Recently, we searched through the archives and selected our top 10 posts. They cover a broad range of topics—from how to be a great non-profit board member to defining a vision for your company’s future.

Hope you enjoy reading them, learn from them, and forward them on to others who might find them insightful.

All the Best,

Karen’s Top Ten

1. Tips for Leading Efficient, Effective, and Enjoyable Meetings
2. Emotional Intelligence: A Different Way of Being Smart
3. How to Use (and How to Choose) an Executive Coach
4. Get Better Results from Difficult Conversations
5. Making a Truly Excellent Hire
6. Defining a Vision for the Future
7. Who are You? Defining Your Purpose and Values
8. How to Be an Outstanding Non-Profit Board Member: 10 Tips
9. “George, can you step into my office for a minute?”: Delivering Effective Feedback
10. Be Creative: Success Flows Directly From Innovation!

Here’s a brief look at each of these favorites.

Tips for Leading Efficient, Effective, and Enjoyable Meetings

What if all our meetings could be decisive, productive, and no longer than necessary? Our 10 tips enable you to lead meetings that are to die for…not to die at.

Here’s how:

1. Determine if the meeting is really necessary.
2. Create and use a detailed agenda.
3. Ensure proper room arrangements are made.
4. Always have a facilitator, timekeeper, and scribe.
5. Set clear guidelines.
6. Manage participation.
7. Make periodic process checks.
8. Take and distribute action minutes.
9. Plan next steps.
10. Begin and end on time.

Emotional Intelligence: A Different Way of Being Smart

In this post about Emotional Intelligence we summarized Daniel Goleman’s seminal book, which now, from a quick check of Amazon, seems to have spawned a cottage industry of similar books and seminars.

Successful leaders need these emotional competencies:

• Self-awareness
• Self-management
• Empathy, and
• Social skill.

This popular blog discusses leadership styles in light of the EQ concept, and provides a wealth of specifics on learning emotional competencies, and using them to create leadership styles that yield positive results.

How to Use (and How to Choose) an Executive Coach

Executive coaching has become a preferred approach to executive development– it focuses specifically on your individual leadership development needs, and can be directly applied to your current work.
Our  2007 newsletter “How to Use (and How to Choose) an Executive Coach” shows how to successfully employ executive coaching.

Get Better Results from Difficult Conversations

There’s nothing easy about difficult conversations. Whether the talk is about performance issues—Her work is just not where it needs to be—or behavioral issues—He was late again today—many of us avoid having to deal with conversations that we know will be unpleasant. Inside every difficult conversation are three separate conversations:

• The talk about what happened
• The conversation about feelings
• The discussion about what this information says about each person’s identity

Re-read “Get Better Results from Difficult Conversations” to get yourself started on more productive difficult conversations.

Making a Truly Excellent Hire

Whether we are expanding our businesses or just replacing employees lost through attrition, the need to “get the right people on the bus” never goes away. “Making a Truly Excellent Hire” focuses on five best practices:

• Learn from those who leave.
• Know what you want in a new hire.
• Base your hiring decisions on more than your gut.
• Hire for smarts.
• Don’t expect your new hires to sink or swim—orient them.

Defining a Vision for the Future

“If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up someplace else.” So we began our newsletter, “Defining a Vision for the Future.” Today, the need to define a clearly envisioned future is essential, and the vision processes are as important as the outcomes.

Who are You? Defining Your Purpose and Values

Start with this: What is your organization’s fundamental reason for being? Our newsletter on Defining Your Purpose and Values,” explores this essential element of a sustainable organization. Check out the model we recommend for defining your mission and values.

How to Be an Outstanding Non-Profit Board Member: 10 Tips

One of the most gratifying aspects of giving back to our communities is service on non-profit boards. In a 2006 blog, we provide 10 tips for making ourselves outstanding non-profit board members.

1. Get to know the organization.
2. Be an advocate for it.
3. Recognize that serving is volunteer, but not optional.
4. Make commitments you can keep.
5. Know your job and stick to it.
6. Find ways to translate what you know to benefit the non-profit.
7. Expand your skills.
8. Recognize that fundraising is a reality and a responsibility.
9. Don’t spread yourself too thin.
10. Rotate off.

Your favorite non-profit will thank you!

“George, can you step into my office for a minute?”: Delivering Effective Feedback

Giving candid and timely feedback may be one of the most neglected of all business skills. We all know we need feedback. So why don’t we give it?

1. We don’t know how.
2. We wait too long.
3. We don’t want to be hurtful.
4. We lose focus on why feedback is important.
5. We are fearful.
6. We are not measured on it.

For more information, see the full 2008 blog. 

Be Creative: Success Flows Directly From Innovation!

In our newsletter on creativity, we took a look at the creative process of Twyla Tharp, one of America’s foremost choreographers. In her book on developing creativity, Tharp comments: “It takes skill to bring something you’ve imagined into the world! No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that’s both painstaking and rewarding. It takes time.”

We hope you will enjoy TWC’s Top Ten and feel free to pass them along, post on Facebook or Twitter—and let us know how the Wunderlin Company can help you.

__________________________________________________

A number of The Wunderlin Company workshops address these newsletter topics in more detail—Facilitating for Results and Advanced Models for Facilitation, Coaching as a Leadership Skill,  Effective Meetings, Myers-Briggs and Difficult Conversations.  For a full schedule or registration information, check out the workshop page on our website.

And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count.
It’s the life in your years.
~Abraham Lincoln

2008 is proving to be a year of tremendous challenge for many of us. The financial markets continue to decline, oil prices have ascended to unimaginable prices – and then descended at a “bends-inducing” rate, there is continued uncertainty about the health of the global economy, contamination in the food supply… You name it, it seems like many areas of our lives are in turmoil.

In our year-end issue, we recognize these stresses and challenge ourselves to “seize the day!” That’s right: carpe diem, make the most of current opportunities. There is much we cannot control—so let’s focus on what we can control.

We are firm believers that people who make things happen – who seize the day – act as if time is at a valuable premium. (Well, isn’t it?) When we say “seize the day,” we mean seize this moment, develop a powerful sense of urgency around your projects and plans. Your sense of urgency is what makes dreams come alive and work for you.

Seizing the day is one way of being (at least slightly) in control of your life – even while parts of it seem to be spinning out of control.  Winston Churchill said, “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”

While you may not be able to control the world, you can control how you respond to it. So wake up! Get going! Life is short and time is fleeting…Over the next six weeks, we’ll give you our top suggestions for how you can seize the day. We begin with this one:

Push yourself to breakthrough thinking
Successful inventors, entrepreneurs and writers say they are often asked where their big ideas came from.

So goes the lead line in a story by Mickey Meece in the New York Times about the 2008 IdeaFestival which happens to take place in my hometown, Louisville, KY. Meece’s NYT article points out that breakthrough thinkers “will acknowledge that serendipity often plays a role. But equally as important, they say, is having an open mind — especially in tumultuous times like these. Big and small ideas are out there, they say, if you are looking for them.”

Now heading into its 10th year, the IdeaFestival (IF) is a world-class event that attracts leading and highly diverse thinkers from across the nation and around the globe to explore and celebrate innovation, imagination, and cutting-edge ideas.  The multi-day festival is presented as a non-linear program designed to stretch people’s horizons and promote breakthrough thinking… utilizing multiple venues to showcase, discuss and “connect” important ideas in science, the arts, design, business, film, technology, education, etc.
I attended the IdeaFestival this year and came away with a number of business relevant ideas. Under normal circumstances I would not be in a conference for gamers or neuro-biologists, but the opportunity for my brain to bounce literally from one thought-provoking and unfamiliar topic to another provoked new ways of thinking for me.

A surgeon, a global leader in his specialty, attended this year and was so energized by the experience he is proposing that he and all his colleagues attend next year to assess for themselves whether they are really thinking innovatively and pushing themselves to the highest levels of new thinking.

