physiological responses which can either be barriers to, or enablers of, extraordinary productivity.

This new framework highlights 5 choices every individual and every team can make to improve their productivity by an order of magnitude and integrates them within a learning experience which both motivates change and provides insights and tools to support people in making that change for themselves.

At a high level, these 5 choices are

Act on the Important - don't react to the urgent (Find Out How )
Go for the Extraordinary - don't settle for the ordinary (Find Out How )
Schedule the Big Rocks - don't sort gravel (Find Out How )
Rule your Technology - don't let it rule you (Find Out How )
Fuel your Fire - don't burn out (Find Out How )

Bearing out the HBR editorial decision to devote a front cover and most of an edition to this topic, the response we have had so far to this thinking has itself been extraordinary, with 10,000 people already registered to attend complementary briefing sessions taking place in 175 cities around the world in September, October and November. (To register an interest to attend one of these sessions, follow this link.)

A Key Pre-Condition for Innovation

2011-07-19T22:08:00.009+01:00

Fred Harburg, who has held numerous international leadership roles at IBM, GM and Motorola, wrote a piece (Your Brain on Innovation) for Chief Learning Officer magazine recently, in which he positioned strongly the idea that without inclusion there can be no creativity and that the desire to be accepted, included and to fit on is 'as strong as the need for food, air and water'

George Ainsworth-Land, author of Grow or Die; the Unifying Principle of Transformation, said organisations must grow or die, and growth depends on innovation. There is no question innovation is fundamental to organisational success - the most admired companies continually find better methods to engage their employees, form creative alliances with their suppliers rather than the tired adversarial relationships of the past, and create fresh ways to attract and retain stakeholders. Unfortunately, it is also rare - after all of the effort, time and money spent trying to create innovation, creativity remains remarkably elusive.

One key to overcoming resistance to innovation and change comes from our increased understanding of a brain region known as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (DACC), which is associated with physical pain and its related emotions. In the January edition of Scientific American, Kipling D.Williams reported that our desire to be accepted, included and to fit in is as strong as our need for food, air and water. He expressly described it as a need rather than as a preference or desire.

Understanding that being unwelcome is interpreted by the DACC in the same way we experience sever physical pain should help us to understand one of the principal barriers to innovation and how to remove it. We must first help people feel they and their ideas are valued before we can expect them to behave in an innovative manner. Otherwise, we are bound to get only defensiveness and conformity.

If this rings true, the question for organisations becomes how to create this atmosphere where people are accepted and included, and FranklinCovey's work in this area suggests three practical starting points

For the individual (who is seeking to be included), if they become aware of how others are assessing them (and in effect judging whether to involve them or not) they can then behave in a way to influence these people. FranklinCovey's experience is that there are 4 basic 'Cores of Credibility' which act as the foundation for these judgements (Integrity, Intent, Capability, Results), the perception of which individuals can actively work on.
For the team leader (who is looking to stimulate an environment of inclusion and ideas sharing) we recommend a focus on a particular set of 'high leverage behaviours' (13 in all) which stimulate and support trust based interactions within a team
For the organisation (which is looking to create a culture of openness where synergy thrives) we advocate an 'audit' of the systems and process which can either encourage or discourage the desired behaviours, and which become either a 'tax' on, or provide a 'dividend' to, their ambition of innovation and high creativity.

Motivating Behavioural Change

2011-07-15T17:08:00.006+01:00

Booz & Co recently released a paper co-written by Jon Katzenbach on motivating behaviour change which was subtitled Boosting Performance by Mobilising Pride Builders

Achieving strategic goals and accelerating performance results often requires that employees at multiple levels of the organisation change critical behaviours. Many companies do not succeed in helping these employees change despite investing heavily in formal initiatives such as financial incentives or training programmes. The problem is that they neglect an essential aspect of what motivates employees - the emotional commitments they must bring to the organisation and their jobs in order to do well and exceed expectations.

By mobilising these emotional commitments, companies can accelerate the behaviour changes required to elevate business performance. "Pride Builders" - employees who instinctively know how to connect what makes individuals feel good with their day to day activities and thereby instil in those in those people pride in the work they do - can play a substantial role in mobilising role in mobilising the kind of emotional commitment that makes behavioural change happen.

The concept of a 'Pride Builder' is very similar to the role of a 'Transition Person' that FranklinCovey has been advocating for many years, and its also interesting to see how the tools, ideas and strategies that FranklinCovey work with would actively support the characteristics Booz and Co define for 'Pride Builders'. For example

'Getting to know team members as individuals' - while this can often be done in an informal / social way, the approach FranklinCovey advocates within our Great Leaders curriculum s for leaders to 'formerly' focus on how they understand the range of motivations in individual will bring to their work so that roles and responsibilities can be better aligned to these motivations. In this was, a leader can play a key role in helping individuals to 'find their voice', which can in turn maximise the energy they contribute to the organisation
'Connecting Individuals day-to-day work to the bigger picture' and 'Communicating clear, actionable goals that the team can relate to' - these 2 characteristics sit at the heart of FranklinCovey's Disciplines of Execution approach. Our experience is that the process of narrowing the focus to 2-3 'wildly important goals', defining these in clearly measurable terms, creating a 'clear line of sight' as to how these relate to levels below and then helping all team members interpret how these goals relate to them (and how they can effectively contribute) is far from 'automatic' but can be highly impactful when done well
'Using an inclusive and transparent communication style' and 'Providing & seeking constructive feedback' - A core element on the work FranklinCovey does in relation to Leading at the Speed of Trust, enables leaders to develop the way others perceive their trustworthiness, which is central to open communication. In terms of then giving and receiving feedback effectively, the thinking and experience which relates to FranklinCovey's work on the 7 Habits of of Highly Effective People includes powerful insights on the mindset one approaches these conversations with in addition to the skills required to say what has to be said in a way that another will be responsive to.

5 Levels of Sales Development, Training & Execution

2011-07-10T12:09:00.004+01:00

ES Research Group published data in their 2006 Sales Training Vendor Guide which suggested that "90% of all sales training programmes result in a 90- to 120-day increase in sales productivity... and fewer than 20% of companies show a sustainable productivity gain that lasts for a year or more".

While a few years old now, many of the conversations we have with clients in this area of sales development suggest the same issues of sustainable productivity gains persist, and our experience is that the problem many companies face is that they offer a variety of 'courses' and allow people to pick and choose which ones they take, assuming training alone will get them the results they seek. When this approach doesn't produce the desired outcomes, the company adds more or different courses and as a result sales development becomes a collection or 'smorgasbord' of classes, rather than a targeted, strategic curriculum.

In this context, FranklinCovey's approach is to recommend 5 Levels of sales development, training and execution within which strategic programmes of support can be provided

Level 1; Product Knowledge Training - Understanding product / service features and benefits and how to position them against the competition
Level 2; CRM Tools & Techniques Training - Understanding the tools that facilitate what sales people do to interact with clients (including leads follow ups, making appointments, behaviour on calls, presenation of features and benefits, basic need probing, trial closing, objection handling, follow up and associated paperwork)
Level 3; Solution/Consultative/Strategic Selling Approach - Focusing on relationship management, probing of customer needs, understanding of purchasing behaviour and developing value propositions.

Levels 1 through 3 provide the 80% of Pareto's 80-20 rule - these sales people are competent, can get some good information from their clients and can present a good case for their product or service. When they compete against other 80 percenters they can and do win work. The problem does not become apparent until they compete against a 20 percenter.

The difference between an 80 percenter and a 20 percenter is that a 20 percenter consistently executes at a high level. They find the real business issues driving a client's need. They discover and overcome barriers that prevent them from winning. They can discuss difficult and sensitive information in a way that endears them with the client.

The 4th and 5th levels of sales development that FranklinCovey recommend go beyond training and provide a significant shift in the thinking necessary to gain breakthrough, sustained superior sales performance. These two levels require a shift in mindsets / paradigms about buying and selling and how we view sales people and approach clients - and therein the potential for creating and sustaining radical change

Level 4; Executing at the Individual Level with Conscious Competence - moving beyond the 'what to do' and focusing on the 'how to do it' of successful consultative, complex sales and business partnerships ie enabling robust dialogue to surface the realities of a client's most pressing business issues and desired outcomes
Level 5; Institutionalising Conscious Organisational Competence and Execution - this level examines and develops leadership to coach and ensure sales execution that results in highly profitable and sustained client relationships. It also aligns people, strategy. processes, systems and tools to execute together for success.

The classic HBR article Strategic Sales Management: A boardroom issue, suggested that sales force performance can account for as much as 40% of a company's revenue production. In terms of the development levels recommended above, levels 1-3 are necessary, yet (by themselves) not sufficient to sustain the behavioural change necessary for people to consistently execute in difficult situations. Levels 4 and 5, however, provide a breakthrough approach that goes beyond training to focus on sustained superior sales performance.

