Use this approach to make your ways of working more disciplined, consistent, and effective by level, remit and choices, and systems and tools:
- Level: Board, CEO, senior leadership, middle management, front line
- Remit and Choices: Governance, cultural, strategic, tactical, activity
- Systems and Tools: Decision rights, communication platforms and linking mechanisms, feedback loops and adjustment
Accepting that these overlap, let’s add some color to each.
Ways of Working by Level
In general,
Boards are accountable for governance and oversight. They approve strategic, annual operating (P&L, cash flows, balance sheet), future capability, succession, contingency, and compensation plans, and are consulted and informed on everything else.
CEOs are accountable for strategic, operating, organization plans/results, culture.
Senior Leadership or the C-suite needs to think about the C-suite as their first team, considering things with an enterprise-wide perspective before considering things from the perspective of their function or business unit.
Middle Management: Functional and unit leaders and front line supervisors require a blend of leadership (why and what) and management (how).
Front Line: The people actually doing the work design, produce, sell/market deliver/distribute, or provide service.
Remits and Choices in Ways of Working
While remits tend to nest and align with levels, all need to consider:
- Governance: Mandatory physical, reputational, and financial policies flowing from the board in line with regulations and societal norms.
- Cultural leadership: Who you are and what you stand for
- Mission (why here, why exist, what business are we in)
- Vision (future picture of success)
- Culture (Behaviors, Relationships, Attitudes, Values, Environment) informed by guiding principles flowing from the CEO/C-suite
- Strategic leadership: Arranging resources before deployment to create tactical capacity
- Tactical leadership: Deploying and adjusting resources in real time to focus on the decisive point
- Activity: design, produce, sell/market deliver/distribute, or provide service
Ways of Working Systems and Tools
All these inform the right set of systems and tools to support the way people in your organization are going to work together.
Decision Rights
There should always be a single decision-maker who is the individual with the best talent, knowledge, skills, experience, and craft to make any particular decision. Others, whether they work with or for the decision-maker or the decision-maker works for them, should either be consulted – providing their perspective to help the decision-maker decide – or informed – either before or after the decision is actually implemented depending upon the circumstances.
Communication Platforms and Linking Mechanisms
It’s time to trade reports and presentations for click-throughs. Technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have reached the point at which almost any organization can have a single, continuously updated, real-time data-base of information coupled with an AI engine to enable anyone to understand the current:
- Mission, vision, values/guiding principles, and governing policies
- Status, understanding, and insights into customers, collaborators, capabilities, culture, competitors, conditions
- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats => key leverage points and business issues (SWOT)
- Strategic priorities
- Status of any key performance indicator at any level with a couple of clicks (at the enterprise, function, business unit, program, project, or activity level.)
If you follow the “what” – “so what” – “now what” approach to analysis, your technology/AI engine should spit out what’s going on so everyone can spend their time drawing “so what” conclusions, and debating “now what” implications and actions – behind-the-scenes, and in all meetings including board meetings. Trade all meeting pre-reads for a single, continuously updated portal/platform.
This suggests a new set of guidelines for meeting management:
- One person responsible for the meeting process
- Single overall objective set – purpose/outcomes: inform, discuss, debate, contribute, decide
- Agenda (process) set with clear expectations for learning, contributions, and decisions by item with time allocated to match what’s needed and a bias to tackling fewer things better with more time on each thing in any one meeting
- Attendees include those needed to learn, contribute, decide, and no one else
- Pre-work, analysis, and pre-reading to people far enough in advance for all to learn/contribute to their fullest potential – ideally through a single, continuously updated portal/platform
- Meeting participation and timing facilitated to optimize learning, contributions, and action-oriented decisions, ending when the overall objective is achieved
- Meeting notes out promptly (or up on portal/platform) to memorialize decisions and actions, inviting other ideas to improve current best thinking, and kicking off the preparation for the next meeting as part of continuous feedback loops and adjustments.
John Hall
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