Here’s advice from one of the IF presenters, Jane McGonigal, a top game designer and future forecaster: “You have to systematically expose yourself to things outside your domain because the breakthrough ideas will come from areas where you are not constrained by doing the daily job.”

Innovators at the 2008 IdeaFestival offered 10 suggestions on how to come up with new ideas. Click here to see their list.

Recently I worked with a leadership team on the end phase of developing a strategic plan. We kept crossing back and forth between finalizing the development of strategies and goals and beginning to implement those elements. We would dive into execution detail, catch ourselves, and then elevate the conversation to finish the strategies and goals.

Being in that moment started me thinking about the best practices for executing strategy. And, experience being the best teacher, I realized that the best resource for identifying pragmatic best practices was to turn to clients who had developed visions, values, goals and strategies, and were now focused on implementing those strategies. In a series of interviews, I asked them to reflect on the practices that lead to successful outcomes and measurable progress toward organizational goals. Turns out, it is never a straight line.

In this edition of Changing Times, we focus on those practices that have led to success. Because organizations’ strategic plans are highly privileged information, we have kept the identities of our interviewees and their companies anonymous. We thank them for their contributions to making this newsletter relevant. Here’s the good advice they offered

Best Practice #1:
Design your strategic planning process with the intent for execution.

One client noted that, in retrospect, their process should have been called: “strategic planning and implementation.” He noted that when the plan was written, there was a huge collective exhale, “as if we were done. In fact, the tough work was just beginning.” His organization has since learned to seamlessly meld conversations about strategy with the work to execute them.

In their book: Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, authors Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan note that “an astonishing number of strategies fail because leaders don’t make a realistic assessment of whether the organization can execute the plan.” Management has to ask itself tough questions and have the courage to answer them realistically:

• How good are the assumptions upon which the plan hinges?

• Do we have the organizational capability to execute the plan?

• What do we need to do in the near and medium terms to make the plan work in the long run?

• Can we adapt the plan to rapid changes in the business environment?

• Do we have the right people in place to execute the strategy?

Here are some further insights from our clients’ experiences:

• “We wanted to make sure we could implement our strategic plan so we designed the process with that in mind. We were in a time of transition in leadership and we wanted to make sure the new plan had the chance of standing the test of time and transition. As it turned out, our strategic plan was one of the things that attracted our new CEO to the organization. He had never seen a plan quite like it and so he bought into the plan before he arrived at his new job.”

• “Once we were well into the process of strategic planning we realized that we did not have the organizational capacity to implement it. We simply did not have the level of skills and systems in place to execute our strategies. The first year or so we spent correcting weaknesses, rather than exploiting strengths. We focused our efforts on rebuilding the company in a more robust fashion. Now we are positioned for growth and strength. This recognition of weaknesses would never have surfaced if we had not gone through a strategic planning process.”

• “You can stumble into the trap of thinking that when you finish the plan, you are done. But that is where the work really begins. You have to have a regular process to ensure implementation, and to reassess periodically and, if need be, recalibrate the plan.”

• And finally, one client noted that the strategic planning process made his organization really think about “who we are and what we really wanted for the business. Up to the time of our strategic planning, very little thought was given to our future. We were at risk of losing company value permanently.”

Best Practice #2:
Leadership must lead.

“An organization’s leadership must buy into the strategic process and the outcome of the plan,” said one client. In fact, in our experience, one of the few uniquely executive functions is to set strategic vision. To reach success, senior leadership must be integrally involved, and has to lead both the planning phase and the implementation phase. Senior leadership has the line of sight to see out into the future while keeping the whole organization in its peripheral view. It is their job to manage the tensions of allocating scarce resources to both the strategic and operational needs of the business.

Bossidy and Charan put it this way: “A contemporary strategic plan must be an action plan that business leaders can rely on to reach their business objectives. In creating it, you as a leader have to ask whether and how your organization can do the things that are needed to achieve its goals . To have realism in your strategy you have to link it to your people process: Do you have the right people in place to execute the strategy? You’ve got to link your strategic plans specifics to your operating plan, so that the moving multiple parts of the organization are aligned to get you where you want to go.”

Here’s what another one of our clients had to say about the role of leadership: “You have to have leaders who can see across the organization. You can’t implement strategy in functional silos. Strategy, by its very nature, causes groups and coalitions of people to come together and think about improvement beyond what we can do on our own.”

Best Practice #3:
Translate plans into manageable “bites.”

A recent Harvard Business Review article entitled: Action Plans: The Architecture of Implementation, noted that leaders must be skilled at turning strategic plans into action plans, executed at the unit level. They set forth five tips for crafting action plans:

• Keep it simple. An overly complex plan will confuse and frustrate.

• Involve the people who will execute the plan. Implementation plans are more likely to succeed if they are not simply imposed on the people asked to push them forward. If the implementers are involved in developing the action plan, they’ll be more dedicated to its success.

• Structure your action plan in achievable chunks. Build an action plan that is both manageable and achievable.

• Specify roles and responsibilities. Every planned outcome should be the acknowledged responsibility of one or more individuals. Those individuals should publicly state that they accept their roles.

• Make it flexible. A good implementation plan is a living document open to revision.

Best Practice #4:
Weave strategic thinking into day-to-day operations.

Balancing short-term business issues with strategic vision challenges many organizations. Here is how several of our clients have approached this challenge:

• “It is the role of leadership to bring balance between the day-to-day and unplanned things that happen while still moving the ball down the field related to the strategic vision of the organization. Sometimes it’s little victories and other times you can make great strides. But, you’ll never do either if you don’t assess your progress in a planful way.”

• “Our strategic plan helped us identify new markets and helped us see how vulnerable we were because our market focuses were so narrow. So each day, we work to broaden our customer base.”

• “Our values need to be reinforced in all we do – from developing employee rewards that are tied to our values to stepping forward and acknowledging when one of our values has been breached.”

Best Practice #5
Measure progress – both financial and nonfinancial.

The late management guru Peter Drucker was known for saying: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” No truer statement can be made for improving your odds of success in implementing your strategic plan.

The type of measuring system is not nearly so important as the fact that the organization has one and uses it rigorously. A number of our clients have adopted a balanced scorecard approach to measuring progress. Others have found successful approaches that tie part of the existing management reporting into strategic plan measurement. Still other clients have implemented a project management process that increases their ability to analyze opportunities and have higher levels of accountability.

All are designed around performance metrics that are both relevant and clear, and feature both financial and nonfinancial performance measurements. All link their strategic plans to their annual business plans and budgets. One of our clients recommended putting one person in charge of measuring progress: “Someone has to be the watchdog of the process.”

Best Practice #6
Communicate, communicate, and communicate some more.

All your strategic activities must be tied together so that employees can understand the strategy and the progress toward the goals. Setting progress measures in terms that are relevant to employees provides them with a sense of how they contribute to the strategy.

Here’s how one of our clients explained this best practice: “People understand the strategy when you do something that changes their world. For example, once they could see and experience lean strategy, everyone in the building understood the strategy better. We would not have gotten the same result if we had shown a slide show on lean manufacturing. You have to bring the learning and the execution close together.”

Talk about your strategies – all the time. Make sure employees understand the organization’s strategies and why they are essential. Talk about how you expect them to play a role in executing the project and initiatives that flow from those strategies. Provide updates at all-employee meetings, talk about it in all your staff meetings, track it in performance reviews, feature it in your newsletter, and keep it front and center as you go about your day, week, month and year. Results will follow!

We, at the Wunderlin Company, believe that is it as important for you to know who you are as it is to know where you are going, for where you are going will change as the world around you changes. Who you are defines the enduring character of your organization. It captures its very soul.

So, who are you? I’m not asking about your company’s current product line or customer segments. I’m asking: “What is your organization’s fundamental reason for being?”

It’s not an easy question to answer. It’s not something you can invent, much less fake. It comes from looking deep inside your organization and discovering your company’s timeless character.

This issue is devoted to helping you understand the need for this soul-searching task and to give you some pointers on how to get started on this important work.