What To Look Out For In Hiring Great People

2011-06-28T08:11:00.006+01:00

The New York Times last week had a front page article on a new admissions policy at Virginia Tech Carillion, the newest medical school in America, reporting that the process "has enormous consequences for the entire health care system".

Rather than evaluate candidates strictly on grades, scores on standardised tests and how they present themselves in an interview, Virginia Tech Carillion now subjects candidates to 9 brief interviews which assess 'how well candidates think on their feet and how willing they are to work on teams' - in effect, capturing 'who' candidates are, not just how smart they are.

This is similar to some of the group exercises and scenarios used by Southwest Airlines - who last year hired fewer than 900 people from 90,000 applications (a lower ratio of admissions than at Harvard!). Those who have been involved in the process at Southwest reflect that in these scenarios "it doesn't matter what solution the group comes up with. What matters is how they're interacting with each other. Who's emerging as a leader? Who's soliciting other people's help? We're looking for what makes you 'who' you are".

There is a direct comparison between both of these approaches and the 4 Cores of Credibility framework that FranklinCovey recommends to clients as an integral part of its recruitment, development, review and reward processes. Of the 4 cores, Results, recognises the importance of 'traditional' measures (such as test scores, % of target hit etc), which remain one of the ways a person's credibility should be assessed. Beyond this, there are 3 further 'cores of credibility' which typically feature less frequently / less consistently

Capabilities - what are the most important ways of thinking and ways of working that relate to a role and how does the individual keep themselves (continuously) sharp in these areas
Intent - what is the fundamental motive or agenda that an individual has (and to what extent does this match with the values of the organisation)
Integrity - to what extent can the person evidence that they behave in a way that is congruent with their intent (especially when there is a 'cost' to doing so)

For organisations that build a culture around these 4 Cores, our experience tells us that the results can be higher trust levels, greater speed and reduced cost over an extended period. For those who focus on Results only, short term gains can be offset by reduced speed and increased cost in the long term.

Visioning That Can Stand The Test of Time

2011-06-21T07:00:00.004+01:00

For many clients we work with, one of the core Leadership characteristics they define is being able to consider and conceive a vision of their business, which will provide guidance for the strategy and goal setting to follow.

To support Leaders to become effective at this, FranklinCovey's Great Leaders curriculum draws on the thinking of Clayton Christensen by asking executives to cosnsider 'What is their job to be done?' - in other words, what are your clients 'hiring you to do?' For such a 'simple' question, our experience is that the process Leaders work through to consider

the answer they can currently provide to this question
the answer they should be able to provide to this question

can be highly challenging and thought provoking (not to mention motivating, in that it often shows up a significant gap between answer 1. and 2.).

If thinking of the 'job to be done' for the immediate period is challenging, asking how this will 'play forward' in 5,10 or 15 years can be even more testing. It this context, an article in last month's Economist, celebrating IBM's centenary, shares an insight into how this most enduring of organisations defines its 'job to be done' in a way that can stand the test of time

IBM's secret is that it is built around an idea that transcends any particular product or technology - its strategy is to package technology for use by businesses. At first this meant making punch card tabulators, but then moved on to magnetic tape systems, mainframes, PCs and most recently services and consulting. Building a company around an idea, rather than a specific technology, makes it easier to adapt when industry "platform shifts" occur.

On the basis of this simple formula - that a company should focus on an idea rather than a technology - which of today's tech giants look best placed to live to 100? The most obvious example is Apple, (which also) has a powerful organising idea; take the latest technology, package it in a simple elegant form and sell it at a premium price. Apple has done this with personal computers, music players, smart phones and tablet computers - each time it has grabbed an existing technology and produced an easier-to-use and prettier version than anyone else. (Elsewhere) the animating idea of Amazon is to make it easy for people to buy stuff - it began by doing this for books, but has since applied the same idea to music, groceries, mobile apps... and as new things come along, Amazon will make it easy for you to buy them. Similarly, the aim of Facebook is to help people share stuff with friends easily. This idea can be extended to almost anything on almost any platform.

Consider, by contrast, three product-based firms - Dell, Cisco and Microsoft. All of these firms are wedded to specific products (PCs, Internet Routers and Windows) and are having trouble navigating technological shifts.

Elevating Good Performance to Great Performance

2011-06-13T09:17:00.005+01:00

Businessworld, which is the largest selling Indian business magazine, and the only business weekly in the country, interviewed FranklinCovey's Chief Executive, Bob Whitman, last month on the topic of organisational performance.

The main discussion related to the key differentiator between good performance and great performance, and Bob referenced FranklinCovey's research in this area indicating a general issue of Execution, but at the same time reflecting that there are pockets of excellence in execution everywhere - even in the worst hotel chain there is one good check-in, and even in the best chain there is one bad check-in. In this sense our research has shown us that the real difference between the great performers and the lesser performers is the lack of consistency in execution - on average, great performers are better than their competitors and there is better consistency in their operations.

This prompted the question from the interviewer "What stands in the way of consistent execution?", and Bob's full answer is below (again reflecting results from research that FranklinCovey has conducted in this area)

Coca-Cola and the CEOs of some of the world's largest supermarkets engaged us several years back to understand why it is two supermarkets on opposing corners of the same intersection, with the same store formats and selling the same goods deliver different results. We interviewed the leaders of their top 1000 outlets to find the difference. Our first question was "how do you know they are you top performing outlets?". In absolute financial performance, we were told. But many of them could just benefit from being in a good location. When we went deeper (and applied a weighting for locational advantage), it turned out that just 50% of their outlets were led by superior managers, 26% were just average and 24% were underperforming.

These top 50% set the bar higher. Winning for them includes all stakeholders - they operate in a system where loyalty of customers is as important as loyalty of employees and higher profitability. The big question then is, do employees understand what success looks like? If your company has not done a good job of defining it for top managers, there is no chance that employees are going to get it right. In top companies, 80% of employees know what their definition of success is and buy into it, whereas in average companies less than 20% of the employees know that. So, the clear definition of success is a huge differentiator.*

The other differentiator is having systems that are aligned to their definition if success. Most companies award their employees on profit. Most companies do not have the courage to tell their top performers that "I know you are the top sales producer, but your customer satisfaction scores are not good enough. Therefore, we will give you a lesser reward". The best companies do that - you hit profits, but not at the cost of lower customer loyalty or dissatisfied employees.

The last differentiator is accountability and leadership behaviour. The best teams maintain a scoreboard of accountability and walk the talk on this front. In the average companies, there are low levels of trust for the leadership - employees feel that what they are doing is not recognised or appreciated. In the best companies, more than 90% of employees feel their work is recognised and appreciated.

The starting point for FranklinCovey in working with clients in this area of Execution reflects the observation that 'the clear definition of success is a huge differentiator', and there is another piece of research referenced in the article bearing this out. This is where McKinsey did a study asking the executives of management teams to name their top three key priorities, and these teams (which typically had 8-9 members) came up with a list of 23 priorities! Creating clarity, and buy-in, as to what the key 2-3 'wildly important' priorities are from this list, with a clear definition of 'where we are now, where we want to be and in what period of time' is a strightforward to grasp, but often challenging to achieve, first step in getting an entire organisation executing together.

Leaders as Teachers - Developing Habits of Highly Effective People within Your Team / Organisation

2011-06-08T05:49:00.007+01:00

There is currently much talk of increasing the number of apprenticeships in the business and general press. Historically, apprentices developed expertise in a trade at the feet of a master craftsman, but in today's multi-layered organisations, this direct learner-teacher connection is rare, which can leave a gap between the tremendous wealth of expertise at the tops levels of companies and the majority of the trainable workforce whose immediate superiors, the middle managers, may lack the experience and teachable viewpoints of senior executives.

This maybe the reason that an increasing number of companies are now reviving the role of the 'master craftsman' by having senior executives share their lessons learned with a new generation of junior executives, with formats such as

Advanced leadership programmes, which feature a number of senior executives who take turns over a period of 6-8 months, teaching the ropes to a few dozen emerging leaders
Brown-bag lunch chats, which are informal, regularly scheduled sessions between a senior executive and 10-15 learners
Leadership workshops, which are presentations by senior leaders to 60-80 associates in short, intensive sessions. (Topics might include leading change, decision making, communication skills etc)

In FranklinCovey's experience, two of the elements that can most effectively support a 'Leader as a Teacher' are,

a set of teaching tools, to complement their practical experience, which are proven to support personal, team and leadership effectiveness
a way to become skilled in using these tools which minimises their time away from the business

In terms of proven teaching tools, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is not only the best-selling business book of all time (with >20 million copies sold), it is also one of the best-selling business books of 2011, with Amazon listing it in their Top 5 Worldwide Business Bestsellers list between March 1st - June 20th (based on data from amazon.com / .co.uk / .ca / .de / .fr and .jp). Likewise, Fast Company, which promotes itself as "being written for, by and about the most progressive business leaders, inspiring readers and users to think beyond traditional boundaries, lead conversations and create the future of business", this April included the 7 Habits in its Leadership Hall of Fame.

