About/Contact Info I am a business consultant for a leading North American business and [+/-] technology services company and have an MBA specializing in management.
The most profitable companies are the ones which fully understand their markets and their competitors. According to the CEO Refresher, there are six ways to deliver customer value by becoming more market-focused:
Develop a sense of purpose around creating superior customer value and communicating this purpose to your entire organization. This approach also requires you to reward and encourage your employees to think in such ways.
Understand your customers better than they even understand themselves. Do this by conducting market research on what these customers want and need, either expressed or unexpressed, and by distilling and disseminating this research throughout your organization.
Understand the short- and long-term strengths, weaknesses and capabilities of your current and potential competitors. To do this, the authors state that you need to distill your competitors' strategies and tactics into meaningful evaluations.
What this means is that you must assess their capabilities within the competitive environment, and then determine how this will impact the competitiveness of your own organization. As with the previous step, you again share your findings with your organization.
Use a collaborative approach to develop and evaluate new products and services to meet the needs of your customers. Two recommended ways of doing this are by internal cross-functional training and by external "value-creation" partnerships with suppliers or channel partners. The goal here is to be profitable in creating customer value via collaborative methods such as these.
Develop your decision-making to focus on the long-term relationships you will be building with your customers. To do this, you must establish clear criteria for emphasizing the long-term, profit-oriented decision making. The article gives a great example with Toyota's shift in the early-1980s in wanting to be number one in market share to number one in satisfaction. The results for the company - in both categories - have been tremendous.
Finally, there must be strong leadership from the top. The CEO must develop a shared vision of strengthening the company's market culture that demonstrates commitment and involvement right from the top. This is demonstrated by the actions and behaviour of the CEO, and from how the organization rewards employees who share in the vision.
A challenge for business leaders is the ability to connect their company's strategy with the operational side of their business. The shortfall, in most cases, is the inability of leaders to break down the organizational strategy far enough to be able to understand the details needed for the higher level plans to work.
In an interview conducted last year with Strategy+Business, Jack Stahl, former CEO of Coca-Cola suggested that situational leadership is the key leadership component that can help bridge the gap between strategy and the operational details.
Situational leadership is, as the name would suggest, a form of leadership which states that different circumstances call for different types of leadership. This type of leadership, proposed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, suggests that there are four different types of leadership styles, each best suited to its own set of circumstances:
"Telling" - these leaders outline the roles and responsibilities of their subordinates and manage them closely. This is perhaps the most common of the four leadership styles.
"Selling" - these leaders engage their subordinates more than the telling-types, and while the decision ultimately rests with the leader, the leader is also receptive to input from the staff.
"Participating" - these leaders delegate all of the decision-making responsibilities to their subordinates, and only act as a participator or facilitator of the discussions.
"Delegating" - as with the participating types, these leaders delegate the decision-making responsibilities to their subordinates; unlike the participating types however, these leaders do not participate in or guide the direction of the the discussions.
Surely, the telling-types are the most common examples of leadership, and the selling-types perhaps the most inspirational, but can a case be made for either of the last two leadership styles, the more hands-off participating and delegating styles?
Stahl seems to think so. CEOs must have a thorough and detailed level of knowledge of their business, and their company leaders must have a more thorough picture of the operational aspects of the business. To bridge the gap between the organization's high-level strategy and its detailed-level operations, leaders must be able to recognize which of the four styles of leadership will work for any given situation. Having leaders who have the ability to connect the strategy to the details is paramount, and having them be able to adapt to any circumstance and employ the appropriate style of leadership is equally as important.
Many of you, I'm sure, may have read a previous post on the website which outlined the ways that business leaders can overcome resistance to change. Well, if you have, and you've applied some of what was outlined in the article, I'd love to hear your comments as to how things worked out.
Were you able to convince an employee unwilling to adapt to a changing work environment? Did you get them involved in the process in some way for them to buy in to the concept?
E-mail me or post your thoughts and experiences. It would be interesting to hear what else people have done with regards to this ever-challenging issue.
The Wall Street Journal online has some great advice for budding entrepreneurs. In the article, "The Essential Balance: From 15 People Who Know," you'll get to read some interesting tips on how to succeed in growing your business and on some key attributes which make a great leader. It sounds so simple and straightforward, but too often many of these tips just aren't followed or executed properly. Read the full article here.
There is an article from GovLeaders.org, a website dedicated to providing news and leadership advice to government managers that, in my opinion, is every bit as applicable to managers and would-be managers in the private sector.
Authors Robert W. Eichinger and Michael M. Lombardo discuss the importance of cultivating leadership from within an organization and that by keeping employees in staff-level jobs for the duration of their careers, organizations are missing out and potentially "wasting future talent."
From the article:
"...the pool of potential leaders for senior management positions is being restricted because women and other minority executives, who have primarily entered organizations via staff positions, are finding it difficult to make it into the senior-potential pool."
Organizations however, need not let this happen. By providing employees with challenging new jobs -- jobs which "teach how to cope with pressure, learn quickly, or deal with balky subordinates," an organization can allow its employees to grow and to learn the fine subtleties of true leadership.
Other recommendations include: offering coursework, providing employees with off-the-job experience (such as leadership roles in community service activities), and assigning employees to leadership positions in both "start-up" and "fix-it" type projects.
The full article outlines 22 ways in which leadership skills can be developed; first among that list is for management to evaluate staff professionals for management potential and intent early on.
By building leadership from within the organization, companies can enjoy the benefits of having an increased pool of leaders for both line and staff functions and an increase in the number of women and minorities making it into senior-level positions. The next article on this website will go into the benefits of the latter in more details.
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