• Overview: Defining Who You Are and Where You are Going

• Discovering Your Organization’s Purpose and Mission

• It Helps to Have a Personal Mission Statement

[audio:http://www.wunderlin.com/audio/changingtimes2.mp3]

Defining your organization’s purpose or mission is only the first step to knowing where you are going in the future. This journey is one of discovery. It cannot be deduced by looking at the external environment. You come to understand it only by looking inside. It has to be authentic. You cannot fake it. It is an exercise that enables you to create a clear picture of how you will advance into an uncertain future. By defining your purpose and then working to discover your values and vision, you become clear about how you will remain steadfast to your purpose and values while your business strategies and practices endlessly adapt to a changing world. In the next issue of “Changing Times,” we will look at how you go about envisioning your future and then working to reach it by defining strategies and short-term action.

Defining who you are, what you stand for, and what your envisioned future looks like is a process that continues indefinitely. Your purpose and values probably won’t ever change; your vision looks far out into the future; your strategies should be firmly in place; but your short-term actions require frequent review, for they will change as you accomplish some and set new goals.

What is it About Your Company That Will Last at Least 100 Years?

If you can answer this question, chances are you are close to defining your organization’s core values and purpose (or mission). For it is the qualities that will last “forever” that define what your company stands for. In the case of Disney, those folks will tell you that they are in business “to make people happy” – not to build theme parks and make cartoons.

According to business authors James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, you should think of your organization’s values and purpose as the “glue that holds the enterprise together.” Your core values are the handful of guiding principles by which your company navigates. Collins and Porras tell us in an article they wrote for Harvard Business Review that your purpose is the “guiding star on the horizon – forever pursued but never reached.”

Companies that enjoy enduring success have a clear picture of how they will advance into an uncertain future. “But,” clarifies Collins and Porras, “they are equally clear about how they will remain steadfast, about the values and purposes that they will always stand for” – even 100 years from now!

Core Values

Core values are a small set (usually between three and five) of timeless guiding principles. They are the essential and enduring tenets of an organization. They are so fundamental and deeply held that they will change seldom, if ever. They require no external justification; they are important to people inside the organization.

“To identify the core values of your own organization, push with relentless honesty to define what values are truly central,” advise Collins and Porras. You must not confuse your values (which do not change) with operating practices, business strategies, or cultural norms (which should be open to change).

One way to begin discerning your organization values is to take a look at a long list of value statements and rank how important each value is to the organization and how well the organization is living out that value. If a number of people in your organization go through this exercise, the information gleaned becomes the focus of continued conversations about what are the truly essential and enduring tenets of your organization.

Purpose

If you ask your management team to define your company’s purpose and they say something like: “We exist to maximize shareholder wealth.” Tell them that’s not good enough. It does not inspire anyone and provides precious little guidance!

Instead, say authors Collins and Porras, ask these questions: “If you woke up tomorrow morning with enough money in the bank to retire, what is it about this company that would make you want to continue working here? What deeper sense of purpose would motivate you to continue to dedicate your precious creative energies to this company’s efforts?”

One goal of this exercise is to find people who are predisposed to share your company’s core values and purpose. “Companies more than ever need to have a clear understanding of their purpose in order to make work meaningful and thereby attract, motivate, and retain outstanding people.”

Another powerful way to distill your company’s purpose is to answer the five whys. Here’s how Collins and Porras explain it: Start with a descriptive statement. “We make X products.” or “We deliver X services,” and then ask, “Why is that important?” Ask it five times. After a few whys, you’ll find that you’re getting down to the fundamental purpose of your organization. You will start to articulate the very soul of your organization.
Being able to articulate your values and purpose is not an easy task. When attempting it, the point is not to create a perfect statement, but to gain a deeper understanding of what your organization really stands for that can then be expressed in a multitude of ways.

Core Purpose: A Company’s Reason for Being

Here’s a look at some core purpose statements for some successful companies.* Notice, none of them say: To maximize shareholder value!3M: To solve unsolved problems innovatively.

Fannie Mae: To strengthen the social fabric by continually democratizing home ownership.
Hewlett-Packard: To make technical contributions for the advancement and welfare of humanity.
Mary Kay Cosmetics: To give unlimited opportunity to women.
Merck: To preserve and improve human life.
Nike: To experience the emotion of competition, winning and crushing competitors.
Radio Sound: A company on the move providing people on the move with the technology to stay in touch.
Sony: To experience the joy of advancing and applying technology for the benefit of the public.
StemWood: Firmly rooted; stemming out.
The Wunderlin Company: To help companies identify and implement change.
Wal-Mart: To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people.

*Sources:
• “Building Your Company’s Vision,” by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Harvard Business Review, September-October 1996
• “The Mission Statement Book,” by Jeffrey Abrahams
• The Wunderlin Company

It Helps to Have a Personal Mission Statement

Before launching an effort to discover the mission of your organization, you may want to spend some time looking within yourself to ascertain what your PERSONAL mission is in life. Ideally, you want your mission statement and the statements of those who work within your organization to align with your corporate one.

Stephen R. Covey, author of the bestseller, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” advises us to live our lives “with the end in mind.” By this, he means “to begin today with an image, picture or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined. Each part of your life – today’s behavior, tomorrow’s behavior, next week’s behavior, next month’s behavior – can be examined in the context of the whole, of what really matters most to you.”

Covey believes that the most effective way to begin with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed. It focuses on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based. He advises that because each individual is unique, a personal mission statement will reflect that uniqueness, both in content and form. He likens a personal mission statement to the United States Constitution. “It’s fundamentally changeless.” He notes that the U.S. Constitution is the standard by which every law in the country is evaluated. It is the foundation and the center that enables people to ride through such major traumas as the Civil War, Vietnam, or Watergate. It is the written standard, the key criterion by which everything else is evaluated and directed.

A personal mission statement based on correct principles becomes the same kind of standard for an individual. It becomes a personal constitution, the basis for making major, life-directing decisions, the basis for making daily decisions in the midst of the circumstances and emotions that affect our lives. It empowers individuals with timeless strength in the swirl of change.

With a mission statement, says Covey, we can flow with change. It becomes our bedrock or foundation – solid ground beneath our feet.

Once you have a sense of mission, you have the beginnings of your own proactivity. You have the vision and values that can direct your life. You have the basic statement or tenet from which you set your long- and short-term goals. You have the power of a written constitution against which every decision concerning the most effective use of your time, your talents, and your energies can be measured.

A Letter from Karen

This issue was ready to go to press when the tragedies of September 11, 2001 consumed our lives and changed us forever. To any of you whose families and friends are affected by those events, our prayers and thoughts are with you daily.

Like many of you, I have worked to put one foot in front of the other, and to “go back to our normal lives.” What we struggle to remind ourselves is that our heightened sense of evil doesn’t negate the goodness on which we build our daily existence. We lean on hope to get us through each day.

In the last edition of this newsletter we focused on how clearly identifying values and purpose can propel your company forward. In this edition, we focus on your trajectory – charting the best course for that forward momentum. It is truly difficult to focus on the future in these uncertain times. And, it may be more critical now than ever. It is how you can restore hope to your organization.

• Defining a Vision – Overview
• A Visioning Process
• Using Future Search to Define Common Ground

[audio:http://www.wunderlin.com/audio/changingtimes3.mp3]

Who Needs a Vision?

“If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up somewhere else.”

What a common sense notion—how frequently do you find yourself or your organization headed in a clear direction?

Experience shows the powerful effect of defining a clear and ambitious desired future. One client we work with recently initiated a round of strategic planning. We began by going back to a simple one-afternoon vision and goal-setting session we had held three years ago. To everyone’s surprise and satisfaction, the company had achieved their “vision” sales target for 2002 two years ahead of schedule! And, when that target was first stated, it was clearly ambitious beyond the team’s wildest imagination. That success has propelled the company to set a new vision for quintupling those sales!

A vision is a short, clear statement of what you want to be true for you or your organization at a specific stated point in time.