As for becoming expert in using / facilitating this content while minimising time away from the business, FranklinCovey (who over the years have accredited 10,000s of people to facilitate The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) have recently launched the facility to become certified virtually, so that accrediting facilitators

can view all of the content in their own time, at their own location and (most importantly) at their own pace
will have ongoing access to instructional and certification videos which they can revisit anytime they need a refresher

Harnessing The Power of Diversity in Your Organisation

2011-05-31T09:01:00.010+01:00

The latest edition of Ernst and Young's quarterly business journal Performance featured an article ('Different is good: how diversity can benefit your organisation') which considered how challenging it can be to harness the power of diversity in teams and which referenced the research of Jeff Polzer (Harvard Business School Professor of Human Resource Management) and Scott E Page (Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science and Economics at the University of Michigan), on the topic

Diversity can be positive or can work against an organisation, improving group performance in some cases but hindering it in others. Performance depends on a range of factors, the most significant of which Polzer calls "interpersonal congruence", or the level of awareness that individual members of a group have of the differing approaches and outlooks of other members. His studies have found that diversity improves creative task performance in groups with high interpersonal congruence, but undermines performance in instances of low interpersonal congruence.

For diversity to pay off, it is therefore vital to validate, rather than suppress, the differences between groups or individuals. As Page explains: "People need to go into meetings recognising that there will be cultural differences but expecting to get better results. The lesson is that you can't just toss people together; that's not going to work."

The challenge, and the opportunity, then would appear to be how one helps diverse individuals and teams be aware of, and better deal with, the differing outlooks and approaches that exist amongst them. In this context, FranklinCovey's work in the area of interpersonal effectiveness over the past 20 years provides both insights and practical development supports, including

drawing distinctions between 'abundance' vs 'scarcity' mindsets as the motivating factors people would have in the first instance to expend the time and energy on appreciating the differences between them
communication skills which initially enable people to reach a better understanding of the different perspectives others bring but also allow them to deal effectively with the possible tensions that arise when these perspectives are potentially at odds with their own
a structure for people to effectively leverage the diversity of opinion and experience that exists to achieve better outcomes

Ensuring Your Business is Staffed with Extraordinary Individuals

2011-05-27T07:56:00.006+01:00

Accenture's Outlook journal recently featured an article (A Team You Can Count On) which provided research based insights into what organisations need to do to become magnets for 'serious talent' - people who are very good at what they do (ie who have superior capability) and for whom work is not just a job but a source of personal pride (ie who have the right attitude).

High performers are known to operate like well-oiled machines, and doing so requires more than rules, regulations and standards. It requires employees who deliver on their promises, on time, day in and day out.

What high performers' employees share is a sense of mutual accountability. The purpose is less about holding employees' feet ot the fire than it is about getting to a place where employees know that a co-worker's word is his or her bond, making future actions and results highly predictable. The increased ability to count on co-workers to deliver gives employees and teams the confidence they need to take on the more challenging tasks high performers tend to engage in.

The imperative to create this sense of mutual accountability within high performance individuals and teams is an outcome FranklinCovey often focuses on with clients, and some of the tools and frameworks we use to enable this include

definitions and development aids around 4 Cores of Credibility against which others will judge an individual to be trustworthy (or not!)
specification (and development of) high leverage behaviours for building and extending trust within a team
frameworks that allow individuals and teams to craft agreements between them based on mutually beneficial outcomes with a clear understanding of the resourcing considerations, accountabilities and consequences that attach to the commitments they are making
project review formats which place the emphasis on a team reporting to each other rather than to a nominal project lead

Insights from Neuroscience to Improve Creativity

2011-05-22T17:44:00.010+01:00

The latest McKinsey Quarterly features an article (Sparking Creativity in Teams: An Executive's Guide) which looks at how organisations can boost the creative outputs of employees at any level

The key is to focus on perception, which leading neuroscientists, such as Emory University's Gregory Berns, find is intrinsically linked to creativity in the human brain. To perceive things differently, Berns maintains, we must bombard our brains with things it has never encountered. This kind of novelty is vital because the brain has evolved for efficiency and routinely takes perceptual shortcuts to save energy; perceiving information in the usual way requires little of it. Only by forcing our brain to recategorise information and move beyond our habitual thinking patterns can we begin to imagine truly novel alternatives.

These conclusions by McKinsey and the neuroscientists they reference parallel almost exactly the experience FranklinCovey has had over the past 20 years. When working with client individuals, teams or departments who are looking to move beyond established patterns and develop new habits of effectiveness or creativity our starting point is to focus on the 'paradigms' (or 'mental maps') people have based on their experiences and preferences, which drive their behaviours and in turn determine the results they get. While many times, people who are trying to develop more creative capabilities initially focus on the skills / behaviours / processes to do so, we know from our experience that if they develop these new ways of 'doing' things while still 'seeing' things as they always have (ie retaining pre-existing paradigms / perceptions) the likelihood is that they will keep on getting what they have always gotten and will not achieve the breakthrough to new and different results they aspire to.

Distinguishing Best in Class vs Average and Laggard Sales Organisations

2011-05-19T20:36:00.013+01:00

Late last year Aberdeen Group produced a report on their findings from a survey of 835 end user organisations which was intended to learn about their deployment of sales training, and which identified 3 categories of Best in Class, Average and Laggard sales organisations

In Best in Class organisations, an average of 77% of sales personnel achieved target compared with 38% for industry Average and 26% among Laggard companies
Best in Class achieved a 14.8% average year-over-year increase in annual corporate revenue, compared with a 2% increase and 11.7% decrease among Industry Average and Laggard companies, respectively
There was a 7.2% year-over-year increase in average sales deals or contract value amongst Best in Class organisations, versus a 0.1% increase for Industry Average and a 7.8% decrease among Laggards

Importantly, the report then looked to identify the characteristics of each category and it was interesting to consider how many of these reflect the capability FranklinCovey offers to client organisations with whom we work to improve their sales effectiveness. For example

The strategic emphasis within Best in Class organisations on strategic account mapping (47%) and discovery skills (37%), which suggest an imperative to diversify / expand from traditional client bases and which brings with it the need to be able to interact effectively with this wider base of - often more senior - contacts. In this context, FranklinCovey's approach prepares relationship managers and sales people in how to structure commercial / exploratory conversations in a way that allows then to interact with those outside of their traditional 'comfort zone'
The Best in Class strategy (in 58% firms) in response to pressures "to create more meaningful sales conversations that address buyers overall business needs", which is another way of describing value based selling. FranklinCovey's philosophy is that no provider's goods or services will be valuable to a client unless they address an issue or deliver a result that is important to the client. The skills we help relationship managers and sales people develop are about helping them to understand the key issues from a client's perspective, their perception of impact, the broader context and possible constraining factors that would prevent this value from being realised
The importance Best in Class (in comparison with Laggard) organisations place on a 'train the trainer' approach (outpacing them by 76%) to empower their own leadership with the data, style and delivery models to ensure effective sales training becomes embedded in their culture for the long term. Offering the option to accredit internal facilitators and coaches has been part of FranklinCovey's approach for over 20 years, and in that time we have accredited over 30,000 client facilitators.
Behavioural analysis and assessment enablers, deployed by the Best in Class organisations 47% more frequently than Laggards, which is complemented by a 49% Best in Class use of: (a) processes to assess sales reps against competency requirements to determine specific skill/competency gaps (vs. 42% and 25% for Industry Average and Laggard firms); and (b) assessment / measurement tools to understand pre-training sales rep performance metric (vs. 32% and 13%). FranklinCovey offer a wide range of self, 360 degree and department / organisational assessments which can include both standard questions and also those which relate to client specific sales processes.

How Design Thinking Can Help Leaders Enable Creativity In Others

2011-05-11T10:00:00.007+01:00

Design thinking is a process of empathising with the end user, and one of its founding thinkers is David Kelley, who helped establish IDEO, a design and innovation company that has won more of the Business Week / ISDA Design Excellence Awards than any other firm.

In a recent interview with Fast Company (Designing Curious Employees, Apr 2011) Kelley describes how he takes a similar approach to managing and leading people

The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you are trying to design for. Leadership is exactly the same thing - building empathy for the people you are entrusted to help. If you want people to do extraordinary things, you really have to understand what they value. I'm trying to get people to remain confident in their creative ability. In order for them to do have that kind of creativity, you have to be very transparent. Understand them and involve them in the decision being made.

