Coaching a Scottish Organisation into Being Strategic
In my experience there is a big difference between having a strategic plan and actually ‘being strategic’. Being strategic involves how you are constantly crafting your strategy[1], feeling it, enacting it, leading it and re-shaping it. It is alive in you and is a shared conversation within the leadership and governance. Yet it can be hard to do well.
Being Strategic is about the long view
In this article you can hear a case study of how my coaching develops this ability of ‘being strategic’ in businesses. So many start up organisations that show the pathways to the future don’t make it past the first 5 years. Yet Green Aspirations CIC, continues to thrive and show all of us what the green economy of doughnut economics offers us all, if only we could listen to the trees and natural systems theory.
Here is my case study which illustrates the type of coaching support I do with numerous organisations. I have also written an accompanying article about what I mean Being Strategic, which has academic links from Harvard and MiT.
Coaching a leading organisation.
I was asked to coach the leadership team of a social enterprise which describe themselves as leading a new form of innovation in the green economy.
The purpose of the coaching was to support the founders to develop their abilities in strategic planning. They had found, like most fledgling business owners, that it was incredibly difficult to take the time out to develop the strategy in amongst the high demands of leading the day to day work in a context of a rapidly changing organisation.
When they approached me, the organisation was 2 years old and the founders were very conscious of the need to lay down solid foundations of strategy for both internal strength and external development. While finding themselves adapting, innovating and experimenting at a rapid pace. They were, and 10 years later, still are, a leading organisation, showing the way of how to adapt to climate change.
The key skills they needed to navigate this environment successfully was about the abilities to ‘Be Strategic’.
Research shows that 90% of small and medium enterprises collapse in the first 5 years.[2]
Coaching Contract
Coaching was chosen as the best way of supporting this focus, rather than a training course, or consultancy, as the founders have all the right ideas and energy but with tight time availability, the organisational development intervention needed to be efficient, integrated and on demand. It is true that assignment could be described as 'leadership-in-action', for which executive coaching or action learning are considered by many businesses to be some of the best interventions.[3]
The core areas of learning were very much about what could be called 'sharpening the bow'. They were things like; refining the way they delegated – downwards delegation and upwards delegation, how they used their time and energy, utilising key meetings and looking after their leadership capacity.
The coaching process concentrated on the triple layers of task – the conversations that needed to happen for strategy formation, the layer of process by which the task drew upon the talent and authority of each of the founders, and the third layer of institutionalising systems and processes for making it future proof. To support this way of working I used tools like the Boston Matrix, Ansolf Marketing Matrix, delegation schema and a time and energy audit tool. The work in the second layer of attending to the process, was very much about pausing, reflecting and naming the assumptions and ladder of inference patterns that were getting in the way of making the most of the talent available. So, together in the coaching sessions we could then re-play and re-boot the conversations, breaking those patterns and creating more effective decision making.[4]
Key areas of learning included a range of practical tactics that support 'being strategic' such as: what can't be delegated from the founders and how things are delegated by the founders: what needed to be written down: what needed to be led verbally: what needed to be repeatedly led until things are shaped (institutionalised or laid down as the way we do things around here).
Outcomes
The coaching lasted from Autumn-Autumn, delivering:
A much better work life balance for the leadership team.
A developed staff team and structure for how staff are developed and work together.
A whole range of systems such as workplan charts, schemes of delegation and reporting structures that have held the business together along its forward plan.
The forward plan was consistently developed as an interactive and flexible business plan.
The deepening of the strategy in how to grow and develop the business while maintaining its core values.
Learning exactly how much time is needed to be planning & how much time to be leading from the front.
The business has gone on thrive and grow. It continues to be strategic.
In the final review session the clients reported that the coaching has improved their roles and the way they talk about them. They are more confident about their rapid growth and expansion because they understand at a deeper level their strengths and weaknesses, how to use them well. They are using the tools from the coaching process such as the Boston Matrix. They have noticed that it is because of their readiness to listen to the outside perspective of where they are at and where they are going. That they have gone on a journey of really trusting the growth process.
Where they are at the end of the year is that they now have robust strategy development. In fact they have really innovated in how they do strategy, using a matrix of 15 sub enterprises with a plan for each one, so they can work out where they should be putting their development energies which sub businesses need to simply be delegated and which sub-businesses require creative planning time.
This was some 5 years ago, and at the time they envisaged that in a years time they will be so much stronger, continuing on the pathway the coaching has supported. Today, you can see on their website how much they have continued to be small yet sustainable.
A few months later one of the founder wrote this testimonial about the work.
“Duncan takes a very person centred approach and worked with us in a way that we felt listened to and empowered to develop in ways that were essential for growth of our business. At no point did we feel merely instructed but supportively guided towards our own solutions, building skills to take away and re-use. I would thoroughly recommend Duncan's method of coaching for entrepreneurs who want to understand their business better.” Co-Founder/Director
[1] H Minzberg ‘Crafting Strategy’ Harvard Business Review 1992.
[2]Reported in Forbes by Neil Patel Jan16th 2016. Go to www.forbes.com
[3]Coaching in Depth – The Organisational Role Analysis Approach, ed John Newton, Susan Long, Burnard Sievers, Karnac Books, 2006
[4]Coaching, Mentoring & Organisational Consultancy, Peter Hawkins and Nick Smith, Open University Press, 2006