From our view, the benefit of visioning can be comprehensive. Personal planning is a tremendously useful endeavor. Work teams, departments, organizations and entire companies have all engaged in successful visioning work.

How Do We Make Sure Our Visioning is Meaningful?

We have found several attributes that distinguish successful visioning efforts from those that are limited to being “words on a wall:”

Be inclusive/involve lots of people. We know folks support what they help create. This clearly applies to defining an ambitious future.
Work deliberately. This work needs to move ahead relentlessly forward AND at a pace that the work groups can keep up with.
Envision thoughtfully. When designing vision processes, we frequently allow for “percolation time.” When vision work groups have overnights to consider their work, and breaks in the process for individual reflection, they frequently come back from those introspections with breakthroughs in their thinking. This is by nature both a public discursive process and a private introspective process. Successful processes allow for both kinds of work.

“It’s the Process, Stupid!”

You won’t be surprised to hear this from us, because our observation is that the work of thinking about the future is as valuable as the final deliverable. We believe that is why folks who look back on their visioning work are frequently surprised at how very successful they have been even though they did not experience themselves as focused on the vision’s achievement. We believe that the visioning process plants seeds that grow and flourish in your organization’s work, often subconsciously. This phenomenon reinforces the need for your process to be inclusive.

Prime the Pump

As your work group defines its future, be sure to allow time and space early on for external scanning. Groups who steep themselves in emerging trends, best practices and big ideas from other companies and industries can develop their visions with confidence. External benchmarking and industry analysis enable you to set your vision on a solid understanding of the environment in which your organization exists.

“Just Do It.”

Whatever you do, begin soon. Setting a vision is a process you learn by doing. And, the more you do it, the better your visioning skills become. So, jump in – the current is strong, the thrills are great and the rewards are immeasurable.

Getting Started

The following is a simple exercise we frequently use to help begin the visioning process. We follow Stephen Covey’s “habit” of Beginning with the End in Mind. We find that visioning work can be made both tangible and compelling to work groups.

A Visioning Exercise

Purpose: To imagine fully the compelling future towards which you want to work.

It is January, 200x (you select the appropriate time horizon for the organization) and you have just learned that your organization will be featured in Fortune (or your industry’s most highly regarded magazine’s next issue). In addition to a cover photo, the magazine will include a full feature on your organization. Your organization’s outstanding success over the last five years is the driving force behind your selection for the cover story.

1. What/who is on the cover of the magazine? Draw it on a flip chart.
2. What is the title of the article?
3. Write an outline of the article. Be sure to include quotes from customers, professional staff and employees, industry experts, and competitors. Describe the factors that have contributed to your outstanding success. Note the barriers that had to be overcome. How did you do it?

Your article should describe feasible events that people are capable of doing. It needs to be a scenario in which you believe, and for which you would work. Do not let concerns regarding cost or difficulty limit your description of your desired future. This activity is designed to help you identify what you want. Another step in the process is to match what you want against your resource limitations.

Groups Use Future Search Process to Define Common Ground

So, you are convinced your department or organization should have a clear direction towards which it is moving. How do you do that? There are a number of effective ways to define a vision. One that we have found to be particularly effective is called Future Search.

Future Search is built on the notion that the people in a given organization or system know best how to define the desired future. And, the more of them who are included in the vision process the better. The Future Search process begins with an assessment of the past; frequently employing 30-foot timelines on butcher paper to create a collective view of the journey thus far. Then, the process is enriched with the insertion of external trends and developments that can and will affect the organization’s future. The process then moves forward to creating a “map” of the current reality. This map organizes the trends and factors that the group names as important, and in the process moves from their individual listing of “my issues” to a collective view of “our issues”. The mapping process is one of the most powerful aspects of the Future Search process because it enables the group to build a picture of what is often a complex and changing environment. For many groups, just creating the map helps them embrace and understand their future direction.

Once the map is created the group works to analyze it, defining the most critical forces going forward. Then future search leads the group to an assessment of today’s organization, the group is now ready to imagine and write about the future. Participants are encouraged to build a picture of their reality. In the words of Jack Welch, the group defines “reality as it is, not as you wish it was.” Armed with this view of the desired envisioned future that is specific, and is portrayed as if it had already happened, individuals then work with each other to identify common elements in their visions, and with the assistance of the facilitator, recombine individual work into a collective draft of the future vision. That draft is then brought forward to larger groups of the organization for validation and refinement.

Future Search enables groups to articulate their future by providing experiential structures, and creating a high energy, focused environment for defining common ground. We recommend it highly!

From our Bookshelf

There are a number of excellent books and articles on the power of visioning. Here is a short list of our favorites:

Built to Last, Collins and Porras.

How to Get Control of your Time and Your Life, Alan Lakein.

Future Search: An Action Guide to Finding Common Ground for Action in Organizations and Communities, Sandra Janoff, Marvin Ross Weisbord.

Whistle While You Work; Heeding Your Life’s Calling, Richard J. Leider and Daivd A. Shaperio.

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, Peter M. Senge (Editor), Art Kleiner (Editor), Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith.

If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, You’ll Probably End Up Somewhere Else, David Campbell.

Positive Image; Positive Energy; Positive Action

This new approach to organizational change, called Appreciative Inquiry, emphasizes and builds on a company’s strengths and potential. It asks the question: “What is working around here?” Organizations around the world find that the answers create tremendous positive energy.

Here’s how a typical Appreciative Inquiry session might look, as described by leading practitioners and authors Jane Magruder Watkins and Bernard J. Mohr in a Harvard Business School article by Tom Krattenmaker, entitled, “Change through Appreciative Inquiry.”

1. Make the focus of inquiry positive. Seek out what is good and right about your organization. A company interested in improving client relations could ask: “When have customers been most pleased with our service, and what can we learn and apply from those moments of success?
2. Elicit positive stories. Use interviews to evoke stories that illuminate an organization’s distinctive strengths. When the organization is functioning at its best, what characteristics are present? Unlike data or lists, positive stories stir imagination and generate excitement about the company and what it is capable of accomplishing in the future.
3. Discover common themes. Through the shared stories, find what elements are common to the moments of greatest success and fulfillment. Look for the ones that are most promising and inspiring as components of a desired future. According to Watkins, “The themes become the basis for collectively imagining what the organization would be like if the exceptional moments uncovered in the interviews become the norm in the organization.”
4. Create shared images for the future. This stage in the process asks employees to create a future in which the high points identified in the stories are the everyday reality. The team then designs the structure – the policies, business processes, resources, etc. – for achieving the desired future.
5. Find innovative ways to create that future. Finally, the employees identify specific ways to bring the preferred future to life.
   

Want to Learn More?

You can read more about Appreciative Inquiry. Here are some books we recommend: The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry, by Sue Annis Hammond. Appreciative Inquiry, Collaborating for Change, by David Cooperrider & Diana Whitney, Berrett-Koehler. Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination, by Bernard J. Mohr and Jane Magruder Watkins. The Power of Appreciative Inquiry, by Diana Whitney & Amanda Trosten-Bloom. Lessons from the Field, Applying Appreciative Inquiry, edited by Sue Annis Hammond, & Cathy Royal, Ph.d. Encyclopedia of Positive Questions Volume One: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Bring out the Best in Your Organization, Diana Whitney, David Cooperrider, Amanda Trosten-Bloom, and Brian S. Kaplin.

Bing Crosby may have been on to something when he sang these lyrics by Johnny Mercer in the 1944 patriotic film, Here Come the Waves. Whereas in the past, much of psychology and organizational change initiatives focused on fixing what was “broken,” there is now a whole body of research that points to the effectiveness of building on strengths and competencies — focusing on “what’s working,” not “what’s broken.” In the human realm, this emphasis is called Positive Psychology; in the corporate world, it’s called Appreciative Inquiry.