FranklinCovey has worked with IDEO to include some of their philosophy in our Synergy and Innovation work, but David Kelly's approach here also aligns closely with the mindsets and skillsets we develop in our Leadership Curriculum. To establish the right mindset about a leader's role in the first instance, the approach we take is to define leadership in terms of "the ability to recognise and affirm potential in others such that they come to see it for themselves". We then help leaders to develop practical skills such as empathic listening (which is very challenging for most to master in practice) and we also provide tools and structures which help them to have conversations with others which explore what it is that taps their talent, fuels their passion and meets the sense of contribution they would like to make.

Igniting The Virtual Classroom

2011-05-10T11:20:00.004+01:00

Looking at the blog and forum pages of Chief Learning Officer magazine over the past week, many of the topics reflect the current focus that organisations place on virtual learning, for example

"What roles does web 2.0 require L&D professionals to play?"
"What is the simplest and most effective process for building effective eLearning courses?"
"Without suitable instructions, a learner can easily be lost within an eLearning course"
"How to manage the time and place for eLearning?"

The focus on purely virtual learning or some form of 'blended' solution is also a constant topic in the conversations that FranklinCovey has with client organisations, and to reflect this reality (as well as supporting those who are approaching this area without extensive experience) our Global Head of Online Learning and Chief e-Learning Architect have written a book - The Learning eXPLOSION: 9 Rules to Ignite Virtual Classrooms in Any Organisations - which tries to distil our own experience in developing both instructor led and learner led virtual offerings.

The book has been written to try and provide resources, tools and guidelines / rules that make the transition to online less challenging, and some of the action plans it references can be downloaded via this link. The 'Rules' themselves are

The Rule of Continual Change; The way people learn will always change. If you wish to embrace the learning explosion, you must change as well
The Rule of Knowledge Transfer; Transitioning from (face-to-face) instructor led classrooms requires a new approach to content, length, instructional delivery and design
The Rule of Learning Circuitry; There are five steps to creating learning circuits in your organisation. Use them to successfully launch and administer your virtual classrooms.
The Rule of Overcoming Bias; Many people have biases toward new ways of learning. You can overcome them by eliminating fears and filling knowledge gaps about technology.
The Rule of Virtual Accountability; To facilitate effective behaviour change and learning, you must hold learners virtually accountable - verbally, visually and kinesthetically.
The Rule of Personal Practice; You may already know that you need to practice, but do you know how? Proficiency, observation, imitation and personalisation are keys.
The Rule of Thumbs Up; People like leaving their mark and giving feedback if you make it easy for them to do so. Use this feedback to improve your virtual classroom.
The Rule of Global Positioning; Reaching a global audience of learners is easy and getting easier. But there are many barriers to be aware of before you apply for a visa.
The Rule of Sustained Orbit; Getting Your New Virtual classroom off the ground is one thing. Achieving a sustained orbit is quite another.

Applying Synergy to Achieve Transformational Change

2011-05-07T13:36:00.007+01:00

The potential conflicts between providing power and electricity to maintain society's demands while doing so in a way that is sensitive to environmental consequences is a source of tension between energy companies and environmental campaigners.

An interview in this month's HBR with Duke Energy CEO James Rogers highlights these tensions when he arrived in role over 20 years ago, just after the company (PSI as it was then) had written down a $2.7bill loss on a half constructed nuclear plant. It also describes how the instincts of one person to try to achieve 'Synergy' rather than pursuing conflict can pay dividends. Below are extracts from the interview under the 3 headings of 'Willingness', 'Viewpoints' and 'New Ideas', which reflect FranklinCovey's Synergy model

Willingness - "All the members of my management team were much older than was, and all of them advised not to meet with any environmentalists. It was an emotional time, as their largest construction project had just been killed by the very groups I was planning to talk to and PSI was on the verge of bankruptcy. Internal opposition to my proposal was so strong that I considered changing course. (But) I believed in the power of collaboration to address tough problems (and) I strongly believed that we needed a culture respectful of divergent views, in which problems could be identified early and unconventional solutions could be found".
Viewpoints - "I developed a plan I called 100 days of listening. I sat down with leaders from the environmental groups that had blocked the plant. I started by telling them that I was new to the job and wanted to better understand their point of view. Soon enough they were talking straight about their perspectives and I learned that their opposition was based on three beliefs. (Another Issue) near the top of my list had arisen in a meeting with a state senator who chaired the environmental committee: PSI needed to integrate environmental risks into its decision making. Failure to do so had nearly caused the company to break down. Prior management hadn't seen the risks from environmental opposition until it was too late."
New Ideas - "I proposed that we study the corporate environmental charters of other utilities and then create one for PSI. To my surprise, we found not one utility with a board adopted public statement about environmental considerations in its decision making. We decided to write a charter by convening our diverse stakeholders: customers, investors, state government, officials, consumer advocates, employees and environmentalists. Some members of my team worried that dialogue would further empower groups that opposed us and would evolve into a negotiation. They were right - but that was part of the reason for doing it. We wanted a charter that established enough common ground that we would never again waste billions of dollars on half-constructing a plant. We held meetings with about two dozen leaders from different stakeholder groups. Each meeting began with an acknowledgement of our objective: to provide clean, affordable and reliable electricity to our 575,000 customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Everyone agreed with this mission, but environmentalists focused on 'clean', consumer advocates stressed 'affordable' and factory owners put a premium on 'reliable'. Nevertheless the framework gave everyone insight into the practical trade-offs involved in providing universal access to electricity. Using that framework, we negotiated a 10-point corporate charter, (which our) board ratified and we printed in our annual report. We had planted a stake."

We hear many people use the word 'synergy' and still more talk about the ambition of achieving these kind of outcomes for their business. The real issue then in achieving this either at an executive level or further throughout a business is knowing 'how' to do it, and the elements above provide strong framework for getting started. Beyond this, FranklinCovey's work with diverse groups hoping to achieve synergies is to help them develop the mindsets and skillsets that sit within each area - for example within 'Willingness', the recognition of abundance vs scarcity mentality, within 'Viewpoints' the ability to communicate empathically so that we can truly understand other's perspectives and also have our own effectively understood and within 'New Ideas' a model that allows people to consider both prototypes and countertypes as an effective mechanism for identifying third alternatives.

Lessons from Crowd Behaviour When Making Decisions in Extreme Situations

2011-05-04T08:25:00.007+01:00

The Economist recently reported on a new body of research from by Mehdi Moussaid of Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, which challenged the rules typically attributed to crowd behaviour

Existing models of crowd behaviour treat moving masses of humanity as though they were molecules in a lquid ie people in a crowd all behave in more or less the same way. This works up to a point, but it fails to predict the changes that happen as a crowd's density increases and its movements become more chaotic. That is why Mehdi Moussaid and his colleagues have made a radical innovation. Instead of treating the individual human beings in a crowd as if they were molecules, they have treated them as if they were human beings. They have, in other words, given them volition.

This was enough to reproduce in the model the sorts of behaviour seen in real crowds, but when Dr Moussaid really put the pressure on by increasing the density of the virtual crowd, the model did not show the extreme turbulence seen in real crowds. To mimic that behaviour he added another rule which made members of his crowd more molecule-like when they were at very close quarters - a lack of volition that will be familiar to anyone who has been in a tight jam of humanity.

This human quality of 'volition' is core to FranklinCovey's thinking around personal effectiveness, especially as it relates to making judgements and decisions. Indeed this research recollects one of the summary comments from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

What the men and women who worked on Macondo lacked - and what every drilling operation requires - was culture of leadership. In hostile offshore environments individuals must take personal ownership of safety issues with a single-minded determination to ask questions and pursue advice until they are certain they get it right.

Combined, these inputs reflect FranklinCovey's experience that while normally effective people may retain their ability to choose in normal situations, it is only highly effective people that are able to overcome the pressure and outside influences of stressful situations to retain this ability to choose. Our experience also tells us however that most, if not everyone, can make the transition from 'normally effective' to 'highly effective' in these situations as the ability to choose is something all humans can retain, even in extreme situations. Our work with individuals and team in this area then is to make them aware of these capabilities and to help them develop the mindsets and skillsets to access them even (or indeed especially) when the pressure is on.

Being a 'Great Place to Work' - What It Takes and The Rewards It Brings

2011-04-28T10:09:00.012+01:00

The Great Place to Work Institute has been conducting research for the past 25 years and every year surveys over 2 million employees to support the publication of 40 country lists, including the Fortune List (US), the Financial Times List (UK) and LeFigaro List (France). Their recent list of Best Workplaces in Canada was published in April 2011, and included this introduction

The workplaces featured on this list represent great diversity in terms of sector, industry, size and location. Each has pioneered a unique path to greatness. But there is one thing they all have in common - TRUST. Employees who trust their managers give their best work freely, and their extra effort goes right to the company's bottom line. Managers who trust their employees allow innovative ideas to bubble up from all levels of the company. Employees who trust each other report a sense of camaraderie and even the feeling of being part of a family. Together they deliver far more than the sum of their individual parts.

