Purpose & Experience Are The Rich
Perspective Executives Need to Succeed
I have been blessed with a great career, rich with progressive projects with clients over 30 years. Every new experience has been an opportunity for renewal and professional growth. While learning a great deal about my profession and clients, I’ve also had the ability to learn much about myself, my preferences and my capabilities. This page will help prospective clients know they’re not just hiring a coach who started a year ago after taking a certification class, but a seasoned professional who has been facilitating learner outcomes for decades and who has been facilitating CEO and C-suite roundtables for more than 10 years.
While I have taken dozens of assessments over the years, one that helped me understand what clients saw and experienced with me was the Gallup Strengthfinder. Given a full set of 34 strategic themes, the assessment offers you a look at the Top 5 Strengths that a person naturally possesses. My strengths were identified as Ideation, Strategic, Maximizer, Harmony & Relator. This provides me a balance viewpoint of the organizational systems, implementation and interpersonal skill sets need to help my clients.
Another model I have found invaluable is the McKinsey 7-S Framework. The framework was developed in the 1970’s as a means to achieve greater organizational effectiveness, and contains the following elements: style, skills, system, structure, staff, strategy & shared values at the center. The coordination of these components leads to effectiveness and improved culture.
These frameworks provide me an opportunity to share the deep expertise I have in these individual areas. They began with teaching, continued into training & development, into leadership & organization development, and now into executive coaching & development.
Let me describe each component and the value gained through client experiences.
Strategy: the plan devised to build and maintain your competitive advantage.
I often naturally think about dilemmas my clients face in a strategic or organizational framework. I use questions to understand the big picture and final outcomes, then build the plan to accomplish the overall result. Frustration sets in if I am only provided a small piece of the puzzle or asked to believe a client who has come to a preliminary conclusion and solution without discovering what’s underneath the symptoms they see today.
My opportunity to lead projects through strategy:
• Facilitating strategic plans for non-profit and for-profit companies
• Implementing continuous improvement where root cause is a must
• Building leadership development systems to build enduring leadership performance
Questions for executives to ask:
• What business are we in?
• How do we deal with competitive pressures & marketplace change?
• When & how will we decide to start and/or stop work with customers?
Structure: the way people in the company are organized and deployed to work.
I always consider a long list of stakeholders around any significant project, especially if the request involves organizational change. Involving others as the project is being designed and assessed will lead to a more effective deployment. The myth I see most often is that people think more about what’s in the org chart box, than the importance and strength of the relationship between individuals and the work groups they are part of.
My opportunity to leverage structure with clients:
• Re-designing organization structure to accommodate organizational growth
• Designing new business groups into an existing organization
• Conducting RACI analysis to capture job responsibilities and decision-making
Questions for executives to ask:
• How will we organize teams and talent to best serve our customers?
• Where on the continuum of decentralized to centralized work will we land?
• How much authority do managers at each level have?
Systems: daily activities and procedures staff members use to accomplish their work.
Every person and company has their way of accomplishing work, and they all fall along a continuum of no structure to high structure. It might simply be in someone’s head or detailed in an operations guide. Wherever you are, you should always be able to find a way for the person after you to do your job after you’re gone.
My opportunity to showcase systems development with clients:
• Helping my company achieve ISO 9001 status with instructional design capability
• Assisting new managers to assimilate and transition effectively to their teams
• Designing new job and management development programs with clients
Questions for executives to ask:
• What systems are core to our work, and how well do they need to be integrated?
• Where do we most need to build in financial and system control for working groups?
• How can we transition our legacy systems to a more agile configuration?
Shared Values: core values in used within the company to build procedural ethic and culture.
Values are too often prescribed and posted – rather than fully engaged and exemplified – in today’s organizations. As the cornerstone of the 7-S Framework, the McKinsey consultants saw the value and importance of shared values to their clients (shared being the operative word).
My opportunity to enhance shared values with clients:
• Focus on shared values as a key discussion within strategy development
• Coach business owners through the paradox of values when facing crisis
• Incorporating values and culture in behavioral interviewing frameworks
Questions for executives to ask:
• What are our company’s shared values? How close are they to those we have posted on our walls and website?
• How do we continue to increase the shared commitment to values over time?
• Are our shared values in alignment with our corporate culture? Why or why not?
Style: the way that managers and executive carry out their leadership activities.
Style is foundational to performance and organization culture. How would you describe your organizational and leadership style today? Is it entrepreneurial? Bureaucratic? Agile? Executives are discussing style and culture a great deal, especially as identifying, attracting and retaining the right talent become even more difficult.
My opportunity to address and improve leadership style with clients:
• Helping client organization recruit C-level talent by building consensus on what leadership skills & style should accompany their professional expertise.
• Building leadership competency models to describe what the expectation for leadership is now within client organizations.
• Coaching executives who need to re-align their management skills and style within the company.
Questions for executives to ask:
• How effective is your company’s current management style?
• Do company teams tend to be more collaborative or competitive?
• Where do we need teams to work across functions more often?
Staff: general capabilities and talent of staff associates and managers.
My entire career has been focused on the development of employee and leadership capabilities. While it is imperative for companies to prepare their employees to be successful for themselves and clients, developing leadership talent provides a key opportunity for client’s competitive advantage as well.
My past opportunity to improve the capabilities of company leaders:
• Performing needs assessments to identify the major skill gaps.
• Analyzing how important current vacancies are, compared to articulated needs of our customers.
• Facilitating CEO roundtables to help executives identify and move towards current challenges.
Questions for executives to ask:
• What positions in the company are filled with key employees?
• Which development activities have we found to be the most effective?
• Do we prefer to send employees to training or help them achieve important outcomes?
Skills: actual skills and competencies held by company employees.
What is the best way for your company to be competitive? We invest millions of dollars in software, new equipment and skills training for our organizations. Are we trying to do it all? Trying to be all things to all clients? Or is there an opportunity for us to focus on the critical few?
Much is being written about the shortage of talent and the skills gap. I recently read that the unemployment rate hit an all-time low in our area – 2.9%. I think we need to seriously look at who we’re hiring, how we’re preparing them, and most importantly, how we’re developing the people we already have within the company.
Questions for executives to ask:
• Which group do you prioritize for skills development – the general population, the employees who are struggling to meet expectations, or those who are thriving?
• How do you assess & monitor the changing skill requirements of staff?
• Are we focused on developing new skill sets because our clients ask us for that capability, or because they are the latest buzzword in the popular press?
The framework provides executives and owners a great way to look at the work that we do, to operate at a more strategic level, and to prioritize the questions we should be asking of our management teams.