In our work with individuals and organizations, we see the power of this positive emphasis — and, along with our clients — it awes us. During a recent Wunderlin Company workshop built around the book Now, Discover Your Strengths, Chip Keeling, VP of Corporate Communications for E. ON U.S. stood up and said to the group, “I used to say, ‘Don’t let X go to any more writing courses. She is already an excellent writer. Have her go to a workshop that addresses a developmental need.’ I now realize the folly of spending our very-limited training dollars trying to make improvements in areas of weakness. We need to focus our training budget on developing our talents into strengths — making our best writers better.”

In this issue of Changing Times, we share resources and techniques for building on your strengths and also on those of the people you manage, and we share some ways to build a strengths-based organization.

So, as Crosby sings, let’s:

“Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.”

Focus on Exercising Your Strengths

“The real tragedy of life is not that each of us doesn’t have enough strengths, it’s that we fail to use the ones we have.” — from Now, Discover Your Strengths

Ask most people what their strengths are and they have a hard time articulating them. Ask them about their weaknesses and they become experts. They spend untold time and effort trying to repair their flaws while their strengths are consistently underused and underappreciated.

In their book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton help individuals identify their talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy consistently, excellent performance. Based on the Gallup study of over two million people, the authors introduce 34 dominant themes with thousands of possible combinations, and reveal how individuals can translate them into personal and career success. (The inside flap of the book’s jacket includes a unique identification number that allows you access to the StrengthsFinder Profile on the Internet. This web-based assessment analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your five most powerful signature themes.)

Buckingham and Clifton advocate the need to become an expert at finding, describing, applying, practicing, and refining your strengths. The authors challenge their readers to adopt the two following assumptions and launch a strengths revolution in their own organizations:

1. Each person’s talents are enduring and unique.
2. Each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strengths.

They believe that these two assumptions explain why great managers are careful to look for talent in every role, why they focus people’s performance on outcomes rather than forcing them into a stylistic mold, why they disobey the Golden Rule and treat each person differently, and why they spend the most time with their best people. In short, they propose, “these two assumptions explain why the world’s best managers break all the rules of conventional management wisdom.”

The authors encourage you to “look inside yourself, try to identify your strongest threads, reinforce them with practice and learning, and then either find or carve out a role that draws on these strengths every day.” They promise, “When you do, you will be more productive, more fulfilled, and more successful.”

How Full is Your Bucket?

Donald Clifton (one of the authors of Now, Discover Your Strengths) collaborated with his grandson, Tom Rath, to write How Full is Your Bucket This slim, upbeat book offers positive strategies for work and life. Organized around a simple theory of a dipper and bucket, the book teaches you how to increase the positive moments in your life — while reducing the negative. The theory goes like this: “Each of us has an invisible dipper. When we use that dipper to fill other people’s bucket — by saying or doing things to increase their positive emotions — we also fill our own bucket. But when we use that dipper to dip from others’ buckets — by saying or doing things that decrease their positive emotions — we diminish ourselves.”

As you read the book, you will discover the power of bucket filling in your own life.

Uncovering and Understanding Your Strengths

Before you can apply and practice and refine your strengths, you need to figure out what they are. We use a number of diagnostic tools to help our clients uncover and understand their strengths.

• We’ve already mentioned the web-based StrengthsFinder Profile that forms the core of the book Now, Discover Your Strengths. The profile uncovers your five signature themes – each of which contains the promise of a strength.
• Ever since founding The Wunderlin Company in 1992, we’ve been an advocate for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® — both Step I and II. We use MBTI® to help individuals gain a deeper understanding of themselves and how they interact with others. We find it to be a powerful tool for helping people transform themselves — improving how they communicate, learn and work.
• Right brain. Left brain. Whole brain. The Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) measures how individuals’ thinking preferences, or “brain dominance,” affect the way they work, learn, and communicate.
• 360° Feedback is literally an opportunity to receive feedback from all the groups of people with whom you work. (Picture yourself at the center of a circle.) Unlike a traditional performance evaluation, 360 feedback includes evaluative data from peers, direct reports, administrative associates, customers and any other group with whom you work directly. Most 360 instruments provide both quantitative and qualitative feedback and can be invaluable in forming a new perspective on areas of strength and opportunities for development. In a previous issue of Changing Times, we featured an article on the use of 360° Feedback in the coaching process. Click here to read that article.
• DISC Personal Profile System is personality testing profiling using a model of normal behavior. Based on the 1928 work of psychologist William Moulton Marston, it helps people explore behavior across four primary dimensions: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness.
• The Predictive Index Survey is a managerial assessment tool that provides insight into the natural workplace behaviors of prospective and existing employees, resulting in improved hiring decisions, team performance, overall communication, and workforce productivity.

We believe that you must know where you are now in order to know where you want to be in the future. You need to know where you excel and where you struggle. This rich and objective data becomes the platform for your professional development.

Strategies for Dealing with Your Weaknesses

We hope by now that we’ve convinced you to stop dwelling on your weakness and instead focus on your strengths. This doesn’t mean you can ignore your weaknesses; instead, we challenge you to find ways to manage them. Here are suggestions offered by the authors of Now, Discover Your Strengths:

• Get a little better at it. While this strategy may not be much fun, it is often the only workable one. Some activities are baseline requirements for almost any role. Authors Buckingham and Clifton cite such examples as communicating your ideas, or listening to others, or organizing your life so that you are where you need to be on any given day. The authors advise you to hunker down “or these weaknesses may well undermine all your great strengths in other areas.”
• Design a support system. Often people will come up with an idiosyncratic support system that serves as a crutch for one of their persistent talent weaknesses. The authors suggest that “it might be as straight-forward as buying a Palm Pilot to help you keep track of your life or as peculiar as imagining your audience naked in order to calm your nerves before a speech.” Whatever it is, if it works, go for it.
• Use one of your strongest themes to overwhelm your weakness. We often recommend this strategy to Wunderlin Company coaching clients. For example, one of our clients was a very effective sales person; his customers loved dealing with him because he was always so knowledgeable and a creative problem-solver. However, his internal staff found him very difficult to deal with. Eventually he learned to use the questioning and listening skills that worked so well with his clients on his internal staff to improve results and relationships.
• Find a partner. It takes a strong person to ask for help. It requires a willingness to admit your imperfections. However, if you do, you can often find a complementary partner. Think of the “numbers-blind” entrepreneur who deliberately partners with a “numbers-mad” accountant, or the gene-splitting genius who sensibly seeks out a legal expert to secure approval for their miracle drug. Together, they are strong.
• Just stop doing it. That’s right. As a last resort stop doing it. Three outcomes may surprise you. First, how little anyone cares. Second, how much respect you can earn. And third, how much better you feel. The authors advise, “Confess that you have lost the battle with your unfixable weakness, and you may well win the trust and respect of those around you.”

Each of these strategies can help you as you strive to build your life around your strengths. But no matter which strategy you use, advise the authors, “Never lose your perspective.” They explain, “These strategies do not transform your weaknesses into strengths. They are designed to help you manage around a weakness so that it doesn’t get in the way of your strengths.” Think of them as damage control.

Two Ways of Looking at Life

Martin S.P. Seligman, Ph.D. has spent more than 30 years researching the influence of optimism on our lives and developing techniques to help people rise above pessimism and the depression that accompanies negative thoughts and to build a life of rewards and lasting happiness.

In his groundbreaking national bestseller, Learned Optimism: How to change Your Mind and Your Life, Dr. Seligman shows you how to chart a new approach to living with “flexible optimism.” He advocates that optimism can be learned by practicing thought patterns that encourage it. In his book he provides step-by-step techniques designed to change your interior dialogue, allowing you to learn to be optimistic.

In Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Seligman explains that the way we habitually explain bad events indicates our explanatory style. This style reflects a habit of thought, learned in childhood and adolescence. It stems directly from your view of your place in the world. Do you think you are valuable and deserving (optimistic), or worthless and hopeless (pessimistic)? According to Seligman, there are three crucial dimensions to your explanatory style: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.