Building workplace trust is the best investment an organisation can make, leading to better recruitment, lower turnover, greater innovation, higher productivity, more loyal customers and higher profits.

This recognition of Trust as a key driver of engagement and performance is something we observe in our conversations with clients right up to C-Level, and the key question for these clients is not whether but how to create a culture of trust that can scale across 100s, 1000s or 10000s of people. In this context, FranklinCovey has codified the mindsets and behaviours that inform 'high trust' interactions with colleagues, stakeholders and clients, the sum of which create the culture of an organisation. FranklinCovey have also developed support and accountability frameworks which help translate this 'learning' into 'doing' and metrics to track how Trust levels develop at team, organisation and market levels. Together these capabilities help client organisations to deliver the results characteristic of the Best Places to Work - which over the past 13 years have delivered an ROI of +262% compared to the S&P 500*.
* Source; Russell Investment Group, based on Study of Fortune Best Places to Work List

Developing the Wisdom of Leaders to Support Prudent Judgements and Better Organisational Outcomes

2011-04-25T08:40:00.009+01:00

Ikujiro Nonaka, Professor Emeritus at Hitotsubashi University in Toyko and Hirotaka Takeuchi from the Harvard Business School, wrote an article in May's Harvard Business Review which explores the topic of Leadership Wisdom, which enables people to make prudent judgements in a timely fashion and to take actions guided by values and morals

In an era when discontinuity is the only constant, the ability to lead wisely has nearly vanished. Dependence only on explicit knowledge prevents leaders from coping with change. The scientific, deductive, theory first approach assumes a world independant of context and seeks answers that are universal and predictive. However, all social phenomena - including business - are context dependent and analysing them is meaningless unless you consider people's goals, values and interests along with the power relationships. Yet executives fail to do just that. Our studies show that (Leaders) must also draw on often forgotten kind of knowledge, called Phronesis, or Practical Wisdom - tacit knowledge that enables people to make prudent judgements and take actions based on the actual situation, guided by morals and values. When leaders cultivate such knowledge throughout the organisation, they will be able not only to create fresh knowledge but also make enlightened decisions.

Nonaka and Takeuchi draw historical comparisons between this form of 'Practical Wisdom' and the Japanese concept of toku (a virtue that leads a person to pursue the common good and excellence as a way fo life) and the Indian concept of yukta (which connotes 'just right' or 'appropriate'). They also make the commercial case by contrasting the 'crisis of confidence' which has engulfed Wall Street (which does not embrace these principles) with the respect afforded to many / most Japanese organisations (who do), and by referencing Gary Hamel's thinking in his 2009 HBR article 'Moon shots for Management', which suggests that "in contrast to the old notion of capitalism, which pitted business and society against each other, the best Japanese companies can become the exemplars of a new, communitarian approach to capitalism."

The link with FranklinCovey's thinking is most obvious within our Leading at the Speed of Trust curriculum, where we describe '5 waves of Trust', culminating in in Societal Trust, which identifies / distinguishes between the 20th vs 21st Century realities of

Business being responsible to shareholders vs Business being responsible to shareholders and the community at large
Unconscious consumers vs Socially conscious consumers
Profit as the measure of success vs Profit and contribution as the measure of success

and then explores the Trust 'Taxes' and 'Dividends' that apply to organisations as a result. Moving from the 'macro' to the 'micro', Nonaka and Takeuchi talk about Executive sessions to build character and integrity at the individual level and this reflects another of FranklinCovey's 'waves of trust' ie Self Trust, where we explore the balance between Character and Competence and consider further the elements of Intent and Integrity as the building blocks of Character.

What Makes One Outsourcing Deal More Successful Than Another

2011-04-23T20:26:00.008+01:00

A report by Leslie Wilcocks and Sara Cullen (The Outsourcing Enterprise - The Power of Relationships) in association with the London School of Economics Information System and Innovation Group provides an insightful analysis of the Outsourcing Industry drawing on their combined research into over 1200 organisations

Fifteen years' worth of research into information technology and business process outsourcing has produced a basic body of knowledge about outsourcing. But the focus has now shifted to what makes one outsourcing deal more successful than another.

In our study of organisations seeking IT cost savings via outsourcing, we found that good relationship management made a 40% difference in cost savings...but there are few precise findings on how such successful relationships should be developed.

The contract is an obvious - but ultimately superficial - driver of day to day behaviour...The deeper and more powerful drivers are rooted in the values and attitudes of the people responsible for carrying out the agreement.

Powerbased relationships are based on the negative threat of sanctions that might be applied to gain compliance. In power-based relationships conflict resolution becomes paramount as manipulation and blame spread. Short-term gains, 'more for less' and self interest are the abiding motifs. However, power is a poor substitute for trust, given the high costs involved in monitoring and imposing sanctions, the negative orientations and behaviours adopted, and the limitd goals that can be pursued by the parties. Therefore relations that generate trust and create a 'trust dividend' offer an important competitive advantage over those that do not. And this means moving to more open and collaborative communications, resolving conflicts constructively and seeing the arrangement as a co-dependent long term investment designed to benefit both parties.

In most cases, the client will want a balance between the two alternatives of power and trust. Extremes of either are generally unacceptable to clients or suppliers and rarely sustainable over longer periods.

The imperative for suppliers of large scale, long term goods and services contract to enable collaborative, trust based relationships is one FranklinCovey sees increasingly in our conversations with these types of organisations. Many are expert at the provision of systems and processes that relate to the service in question, but many have historically focused on the contract as the driver of day to day behaviours. As a result, they are less expert in what it takes to develop attitudes and behaviours of trust and collaboration, and especially the reality of scaling these to the 1000's of daily interactions which often characterise these agreements.

In these situations, FranklinCovey has broad experience in codifying and developing the mindsets and skillsets which

measure and develop trust at team, function and organisation or project level
enable effective consulting within the client relationship to diagnose and address ongoing issues
help project teams move beyond coordination and cooperation to achieve real collaboration, inter-dependence and synergy
deal with the reality of challenging conversations and conflict in daily and weekly interactions
create a framework for the effective execution of most important project goals
can scale / reach to the 100's or 1000's of people that may be involved

and in the process achieve the kind of efficiency savings identified in the research by Willcocks and Cullen.

Do People Mistrust Confidence in Experts?

2011-04-21T10:32:00.003+01:00

This was the question posed in a article in the March edition of Harvard Business Review, with a professor at the Stanford School of Business (Zakary Tormala) describing his research finding that when experts express uncertainty about their opinion, people find them more compelling

The phenomenon at work here is what we call expectancy violations. People expect experts to be confident. Violations of that expectation surprise them. We see that in our data - a surprise draws you in and makes you pay more attention.

While the concept of 'expectancy violation' is an interesting one to consider, the context of the research (experts providing opinion about a restaurant review) provides a sense that this may apply more to situations where we don't have a relationship with the expert and when the decision being made (whether to chose that restaurant - or not) is of the less serious variety.

In FranklinCovey's experience, when a relationship does exist with a person providing expert advice, and when the decision being made is a significant one, there are 4 characteristics that will impact most on the confidence we have in the opinion being provided (and the person providing it)

Integrity; is there convergence between what a person says they value and the actions they display
Intent; what motive do you ascribe to their behaviours / recommendations (ie whose agenda do you feel they are on - theirs or yours)
Capability; the extent to which the person demonstrates the talents, skills expertise and knowledge relevant to the advice they are offering
Results; whether the person can demonstrate results elsewhere from the advice being provided

Our experience is that many 'experts' focus on developing their 'competence' in certain ares (elements 3 and 4 above) but have less of a focus on their 'character' (elements 1 and 2 above) and that this can be the greatest cause of any confidence or credibility deficit they encounter.

5 Golden Questions for Driving Growth through Customer Loyalty

2011-04-16T13:21:00.006+01:00

The American Customer Satisfaction Index was founded at the University of Michigan and publishes data quarterly drawn from over 200 companies across 43 industries.

The ACSI markets itself on how it is able to show that customer satisfaction is an indicator of of financial results on both macro and micro-economic levels, and with 15 years of data on their side, they make a strong case.

The question arises though, while customer satisfaction may predict financial results will it in and of itself drive the kind of financial results a company is looking for? A case in point was a professional services client we met recently, who is already successful and growing in their market, but whose goal was to accelerate that growth by 2-3 times. Our conversation with them reflected the fact that their current levels of growth may be achievable with high levels of customer 'satisfaction', but to achieve the levels of growth they were targeting they would need to reach beyond this to the point they were achieving customer 'delight' and 'loyalty'.

