Do you communicate your strategy powerfully to the front line?

To attract the attention of the front-line to the strategy, the CEO can tell simple emotional stories

All the recent psychological research points the same way. People deliver what they focus on. So one of the key challenges to the CEO is to communicate their strategy in ways that repeatedly draw the focus of everyone in the organisation. The same psychological research also indicates how to achieve this. Messages stick when they are simple, emotional stories about real people, illustrating how the strategy will guide the millions of small decisions employees make every day.

For example, the Fedex strategy is built upon their Unique Selling Point of “absolute, positive reliability”. One story to bring this alive for the front line is of a Fedex driver who left his key to open a collection box back at the depot, who then undid the bolts that attach the box to the ground with his spanner and lifted the whole box into his truck to make sure the packages made the flight. This story makes the unreasonable commitment required to deliver “absolute positive reliability” come alive.

The old stories are deeply embedded in the culture of the organisation. The stories that illustrate your future strategy will need an unreasonable level of repetition and reinforcement to stick.

What are the stories you are telling to attract the focus of, and therefore the results of, your organisation?

Are you stubborn or determined?

A leader can be committed to their organisations strategy and ambition, while remaining flexible about how to get there.

It is amazing how quickly journalists change their tune. When things are going well, the leader is committed, determined and persistent. Hit a sticky patch and the same leader becomes stubborn and inflexible, exhibiting tunnel vision.

How can a CEO be committed and flexible at the same time? Change requires overcoming barriers, without forever butting heads against a brick wall.

The answer lies in clearly separating ends and means.

Dominating a specific customer segment, or achieving the lowest cost position in the industry are ends. The Leader has a key role to play in achieving these strategic positions through their unrelenting determination. They project total confidence that they will be achieved, setting high standards and asking the unreasonable to challenge their organisation.

The same leader can be fully flexible about how to get there however. There is no need to spend your credibility by committing to any one particular approach, since you can’t be sure it will work. Maintain the pressure through total commitment to the end, and allow your team to innovate to get there.

Are your people’s concerns linked to your organisation’s concerns?

Your peoples’ passion will be unleashed if they see how the organisation’s concerns are the same as their own personal concerns.

Every individual has a few fundamental concerns that drive them throughout their lives. They will be different for everybody. Examples could be love and family, making a difference, self-expression or contribution to others.

Whenever I am blocked and resist something I should do, it is because I cannot link this activity with my fundamental concerns. When I resist spending time on personal finance and label it a “chore”, it is because I have temporarily lost the connection between doing this and looking after my family. With the link clear, I can do exactly the same activity with a real feeling of achievement and choice.

The same is true for people at work. Have you at any point in your life ever experienced the difference between working for a salary and working to further one of your fundamental concerns? What did it feel like? That was when words like “work” and “employee” ceased to have meaning, and your passion was engaged. Imagine the strength of an organisation that taps into that passion for all its people on a regular basis.

Unrealistic? What it takes is the commitment to find the right place for everyone. Salespeople with a fundamental concern with accomplishment. Service staff with a fundamental desire to help others. Accountants who live for the perfect moment when the numbers balance. Leaders who personally share the vision of the organisation. And every day, they will love what they do.

Is your strategy unreasonable?

If your strategy aims boldly for the unreasonable, you have more chance to deliver a reasonable change.

What achievements were the most fulfilling for you? Chances are they are when you achieved something that you thought was impossible. Even very high achievement means little when it is requires no personal stretch.

The same is true for companies. The seminal moments in the history of a company are when they faced up to and achieved the unreasonable. The regular delivery of good, but predictable results generates little emotion and releases little energy.

Unreasonable objectives raise the standards in an organisation. And the “Pygmalion Principle” shows that when high standards are set, people perform better to live up to them.

Another factor working against reasonable goals is entropy. The law of entropy in physics states that in any natural process there exists an inherent tendency towards the dissipation of energy. There is an exact parallel in organisations. Any strategy that you lay out will get diluted as it percolates down the organisation and over time – it will never get amplified. The inertia of the company will dissipate the energy and focus you started out with, pulling back towards the status quo.

If your strategy aims well above what the organisation thinks is reasonable, there is a chance that, after the effects of entropy, there is sufficient energy to deliver the change required.