Permanence: People who give up easily believe the causes of the bad events that happen to them are permanent. They believe that the bad events will persist and that they will always be there to affect their lives. If you think about bad things in “always’s” and “nevers,” chances are you have a pessimistic style. However, if you think in “sometimes” and “lately,” using qualifiers and blame bad events on transient conditions, you have an optimistic style. For example:

The optimistic style of explaining good events is just the opposite of the optimistic style of explaining bad events. People who believe good events have permanent causes are more optimistic than people who believe they have temporary causes.

Pervasiveness. While permanence is about time, pervasiveness is about space. Seligman explains it this way, “Some people can put their troubles neatly into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it — their job, for example, or their love life — is suffering. Others bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels.” A pessimist often makes universal explanations for their failures and gives up on everything when failure strikes in one area. Optimists, on the other hand, will make specific explanations and may become helpless in that one area of their lives, yet go forward in the others.

Whether or not we have hope depends on these two dimensions of our explanatory style — pervasiveness and permanence. Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope. Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.

Personalization. When bad things happen, Seligman explains, we can blame ourselves or we can blame other people or circumstances. People who blame themselves when they fail have low self-esteem as a consequence. People who blame external events do not lose self-esteem when bad events strike. On the whole, they like themselves better than people who internalize the blame.

However the opposite is true when explaining good events. The optimistic style of explaining good events is again the opposite of that used for bad events. It’s internal rather an external. People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people and circumstances.

If you tend to have a pessimistic exploratory style, you should be aware that you are likely to get depressed easily; you are probably achieving less at work than your talents warrant; your physical heath and your immune function are probably not what they should be; and life is just not as pleasurable as it should be. Seligman argues that by altering your explanatory style (i.e., learning optimism) you’ll be better equipped to cope with troubled times and keep them from propelling you toward depression.

Bringing Out the Best in Your Organization

Imagine bringing employees together to talk not about problems, but rather about their greatest successes. Imagine asking them “What is it like when our department/organization is working at its best?” And then listening carefully to the responses.

This process, of focusing on what’s working rather than on what’s broken, is called Appreciative Inquiry (AI). In our work with clients we employ it as a powerful mechanism for envisioning a desired future. Working backwards from their vision, they devise the changes that are required to achieve the vision. We have successfully added an appreciative inquiry approach to WorkOuts, leading to even better team results.

Appreciative Inquiry emphasizes and builds on a company’s strengths and potential. It is both pragmatic and hopeful. By asking the right questions, it seeks to locate, highlight and illuminate the “life-giving” forces of an organization’s existence. As David Cooperrider, Diana Whitney and Jackqueline Stavros explain in The Appreciative Inquiry Handbook, “Appreciative Inquiry seeks out the best of what is to help ignite the collective imagination of what might be.” A while back, we published an entire newsletter on this subject. If you want to read more about Appreciative Inquiry and how it might be used within your organization, click here.

Dig Deeper into Your MBTI® Preferences

Chances are, somewhere in your career past, you’ve taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®) personality inventory. It helped you figure out your preferences on four dichotomies:

• Extraversion – Introversion
• Sensing – Intuition
• Thinking – Feeling
• Judging – Perceiving

The various combinations of these preferences result in 16 unique personality types. You might be an ESTJ or perhaps an ISFP or maybe an INFP. The results of your MBTI® inventory help you identify your natural patterns for accessing information, making decisions, relating to the outside world, and coming to closure.

What the results from the basic inventory are not able to do is explore and identify a person’s unique individuality within the type code that best describes his/her pattern. The MBTI® Step II instrument accomplishes this. Recently we have been administering and interpreting the Step II inventory, providing coaching clients the opportunity to dig deeper into their preferences.

In the MBTI® Step II each of the four dichotomies are composed of five facets; the facets explain the uniqueness of the individual in greater detail, and serve to identify the differences that are experienced between two persons of a given type.

For example, a person who has an overall preference for Extroversion exhibits preferences on the five facets: initiating, expressive, gregarious, active, and enthusiastic. An introvert will exhibit varying strengths in the following facets: receiving, contained, intimate, reflective, and quiet. For each, an individual may be stronger in some facets than others.

If you want to learn more about Step II and how it might help you target areas of personal strength that are clear and specific, click here.

Want to Build a More Positive Approach?

If these approaches intrigue you, we would be delighted to work with you to define the optimal approach to introducing them to your organization, be it via Appreciative Inquiry in a large group, a StrengthsFinder, or an MBTI® workshop, or executive coaching. One of our values is looking for the best in people, situations, and organizations. We’d be honored to partner with you in the spirit of that value. Please email us at: kw@wunderlin.com or give us a call at 502.895.3689.

In addition, the resource page of our web site features articles, books and web links that we find helpful in understanding how to build on strengths and how to develop strengths-based organizations. Click here to see what we recommend.

You may want to consider attending our newest Wunderlin Company workshop, Discover Your Strengths & Put Them to Work. This workshop for teams and work groups is built around the book Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. Prior to attending, you’ll take the StrengthsFinder Profile which will identify your five most powerful signature themes. Time will be spent at the workshop discovering the source of your strengths and how to manage them.

In today’s business environment, it is critical for organizations to respond quickly when the unexpected happens. The organizations that can do this best are ones that know how to execute well. They design strategies that are more road maps than rigid plans filed away in fat planning books. They design strategies that can be executed, and execution paces everything.

Execution is a discipline of its own. It is a discipline for achieving success and gaining competitive advantage. Some individuals and organizations are better at it than others. With this issue, we visit with executives who we believe are really good at “getting things done.” We asked them to share their thoughts on execution in broad terms and then to divulge their secrets for how they go about getting things done. We think you will find their comments inspiring. Who knows what you might get done after reading their remarks!

Meet our “Execution Experts”

We are pleased to introduce our “execution experts”:

Marilyn Carp, president and chief executive officer, Aegon Direct Marketing Services: a subsidiary of Aegon USA. It uses direct response methods to offer life insurance products to potential clients. Headquartered in Baltimore, MD.

Bruce Greenbaum, president, UltraPro: the leading manufacturer and marketer of archival safe-storage products worldwide. Produces storage for sports and gaming collectibles, photo and photofinishing, and products to store and protect multi-media. Headquartered in Los Angeles, CA.

Paul E. Gross, chief information officer, Brown-Forman Corporation: a diversified producer and marketer of fine-quality consumer products (wines and spirits and consumer durables). Headquartered in Louisville, KY.

Ted McQuade, president and CEO, Industrial Powder Coatings, Inc.: a leader in the custom coating industry, specializing in powder coating, electro-coating, and plating for automotive and appliance applications. Headquartered in Norwalk, OH.

Why Does Execution Matter?

Ted: Without an explicit focus on execution, all you do is destroy shareholder value. Let’s face it, manufacturing can be dull and repetitive. But you make the money in the day-to-day details of managing your operations. You transform raw materials into something of value. You’ve got to manage it. You’ve got to execute.

Lynnie: As head of a non-profit organization, I have to be able to execute. Part of being a good steward has to do with being able to deliver good results. Success breeds success. We are doing good work for our clients. We are delivering good results. As a result, people want to be involved in the work of the Center. There is a buzz about what we are doing at The Center for Women and Families.

Bruce: You can have the best plan in the world, but if you don’t execute it, you won’t get the results you need to be successful.

Paul: At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself: Did I achieve what I set out to achieve?

What have you learned about execution and how to do it?

Ted: You must establish a “rhythm of accountability” as one of the first things you do in a new organization. By this I mean a sequence of daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings to review progress. It is important that the execution items be measurable and that they have a single, clearly-identified owner. People must know that they will have to stand and deliver results to the organization at pre-determined intervals. Change the rhythm of the organization and you’ll change their focus.

Marilyn: If you have the right people, then you must empower them to work together as a team and take ownership. As a leader, my job is to support that team. Communication is critical to the success of execution. We have processes in place that have been refined over time to ensure that we execute with excellence.

How do you focus your people on execution?