In considering this question, we prompted the client's thinking with 5 'golden questions'

Why? the beliefs key stakeholders have about a measure of customer delight and the relative weight they give to it (in comparison to other key business metrics)
How? if the goal is to measure 'loyalty' and 'delight' (as opposed to 'satisfaction') how can existing measures be re-calibrated to do this?
Who? at what level will we try to get customer feedback ie how can we practically understand and reflect the representative experiences from all of our customer touch points rather than just the opinions of a few.
When? what is the frequency at which we should measure this so that the measure can be actively used to drive behaviour, and what is the approach that should be adopted to make this both feasible and statistically valid
What? what impact will this measure have on how we manage our client contact and what impact will it practically have on reward and recognition measures we have in place

The Story of a Real 'Transition Figure'

2011-04-12T06:46:00.009+01:00

The Irish Times wrote about Caroline Casey

She is one of those people who, instead of just talking about changing the world, gets up and actually does it however tough it turns out to be

This short keynote that Caroline gave recently at TED (a non-profit organisation dedicated to 'Ideas Worth Sharing') provides some key insights into what it takes to become such a transition figure, and at the same time demonstrates how the framework of effectiveness devised by Stephen Covey is as true and relevant today as it was 20 years ago

Caroline's reflection on the power of 'beliefs' and how we see things (physically and metaphorically) in driving our behaviours and the results we achieve, has a strong parallel to the 'Basic Change / See-Do-Get' model that sits at the heart of much of FranklinCovey's work
In part of her story, Caroline describes how, first her parents, and then she herself chose what many may consider as 'alternative paths' when faced with lifechanging situations and decisions. This is a strong example of the unique 'human endowments' FranklinCovey consider as helping us choose our response, whatever the stimulus
As she started to make the transition for herself, Caroline provides a very real example of how 'mental creation precedes physical creation' as she asks herself who does she want to be and what does she want to be, until the answer comes to her 'blowing up in her head and bashing in her heart'
Having created her vision for what she wants to be, we then get the start of Caroline's story as to how she has had the self discipline to put first things first and to make this happen, and how over time her circle of influence has expanded to the point where, 10 years later, she has influenced and 'reframed' how 100s of companies view how they engage with and leverage the talents of employees across the ability spectrum.

Leadership Hall of Fame

2011-04-10T12:28:00.005+01:00

Fast Company promotes itself as being "written for, by and about the most progressive business leaders, inspiring readers and users to think beyond traditional boundaries, lead conversations and create the future of business".

Last month, Fast Company included FranklinCovey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in its Leadership Hall of Fame, and interviewed Dr Stephen Covey, asking him why he thinks the book was so successful

I think its because it was based in universal and timeless principles and teaches you how to become independent an interdependent. I think that's why it works well. It's sold 10 millions copies in Chine. They don't respect intellectual property, but 10 millions copies were sold. Millions in India.

This sense of the material still resonating is the same with many large corporate clients we speak with, one of whom last week described this as material 'whose time has come' within their business. To provide an insight into why the material retains its relevance, below is an indication of the outcomes people can expect from applying the '7 Habits'

An understanding of how we develop, and sustain, new habits
Helping is to be in more control, rather than feeling that what we do is driven by forces external to us.
Enabling people to 'choose their response' and work at the limits of their influence when faced with challenging situations
Creating a different perspective on how we manage our priorities, so that even with the many roles we play and the multiple calls om our time, we can identify and focus on what's most important to us and achieve more in our relationships with colleagues and clients
Developing an 'abundance mentality' and seeking mutual benefit in our relationships with colleagues and clients. When faced with situations which require us to deliver higher levels of outputs with similar or fewer resources, this instinct for collaboration rather than competition can be a key ingredient.
Balancing 'courage' and 'consideration' when providing feedback so that we can manage expectations and ensure there is a free flow of information through the business
When faced with potential conflict situations, ensuring that our first instinct is for enquiry rather than advocacy, which can help us move beyond the emotion involved and enable a decision
Seeking out and valuing diversity of thought in our interactions with others and working with colleagues and clients to produce outcomes greater than either one of us could have produced individually
Ensuring that we keep ourselves 'sharp' so that we can achieve what is most important to us now in a way that allows us to achieve it again and again

The Dangers of Too Much Information Impairing Decision Making

2011-04-07T07:47:00.008+01:00

The phenomenon of information overload is not a new one - in the 17th century Leibniz highlighted a 'horrible mass of books which keeps on growing' and in 1729 Alexander Pope warned of a 'deluge of authors covering the land'. However, while the consequences of 'information fatigue' (a phrase added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2009) have typically been considered as emotional and psychological, a recent a recent article in Newsweek - "I Can't Think" - summarises a broader concern

As information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. An nowhere are these effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions

When supporting clients who have identified this as an issue in their business, FranklinCovey typically take a 3 part approach

Self Awareness - a starting point is for people to recognise what is happening in the environment around them and the potential impacts it has on them and their own cognitive decision making tools. For example, in a recent piece of research by Angelika Dimoka of the Centre for Neural Decision Making at Temple University a group of volunteers took part in a series of complex 'combinatorial auctions', and as they did their brain activity was measured with fMRI. As the information load increased so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making an control of emotions. However, as the researchers gave the bidders more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off. "The bidders reach cognitive overload and they start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises" says Dimoka. "For the same reason their frustration and anxiety soar: the brain's emotions - previously held in check by the dorsolateral PFC - run wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another so that with too much information people's decisions make less and less sense".
Retaining choice - Every bit of incoming information presents a choice: whether to pay attention, whether to reply or whether to factor it into an impending decision and our focus here is to reinforce with people that they retain the choice as to how they respond to information, rather than being dependent on it or determined by it. This extends to people focusing on what is within their influence in terms of information management. It also involves being comfortable making decisions by applying their judgement to what they are aware of, because they now realise that the 'optimal' situation of getting more and more detail to guide the 'perfect' decision can also lead to suboptimal cognitive processing.
Guiding Strategies - having made the choice to be a 'sufficer' of information rather than a 'maximiser' we then provide some short structures that people can use to guide their response to a given stimulus and also to explore the issue they find themselves confronted with and address it based on the evidence available, their sense of the impact and any constraining factors which may apply.

A Profound Change for Teams That is Pivotal to the Future of Organisations

2011-03-31T11:25:00.008+01:00

Edgar H Schein, professor emeritus at MIT's Sloan School of Management has been one of the world's leading authorities on the link between culture and behaviour for over 50 years.

In his latest book Helping: How to Offer, Give and Receive Help, he talks about a topic that he believes is 'pivotal to the future of organisations', and which he summarised in a recent interview as follows

In most team cultures, bosses tend to act as authority figures who are there only to help subordinates, not to listen to and be helped by others... Better teamwork requires perpetual mutual helping, within and across hierarchical boundaries... - situations in which people can go outside the organisation's norms and practices and explicitly create this mutual helping relationship. (For example) people with the most authority and established knowledge must make the others feel psychologically safe so everyone will speak up freely when something is wrong. (Also) in any helping situation 'humble inquiry' is a key intervention to equilibriate the relationship between the person asking for help and the helper.

All this will demand that companies train their teams in the helping process. Most team training that I've seen is focused on making people feel good about one another. But what I'm talking about is something much more profound and essential; knowing how to work with one another as equal partners in an operational setting.

The idea that this can be a 'profound' adjustment for teams not used to operating this way is - in our experience - a fair conclusion, and while Schein's comments reflect 'what' these teams need to do, FranklinCovey's work in this area is to codify the new ways of thinking and new ways of working described - changing authority mindsets, seeking to inquire, building trust, developing interdependence, identifying 3rd alternatives, achieving synergies - so that teams understand 'how' these can be achieved and the performance benefits realised.

Negotiations as a Key Sales Challenge

2011-03-27T22:04:00.007+01:00

The research we referred to previously in identifying key sales challenges also highlighted 'Negotiations', with concerns including maintaining profitability, customers who continue to reopen the negotiation / more concessions, gaining higher prices, closing win-win deals and handling adversarial conversations. Their analysis concluded

When viewed as a whole, the data suggests that the focus should be around preparing effectively for intense price discussions, identifying a strategy to justify value and responding effectively to clients who continue to reopen negotiations. While intensive preparation for finalist presentations is the norm for most successful sales people, most do not put the same energy and discipline into preparing their negotiation.