Ted: When I’m new to a company, I’m probably perceived as a real pain in the butt and a micromanager. I get involved. I ask a lot of questions of the people who are closest to the process. I want to know “How are you going to do it? Who’s going to do it? When is it going to get done?” I keep asking questions until I’m satisfied that they understand my expectations.

Marilyn: Getting the right team together is the most important thing. They must feel that they have management’s support to go out and do the job. Often I will kick off the project. The team needs to understand why the work they are being asked to do is important; how it fits into the overall picture. They must know how to work together as a team; how to collaborate. They also need to feel accountable. They need a good plan and regular communication to keep everyone up to date on progress. If they fall behind or get off course, they need a plan to get back on track.

Paul: I’m a big believer in clearly defining expectations. I drill down pretty deep in conversation to ensure that my peoples’ interpretations of expectations are the same as mine. Then I make sure we can measure those expectations. It puts discipline into the process.

How do you close the gap between results promised and results delivered?

Ted: You’ve got to involve the people closest to the process. If you’ve done a good job of identifying key metrics, if you have checkpoints and milestones along the way, and if you clearly identify who is responsible, then you will know if a gap exists, and you can make mid-course corrections. If you find you can’t meet your goal, then at least you owe it to whomever you promised the results to keep them informed and share your recovery plan. You lose your credibility if you don’t.

Bruce: First I make sure that I have the right people in the job. Are they capable of delivering results and are they motivated to deliver them? Once that is in place, it is important that progress towards achieving the plan in a timely fashion gets visibility, so that, if required, corrective action can be taken. We then share the rewards that come with successful achievement.

Paul: We use the “carrot” approach of reward and recognition. I also encourage open dialogue so that my staff isn’t afraid to let me know if we need to take corrective action to get a project back on track. One of our biggest challenges is keeping the scope of projects from growing. It’s hard to stay focused on a two-year project; it is just too big. Instead, we break it into manageable chunks that can be accomplished in six months or less.

Marilyn: I don’t want people to spend an inordinate amount of time writing status reports, but I am a believer in the value of them. They serve a double purpose; one is to keep me informed of progress, and the other is to cause the team to reflect on what they have accomplished and where they are falling behind.

How do you link your strategy, people, and operations?

Lynnie: We work hard to make sure that our staff is aligned and focused on our goals. Our culture is one that promotes the internal expectation that our people will step up and do what needs to be done. They believe in their work. They believe in our mission.

Ted: Our leadership team provides the link between these three core processes. We all carry the same mental DNA. We are always asking ourselves: “How does this short-term action get us to our long-term goal? Do we have the right people in place to do the job?”

How to you manage your own workload? What tools do you use?

Bruce: I’ve got a 45-minute commute to and from work each day, and I use that time to return phone calls. My days are filled with routine meetings and unavoidable interruptions, so I often use the evenings and weekends to catch up with larger projects. (I hate to admit it, but now I even take my laptop on vacations.)

Lynnie: I’ve really changed my style since I started working at the Center. In the beginning, I tried to do everything. Now, I have a great team in place. I encourage them to think of themselves as the CEO of their area. I’m able to delegate a lot to them. We try to divide and conquer, not duplicate our efforts. I do make use of certain tools to manage my work. I can check my voice mail, e-mail and access my computer files from home. I use a palm pilot. I schedule work time on my calendar for large projects. I keep a to-do list. I try to return all phone calls before I leave for the evening.

Ted: When I have too much on my plate, I step back and ask myself, “What do people really want from me?” The answer is always the same: they want me to be visible; they want me to represent the company well with our board, our customers, our bankers and our constituents. My people want me to listen to them; talk to them about what’s important; and give direction, insight, and feedback. This conversation I have with myself gets me back on track pretty fast.

How did you learn to execute well?

Bruce: Early in my career, I had the good fortune of working with manufacturing-veteran Nels Hoffman. Today my style of execution is very much like his. He taught me well.

Paul: Years ago I worked for a guy who served as my mentor. He was willing to take risks with me and gave me some large and significant projects to manage. He was very good at giving me feedback. He taught me not only about how to manage projects, but also about how to coach others.

Lynnie: I attribute my execution style to two sources. I worked for a time for Humana and participated in its management-training program. It is a stellar program, and much of how I operate today I learned from my experience there. Also, my parents have a really strong work ethic that they have passed down to each of their five children. I work hard, and I enjoy my job. If I won the Lotto tomorrow, I’d probably still be here.

So, in summary, here are some lessons learned for creating a culture of execution:

• Be sure that your people understand why execution matters in your organization.
  
• Execution is a discipline. Create execution processes that have both rhythm and rigor.
  
• Learn to ask tough, incisive questions that will focus people on where execution is and isn’t happening.
  
• Remember, you can’t do execution alone. While execution is a MAJOR job of the business leader, collaboration is the key. You have to
• spread execution capability to the teams and functions in your organization. It must become a core element of your organization’s culture.

Let us know about your organization’s execution successes and challenges. Send your comments to: execution@wunderlin.com.

Getting Started for Getting Things Done: Two Books and One Tool

There are two books and one tool that we highly recommend for learning more about the discipline of execution.

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy (Chairman of Honeywell International) and Ram Charan (legendary adviser to senior executives and boards of directors). This book shows you how to close the gap between results promised and results delivered. The authors contend that leaders who execute well are leaders who understand how to link together people, strategy, and operations.

Getting it Done: How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge, by Roger Fisher and Alan Sharp. The premise of their book is that you must be able to collaborate to get the work done. They offer a no-nonsense guide to successful persuasion and influence. A simple tool that we often use with our clients is an action-plan worksheet. It allows a group to clearly state the actions that need to be done as a follow up to a work session, identify who is respon-sible, and assign a date for completion. It’s amazing how being clear about next steps allows groups to improve their execution. For a sample action plan, link to http://www.wunderlin.com/actionplan.pdf.

Experiential Workshops Can Help You Execute Better

Another way to improve your execution style is to brush up on skills that will make you a better manager – of projects and of people. The Wunderlin Company offers three workshops designed to help you work more effectively. The first one, Facilitator Training, is a foundational workshop where participants learn to plan and facilitate meetings. The second one, Skills for the Advanced Facilitator, builds on the foundation course and is designed specifically for those interested in taking their facilitation skills to the next level. The third workshop, Coaching as a Leadership Skill, will help you become a masterful coach able to inspire, motivate, and train employees so that they can perform to the best of their abilities. The premise of all three workshops is that if you demonstrate the leadership skills necessary to stay ahead in a highly competitive and quickly changing world, you can impact the culture of your organization and move it to one that is successful because it executes well. To find out more about these three workshops and to register for them, log on to http://www.wunderlin.com/ workshops.htm.

This issue was ready to go to press when the tragedies of September 11, 2001 consumed our lives and changed us forever. To any of you whose families and friends are affected by those events, our prayers and thoughts are with you daily.

Like many of you, I have worked to put one foot in front of the other, and to “go back to our normal lives.” What we struggle to remind ourselves is that our heightened sense of evil doesn’t negate the goodness on which we build our daily existence. We lean on hope to get us through each day.

In the last edition of this newsletter we focused on how clearly identifying values and purpose can propel your company forward. In this edition, we focus on your trajectory – charting the best course for that forward momentum. It is truly difficult to focus on the future in these uncertain times. And, it may be more critical now than ever. It is how you can restore hope to your organization.

Who Needs a Vision?

“If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up somewhere else.”

What a common sense notion—how frequently do you find yourself or your organization headed in a clear direction?

Experience shows the powerful effect of defining a clear and ambitious desired future. One client we work with recently initiated a round of strategic planning. We began by going back to a simple one-afternoon vision and goal-setting session we had held three years ago. To everyone’s surprise and satisfaction, the company had achieved their “vision” sales target for 2002 two years ahead of schedule! And, when that target was first stated, it was clearly ambitious beyond the team’s wildest imagination. That success has propelled the company to set a new vision for quintupling those sales!

A vision is a short, clear statement of what you want to be true for you or your organization at a specific stated point in time.