These recommendations (such as effective planning for negotiation conversations) relate closely to the support FranklinCovey offers to clients in the area of effective negotiations. In a couple of crucial areas, however, we go further. For example,

Rather than just 'identifying a strategy to justify value', a starting point for us is the paradigms / beliefs people have about the value being offered by the services they provide. If this connection to value is not something they genuinely believe in, then their ability to credibly claim fees / charges that are in effect an 'exchange of value' is significantly diminished
Our conversations with clients also help us understand how the role of procurement teams (and the frequency of their involvement) is changing the landscape of client negotiation. What we hear is that there is a 'continuum' of procurement experiences which range from highly professional engagements around value and value exchange to more adversarial engagements where there is a 'hardened' (and often singular) focus on budget reduction targets. While these conversations are not straightforward, they do often follow a pattern, with some common approaches being used by (and regularly trained to) procurement organisations. FranklinCovey's approach here is to cluster these approaches into groupings of 'top tactics' commonly used and then provide insights into new ways of thinking and new ways of working that can be applied to find a resolution to what (at first) first may seem like intractable situations.

Finding Synergy Where You'd Least Expect It

2011-03-22T07:49:00.005Z

The Harvard Business Review sends out a Management 'Tip of the Day' and one arrived last week with the title 'Turn Your Competitors Into Allies', expanding on the theme as follows

When a colleague's agenda is seemingly opposed to your own, it can be tempting to demonise them. Distorting other people is a common response to conflict, but not a particularly productive one. In fact, doing so undermines your ability to exert influence. Instead of deciding that everything about a colleague you don't get along with is hateful, get to know them better. Sit down and talk about what they care and are concerned about.

This passage resonated in the context of a group session we facilitated a few days before in the topic of delivering innovation and value, and here too we looked at a routemap to achieving synergies in what might otherwise be adversarial client relationships. While most seemed to agree that this approach to achieving synergy could achieve 'transformational' outcomes, and was applicable is competitive situations, the discussion was particularly interesting as it highlighted some particular 'watch outs' to be aware of

the first is the extent to which either / both parties agree that these better outcomes can be achieved so that they are motivated to invest in this approach - a quick poll of the group we worked with suggested that just over half (57%) of those they interacted with believed that synergistic outcomes were possible (which means that just under half did not)
the second is how one goes about listening as you try to understand another's perspective. In our experience, even those who consider themselves to be good 'attentive' listeners, typically listen more with the intent to respond rather than to genuinely understand
the third is the filter we then apply to the ideas that may ensue from these conversations - another quick poll of the group we worked with suggested that only 18% of their interactions could be described as 'transformative', so the question is will people recognise these opportunities when they see them or will (as is often the case) people perceive 'compromise' as a false synergy, and so never really achieve the true potential these relationships have to offer

When Could You (or Should You) Become a Trusted Adviser?

2011-03-21T10:01:00.006Z

Richardson recently undertook an extensive survey among 15,000 sales professionals to try to understand what their key sales challenges were, and an above average response drew insights from various role levels, different company sizes and a range of industry sectors (as indicated below)
Three of the most significant challenges highlighted came in the categories of 'Account Management' and 'Expanding Client Relationships'. Of these 3 challenges, one was 'Becoming a Trusted Adviser', and the report had to say this on the topic

Becoming a trusted advisor is a long term effort. True trusted advosor status is conferred on a sales professional when that person becomes part of the client's own decision-making process on significant issues. Sales professionals cannot, nor should they, try to be trusted advisers to all of their clients. Sales leaders can help each sales professional to carefully select one significant client with whom that sales professional would like to achieve trusted advisor status.

The two other most significant challenges are described as 'Finding ways to add value' (38.5%) and 'Balancing sales and relationship management', and here the report had this to say

Clients want to feel that "you are one of them" before they allow a sales professional to expand opportunities within their companies

At first glance, these comments seem a little contradictory. If it's important for all clients to feel we are 'one of them', is it correct that we should only identify one client whom we would like to see us as a 'trusted adviser'? FranklinCovey's work in this area is to try and make the reputation of 'trusted adviser' accessible to all levels of account managers across all of their client contacts. For someone to be trusted, we recognise the two elements that need to be present - character and competence - and we build both through a person's intent to help their client succeed and their ability to structure a client interaction in way that they mutually explore the issues at hand, including likely impacts and potential constraints, such that they are in a better position to recommend a solution that exactly meets their clients needs.

Better Brainstorming Outcomes

2011-03-14T06:53:00.003Z

G.K. Chesterton, one of the most well known English writers of the 20th century once said "It's not that they can't see the solution. They can't see the problem", and while he may not have been thinking of them at the time, this insight says alot about why brainstorming sessions often don't provide effective new ideas or solutions ie the problem statement that people are being asked to consider is the wrong one.

In getting to better brainstorming outcomes, a key focus for FranklinCovey is working with the group leader to support their preparation ahead of them facilitating an ideas generation session, which includes

Self Awareness - being aware of the role of 'ego' and 'perception bias' that will contribute to their (and other's) approach to the brainstorming process
Issues List - making sure they have considered more than just the 'obvious' issue as the basis for any brainstorming session
Evidence and Impact - moving beyond the emotion that may be attached to an issue and basing the priority for brainstorming time and energy on those issues which have the greatest impact
Context - considering who and what else is effected so those people can help to define the topic and contribute to the brainstorming process itself

How To Build World Class Culture - A CEO's Insight

2011-03-13T20:59:00.005Z

Canada's Bombardier is the world's number-one train manufacturer and number-three manufacturer of civil aircraft, and in a recent interview with McKinsey its President and CEO, Pierre Baeudoin, shared his insights into the key elements of Building a World Class Culture, based on 4 keys areas of focus he had identified for his own company's transformation

"(Employees) were telling is that we're very focused on hardware. But I knew the customer doesn't really care about the hardware: he cares about his flight. We needed employees to understand we flying people, not planes".
"We'd asked employees what objectives they thought we valued, and although we had very bog strategic plans, nobody could answer the question. For any team to pull in the same direction, it has to know what you're looking for and feel a connection".
"At a management level, there were cultural problems too: the culture was about avoiding putting facts on the table. It was a culture of not facing up to issues, of blaming another department".
"In addition, there were alot of silos. People were focused on their own tasks. And it was a culture where we valued the 'firefighter', the person who would step on everybody to get the job done in a crisis. There was very little teamwork".

What's interesting is to consider for how many Chief Executives of large multinational organisations (or Heads of Function or Large Project Leads...) this list would ring true for. What's also interesting is to consider how closely this list maps to the capabilities FranklinCovey has developed to support clients make this transformation for themselves - from a customer loyalty approach that helps to measure and align employee behaviour to 'customer delight', to an execution process that helps translate high level goals to front line workers, insights that help people deal with each other at a more 'mature level' (specifically balancing the courage of 'getting real' with the consideration of doing so in a way colleagues and clients are responsive to) and a road map to team synergy which builds trust and overcomes silo mentality.

Combining Lean Process with Behavioural Principles to Achieve Large Scale Change

2011-03-10T12:20:00.009Z

The latest edition of the McKinsey Quarterly features an interview with Joroen van Breda Vriesman, Chief Executive of the Dutch Insurance company Eureko on how they achieved a large scale change programme, initially within a 2,200 person division and then across the entire 20,000 person organisation.

The observations of two of the critical components resonated strongly, as they reflect closely the work that FranklinCovey does in helping clients to deliver effective change

"You must have a vision that explains to people why they are working according to lean principles - that it's not only about meeting a budget, that it's actually about creating a better company. With a vision - one that employees trust - you can make incredibly big changes in a short time. Without this vision, if you push lean just as something top management wants, it will probably not be around for more than a couple of years"
"The prerequisite for succeeding with this vision is that people trust us. (By this) we mean that people in our company need to trust themselves, players within teams have to trust each other and teams also need mutual trust. This is very important for lean, because if teams don't trust each other, they will end up duplicating work. It also goes without saying that our customers also need to trust us. So we have performance indicators that measure how sales teams trust each other and how our customers trust us overall, as well as our separate brands. It's also important to learn how we can improve that trust. Finally, we have begun to measure how health care providers trust our company."

FranklinCovey's long established work in helping Leaders to set a direction for their business and communicate their strategy in terms than enable engagement and execution means we have strong experience to offer when it comes to establishing a compelling vision. Likewise, the work we have done in our Speed of Trust practice means we can also provide very tangible measures of Trust at an Individual, Team, Organisational, Customer and Market level. As (if not more) importantly, we can then provide the support to develop a culture of trust through the daily behaviours of an organisations people towards colleagues and clients.

Changing Your Life In A Way That's Also Relevant To The Day Job

2011-03-07T07:07:00.007Z

In this month's Fortune Magazine, FranklinCovey's personal effectiveness methodology was road tested by Senior Editor Leigh Gallagher and the assessment was very positive, with 2 main categories of feedback

Day-Job Relevance
Life-Changing Potential

both scoring an 'A' grade.