From our view, the benefit of visioning can be comprehensive. Personal planning is a tremendously useful endeavor. Work teams, departments, organizations and entire companies have all engaged in successful visioning work.

How Do We Make Sure Our Visioning is Meaningful?

We have found several attributes that distinguish successful visioning efforts from those that are limited to being “words on a wall:”

Be inclusive/involve lots of people. We know folks support what they help create. This clearly applies to defining an ambitious future.
Work deliberately. This work needs to move ahead relentlessly forward AND at a pace that the work groups can keep up with.
Envision thoughtfully. When designing vision processes, we frequently allow for “percolation time.” When vision work groups have overnights to consider their work, and breaks in the process for individual reflection, they frequently come back from those introspections with breakthroughs in their thinking. This is by nature both a public discursive process and a private introspective process. Successful processes allow for both kinds of work.

“It’s the Process, Stupid!”

You won’t be surprised to hear this from us, because our observation is that the work of thinking about the future is as valuable as the final deliverable. We believe that is why folks who look back on their visioning work are frequently surprised at how very successful they have been even though they did not experience themselves as focused on the vision’s achievement. We believe that the visioning process plants seeds that grow and flourish in your organization’s work, often subconsciously. This phenomenon reinforces the need for your process to be inclusive.

Prime the Pump
As your work group defines its future, be sure to allow time and space early on for external scanning. Groups who steep themselves in emerging trends, best practices and big ideas from other companies and industries can develop their visions with confidence. External benchmarking and industry analysis enable you to set your vision on a solid understanding of the environment in which your organization exists.

“Just Do It.”

Whatever you do, begin soon. Setting a vision is a process you learn by doing. And, the more you do it, the better your visioning skills become. So, jump in – the current is strong, the thrills are great and the rewards are immeasurable.

Getting Started

The following is a simple exercise we frequently use to help begin the visioning process. We follow Stephen Covey’s “habit” of Beginning with the End in Mind. We find that visioning work can be made both tangible and compelling to work groups.

Visioning Exercise

Purpose: To imagine fully the compelling future towards which you want to work.

It is January, 200x (you select the appropriate time horizon for the organization) and you have just learned that your organization will be featured in Fortune (or your industry’s most highly regarded magazine’s next issue). In addition to a cover photo, the magazine will include a full feature on your organization. Your organization’s outstanding success over the last five years is the driving force behind your selection for the cover story.

1. What/who is on the cover of the magazine? Draw it on a flip chart.
2. What is the title of the article?
3. Write an outline of the article. Be sure to include quotes from customers, professional staff and employees, industry experts, and competitors. Describe the factors that have contributed to your outstanding success. Note the barriers that had to be overcome. How did you do it?

Your article should describe feasible events that people are capable of doing. It needs to be a scenario in which you believe, and for which you would work. Do not let concerns regarding cost or difficulty limit your description of your desired future. This activity is designed to help you identify what you want. Another step in the process is to match what you want against your resource limitations.

Groups Use Future Search Process to Define Common Ground

So, you are convinced your department or organization should have a clear direction towards which it is moving. How do you do that? There are a number of effective ways to define a vision. One that we have found to be particularly effective is called Future Search.

Future Search is built on the notion that the people in a given organization or system know best how to define the desired future. And, the more of them who are included in the vision process the better. The Future Search process begins with an assessment of the past; frequently employing 30-foot timelines on butcher paper to create a collective view of the journey thus far. Then, the process is enriched with the insertion of external trends and developments that can and will affect the organization’s future. The process then moves forward to creating a “map” of the current reality. This map organizes the trends and factors that the group names as important, and in the process moves from their individual listing of “my issues” to a collective view of “our issues”. The mapping process is one of the most powerful aspects of the Future Search process because it enables the group to build a picture of what is often a complex and changing environment. For many groups, just creating the map helps them embrace and understand their future direction.

Once the map is created the group works to analyze it, defining the most critical forces going forward. Then future search leads the group to an assessment of today’s organization, the group is now ready to imagine and write about the future. Participants are encouraged to build a picture of their reality. In the words of Jack Welch, the group defines “reality as it is, not as you wish it was.” Armed with this view of the desired envisioned future that is specific, and is portrayed as if it had already happened, individuals then work with each other to identify common elements in their visions, and with the assistance of the facilitator, recombine individual work into a collective draft of the future vision. That draft is then brought forward to larger groups of the organization for validation and refinement.

Future Search enables groups to articulate their future by providing experiential structures, and creating a high energy, focused environment for defining common ground. We recommend it highly!

Words from Those Who Have Experienced the Power

When I encountered new people and told them that I was the Producing Director of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, they would grimace. They told me they disliked Shakespeare. When I pressed them as to the reason, it was always because they had been exposed to Shakespeare in the worst possible way. They had been forced to read it in their English classes. It became clear what I needed to do to stop this destructive behavior.

Shakespeare was meant to be seen and heard in performance and not read. This led me to a vision for bringing the works of William Shakespeare to life through performance for students across the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

In 1990, I created our educational outreach program, Shakespeare Alive!. To date, we have toured to all 120 Kentucky counties, the only arts group in Kentucky to accomplish this feat. We have served over 280,000 kindergarten through twelfth grade students with 3,257 performance/workshops in 1,405 schools. The education program also includes short-, medium- and long-term residency programs, a teacher training program, and summer Shakespeare camps for young people. The vision is working!
- Curt L. Tofteland, Producing Director, Kentucky Shakespeare Festival

The vision that our team developed as part of the development of a real strategic plan was “Increasing the Competitiveness of U.S. Manufacturers Through Applied Technology and Training.” This gave us a touchstone which defined what we did and how to measure our effectiveness. A sharper focus then allowed the development of a set of strategic imperatives that guide our tactical planning. In the first year under this strategy we became financially self-sufficient (for the first time since its founding in 1992). Since then we have continued to improve on all measures and grow significantly.
- Dr. William J. Sheeran, Director of the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology

• WINNING WITH CUSTOMERS • GROWING WITH PEOPLE • RAISING THE BAR •TOGETHER, WE CAN MOVE THE MOUNTAIN.
This was the vision that our Eastern Mountain Region team developed. It allowed us to recognize that we needed to raise the bar for our performance expectations. Through our visioning work the group came to realize that the change and improvements that were coming our way would benefit everyone (customers and the company). It rallied us to work together to share resources, ideas and problem solving. It allowed us to lose the mentality that the issues facing us were too big. We could move MOUNTAINS! Our efforts translated to cost control and profit growth. Critically, these translated to personal growth and increased agility of the entire region.
- Deborah Pearce, former Regional General Manager, Otis Elevator Company

When I left a salaried job to start my own consulting business, I wrote up a list of goals I wanted to accomplish in my new life, both business and personal.

Business goals included working for a variety of clients to see what tasks best fit my talents and flexible schedule, and developing an expertise in several areas of strength such as facilitating and problem-solving.

Personal goals involved spending more time with my family, adventuresome travel with my husband and more time to explore “domestic” interests such as cooking and sewing.

I referred to the goals often, and after four years I’ve been pleased to realize that I have accomplished every one of them in some fashion. I’m convinced this success is because I took the time to really think about what I wanted, to write down my goals in some detail, and to frequently consult my goals list to keep on track. Now I’m ready for new goals, and I intend to follow the same process — hopefully with the same positive results!
- Joan Riehm, Management Consultant and former Deputy Mayor, City of Louisville

From our Bookshelf

There are a number of excellent books and articles on the power of visioning. Here is a short list of our favorites:

Built to Last, Collins and Porras.

How to Get Control of your Time and Your Life, Alan Lakein.

Future Search: An Action Guide to Finding Common Ground for Action in Organizations and Communities, Sandra Janoff, Marvin Ross Weisbord.

Whistle While You Work; Heeding Your Life’s Calling, Richard J. Leider and Daivd A. Shaperio.

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, Peter M. Senge (Editor), Art Kleiner (Editor), Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith.

If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, You’ll Probably End Up Somewhere Else, David Campbell.