It's always encouraging to get this kind of feedback - whether from an individual participant or the Senior Editor of a benchmark business magazine that will give you global publicity - and whomever it comes from, it prompts the question as to what are the ingredients that can offer people the potential to change their life in a way that is relevant to the day job. Last week we developed an outline for a client programme on the topic of 'Leading Self' and some of the extracts below provide a sense of the 'FranklinCovey Way' alluded to in the Fortune article;

Fundamentals of Personal Change - Looking at the role of paradigms and beliefs and how they influence fundamentally the behaviours we model and the results we achieve. Also, considering how principle based behaviours sit at the heart of effective and authentic leadership
Individual Proactivity - Exploring how individual proactivity is the building block of organisational effectiveness and how we can overcome issues of 'conditioning' and 'dependence' to achieve it
Defining What's Most Important - Recognising the Importance of having a strong point of reference for what is most important (both inside and outside of work) which can guide the decisions we make on a daily (and even hourly) basis
Becoming Disciplined in How we Spend Our Time - Maximising time effectively by dealing with 'time stealers' and by weekly and daily planning that is aligned to the planning system we use
Becoming Trustworthy and Improving Performance - Creating an awareness of how these principles combine to make us 'trustworthy' in the eyes of others and the improved performance outcomes (increased speed, reduced cost) we can achieve as a result

Addressing Trust Deficits

2011-02-28T16:01:00.004Z

Once a business has come to the conclusion that establishing a culture of Trust is an important competitive advantage in it achieving sustained higher performance, the question then (naturally) turns to 'how do we do this'?

Some insights on the 'how' were provided in PWCs most recent (Q4 2010) CEO survey, which gathered inputs from 1,200 business leaders in 69 countries. One question asked which approaches they were adopting to address issues of Trust, and responses included Improve Sector Reputation, Proactive Dialogue with Policy Makers/Regulators, Systematic Approach to Measuring Reputation, Corporate Responsibility Programmes, Media Relations ans Advertising, Reporting and Engagement with Investor Community, Work with NGOs to Improve Practices and Executive Compensation Packages.

At first glance, this seems like a comprehensive list, but on further examination, what's clear is that it doesn't touch on the issue of developing new ways of thinking and new ways of working across the 100s, 1000s or 10000s of people that work for a business and who contribute to (or detract from) an overall culture of Trust on a daily business.

Perhaps one of the reasons that this element does not feature is that it seems hard to achieve. Our experience bears out that this is not straighforward, but it has shown us how this element of addressing day to day behaviours across an entire workforce is a necessary part of achieving a truly trust based culture and that it will distinguish those who do it well. Where FranklinCovey helps in making this seem 'less hard' is in codifying the mindsets and skill sets that create Trust at a Personal level, a Team level, and Organisational level and a Client level and then making these accessible to all employees from Executive right down to Front Line level.

The Most Important Pre-Requisite for Creating a Culture Based on Trust

2011-02-26T23:42:00.004Z

During two recent meetings the issue has come up as to what pre-requisites need to exist to engage senior leaders with the idea of creating a corporate culture based on Trust.

In one of the meetings there was a question as to whether it required both the organisation itself and the executives charged with running it to have a 'strong moral code', and while our feedback was that this is certainly an important corporate characteristic, it is not what is most important in getting executive and organisational buy-in to establishing a culture based on trust.

Our experience is that the most important pre-requisite is that the executive buy into the very tangible commercial results that can be achieved. We've referenced previously a client case study about Pepsi which highlights this and we now have available an extended interview with the President and Chief Executive of the business unit involved (Al Carey) which can be accessed via this link. His comments about the 'Speed of Trust' are perhaps the best way to make tangible these pre-requisite beliefs.

Understanding Passive-Aggressive Behaviour

2011-02-21T00:18:00.003Z

Harvard's The Conversation blog recently featured a post on 'How to Deal with a Passive-Aggressive Peer', which initially provided a definition from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) describing a passive-aggressive condition as one in which a person seems to actively comply with the desires and needs of others, but actually passively resists them. The NIH went on to explain that a passive-aggressive person may appear to comply with another's wishes and may even demonstrate enthusiasm for those wishes. However, the person will tend to perform the requested action too late to be helpful or in a way that is useless or aims to sabotage the action as a demonstration of anger that they cannot express in words.

The (entirely reasonable) interpretation of this type of behaviour is that it is undesirable and potentially destructive in any relationship, and so the authors describe some coping strategies that people can implement, stressing that the starting point should always be to give feedback

Tell them what you observe and the impact it's having and give them suggestions as to how they can approach the situation differently.

This is where FranklinCovey's approach to a situation such as this would diverge from the advice above, because a core truth we recognise in human behaviour is that everyone's behaviours make perfect sense to them in the context of the beliefs (or paradigms) they hold. As such, providing the type of feedback suggested above may not always be received in the same way it is intended, and may sometimes make matters worse.

The issue is that, in sizing up people, we typically focus on the behaviours that we observe, and have our own interpretations based on those observations. The alternative approach, which we work with client groups to develop, is to get people to consider what beliefs an individual must hold to behave the way they do. To work with others effectively, to influence them or to encourage them to change their behaviours our experience is that is the 'beliefs' which lie behind their 'behaviours' which are critical for us to understand as a pre-cursor for achieving effective results in the relationship.

Dealing With The 'Curse of Knowledge'

2011-02-19T23:33:00.003Z

The 'curse of knowledge' is a phrase originally associated with a 1989 paper in the Journal of Political economy referring to the phenomenon that once you've become an expert in a particular area its hard to imagine not knowing what you do.

In 2005, Andy Grove (co-founder of Intel) referred to the same phenomenon when he told Fortune Magazine that "When everyone knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin'". Put another way, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you've built around yourself.

The impact of this on the capacity to innovate was reinforced in a recent post by Jeffery Phillips (whose Innovate on Purpose blog has recently been voted in the top 3 Innovation blogs in a Blogging Innovation poll)

When your form seeks help with innovation, don't ask a consultant if they have deep expertise in your industry or technology, because if they do they are likely to share the same curse of knowledge as your internal teams. If you want help stretching your team, introduce third parties and consultants who have little or no knowledge of the 'facts' of your problem or industry, and who are broad thinkers willing to generate ideas that may seem a bit heretical to your business. No competitor is going to steal your market by copying what you do exactly. Disruption happens when a competitor spots an opportunity or offering and the firms in the industry are blinded due to their "knowledge". To innovate successfully, you've got to get outside your frame of reference and your knowledge. Otherwise you simply tinker with the existing models, rather than create new offerings.

What's striking about these comments and analyses is that they reflect closely the role FranklinCovey plays in its work with clients to enable different mindsets and perspectives when faced with new and different results they need to achieve. The capabilities we have that make this possible include

a long history of dealing with the fundamental principles of human effectiveness which allow us to look beyond (and help clients think beyond) modern day 'truths'
a process for helping clients succeed which enables us to engage in exploratory conversations that 'start anywhere and go everywhere', even on topics we are not experts in
an execution methodology which helps senior leaders to engage the thinking of those right down to the front line of their organisation in the new and different ways they can approach the strategic challenges facing the business (and that can be used on any strategy in any business from any industry)

Executive Frustration - And How to Overcome It

2011-02-10T00:31:00.005Z

A Booz & Company survey of more than 1,800 executives has found that the majority (across all industries) lack 'coherence', that is they struggle to ensure that day-to-day decisions are in line with their strategy and to allocate resources in a way that supports the strategy.

Some of the surveys specific findings were

A great majority of executives (64% of the survey respondents) say that their biggest frustration is "having too many conflicting priorities"
Executives report that their biggest challenges are (a) ensuring that day-to-day decisions are in line with strategy and (b) allocating resources in a way that really supports the strategy (56%)
The vast majority of executives (82%) say functional departments in their companies get competing demands from different business units
While most executives say their company has a clear way to create value, most (53%) say that this 'way' is not understood by employees and customers.
Respondents whose companies are deemed coherent by the Booz & Company algorithm are most likely to say profitability and revenue growth are above average. (They are more than twice as likely to say that their company has above-average profitability than those respondents whose company has been characterised as incoherent by the same algorithm.

How then to deal with the 'frustration' highlighted in the survey (and the sub-optimal results it clearly produces)? The approach (and capability) of Booz & Company, is that an organisation should work to identify its "distinctive blend of strategic direction and differentiated capabilities that give them the 'right to win' in their chosen markets".

This would seem to be a sensible starting point, but our experience is that - in and of itself - it is insufficient to guarantee success. This is because, even a strategy that provides a strong sense of direction and reflects well a company's differentiated capabilities, must then be handed over to 100s, 1000s or 10000s of people to execute on a daily and weekly basis, and it is often at this point that the issues highlighted in the survey results occur. As such, it is really the ability to enable a scalable and repeatable discipline of execution at all levels that provides the best chance of reduced frustration through fewer conflicting priorities, alignment of day-to-day decisions and resource allocations, business unit demands that complement (rather than conflict with) each other and greater clarity and commitment from all stakeholders (employees and customers) as to what the business is trying to achieve.