S12E06: How to create a culture of strategic activity in your team

Davina Stanley
Welcome back. It's Davina Stanley here with Richard Medcalf again, to bring you more ideas from Richard's new book, Making Time For Strategy. Hi Richard, How are you today?

Richard Medcalf
That's good. Good morning to you. I'm really well and looking forward to add to talk about environment, which is a whole topic, a whole big topic but we can perhaps scratch the surface a bit today.

Davina Stanley
Yeah, absolutely and it's all it's goes beyond looking at your own personal activities, doesn't it to really looking at it taking a bit of a systemic approach to what's around you, which I think is really, really wonderful and so perhaps it might help people to understand. What are you thinking of when you talk about environment? We've talked about tactics, we've talked about influence, we've talked about mindset. Now environment, what is environment?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. So in the book, which, you know, there's all about making time for strategy and we've looked at these different areas. Tactics influence mindsets, and we've covered those in previous episodes but I was really clear, when I wrote the book, I wanted it for leaders to be for leaders and leaders have to full responsibility they do really important need to manage their own personal focus, elevate their focus, elevate their leadership, is super important. We don't get to the next level without reinventing the bit who we are but oh, and there is also another dimension for leaders and that dimension. Is my organization, how do I create a culture? Where people are making time in their own ways for what's strategic for them? Now, not everybody is going to be working on the company's strategy? Of course not but you're going to have your executive team working on their departmental strategies, you're going to have team leaders needing to think about what's the noise in what we're doing, and what's going to move the needle and so I think it's really helpful to start to create a culture where everybody is thinking about, how do we get out of the day to day and make some time to uplevel? And that's really what environment is about. There's really two elements. One is the wider context. Its wider context in which you work and so one is your immediate environment. So on a personal level, the way that you set up your environment does matter. Right? So are you being distracted by notifications? Do you have you know, you mentioned digital devices in your office set up in a way that allows you to focus, and we deal with some of that in the environment section, but also in other parts of the book in the tactical area but all the area here, perhaps we can focus on today? Is that corporate environment, right, trading that environmental strategic thinking in focus for the wider team? And that's really the big challenge for today.

Davina Stanley
Yeah, yeah. No, that's just beautiful and it's, it's quite a big task, and quite hard to do because culture can be quite hard to get your fingers on contact. So do you have some stories or anything to help us get a real tangible sense of what you're going for here?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, so often, people try to pick a tactical fix, to culture doesn't tend to work and it's important to take local systemic approach, right? So we need to really figure out, you know, what really needs to shift that suddenly makes it easy to do the new behaviors. There's a story that I talked about in the book. Can't be sure it's true, but I think the the but the message is is still really clear and it was about Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, and the sort of story goes he turned up at one of these, one of the branches, one of the franchises and one of the bulbs have gone in the Starbucks logo. So we'll sayings Starbucks or something, and obviously not a great first impression from the franchise as owner, and now what did he do? Right? And he could have, he could have shouted and got angry. This is not respecting our brand, this is terrible, etc, right? He could have like literally said, Give me a ladder, I'm gonna fix it myself and really made the example, lead by example. You know, he could have got everybody together and taught them something, whatever. What he did is he picked up his phone, apparently, and called his operations manager and says, you know, hey, Fred. What's our process for blown bulbs? And the point here is, he saw an issue, which was okay, well, I don't want to fix it here in now, in this one instance, I want to fix it everywhere. All the time forever. I want to solve this. So never happens again. So it goes towards the process and if you have just a great example of taking the systemic approach, you fix it once.

Davina Stanley
And fix it all the time and if it didn't have a process, it's like, okay, we need one and if you did have a process, terrific, tell Mary over there what it is, so she can actually fix it at this site. Or implemented for this? Yeah.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah and so the relevance to this, but when it comes to making time for strategy is, is your culture and your systems and your processes? Are they working for you? When it comes to making time for strategy? Why are they working against you? Can't keep count the number of leaders who have said to me, You know what, I love all this stuff but my organization, we're addicted to firefighting, we love kind of this culture of dropping everything to deal with customer issues. Yes, one company, I believe it was a HubSpot. They had a they had a principle called the 72 hour rule. If we're being asked if we have to ask a colleague for something unexpected with less than 72 hours turnaround time, then we have a broken business process. Oh, and I love that example because it's a real trigger is to say, You know what, if I am asking for things urgently from you, then actually I'm interrupting your focus, I'm distracting you and we, we haven't built out a process which allows us to do this as part of the daily course of business. So what's going on here and I think as a leader, we have to take a hard look at organizations and say, are we are we rewarding, focused? Problem solving on the root issues? Who are we actually rewarding just people kind of like ducking and diving and firefighting, I'd say don't be the fire fighter, be a fire prevention officer. That's the leaders role and yet many leaders again, the fact they've risen up through the ranks by being a great firefighter. So always if you could, firefighter why you want more fires in one way, right? But actually, if somebody who is a firefighter, it's like, it's a nightmare, that house is burning down everything that is Firefighting is a terrible thing but it kind of sounds heroic.

Davina Stanley
And your people live on coffee, and chocolate, and, you know, just burn out so quickly, don't think because everything has to be now now now now now, there's, there's no no time for thinking I was thinking about your point there about the 72 hour rule is a beautiful example of something very simple, too, which you can identify to help put the flag system and that's a bit of an art to getting them to be really simple like that. Being in that simple, I think that's super. So when you do go, to get people to shift their culture and you do want to make that change in a particular way. You've got a wonderful framework, its impact, which is what your business is all about. It's all about impact. It's another one of your acronyms that I love because it it is not only memorable, but it actually synonymous as what you're all about. Tell us about this framework, about the impact framework.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. So the impact framework is going to help you focus in on what actually matters right now because when you want to change culture, its culture change is complicated, it doesn't happen overnight, you have to really think about it, what you're trying to do is change people's behaviors. So often, when people think about code change, the first thing they do actually, is they come up with a Gantt chart to a big process that they want to implement initiatives to launch. Some of that can be valuable but the question is, are we actually changing people's way of thinking, way of operating and we know, all the failed diets, exercise regimes, everything else, we know that behavior, change is tough, we work in certain ways. So the impact framework works individually, you can use it on yourself, you want to build a new habit but you can also look at when you want to look at your organization and build new habits there, which is why I introduced it in this part of the book. So there's six barriers, if you like, they spell out the word impact and each of these barriers is something which could stop the process in its tracks. So we'll look at them. So first of all insights, meet people need to know what they need to change, right? What what they want to do differently, what is leveling up? Now, I talked about various ways to do that but a lot of that is around language need to start to introduce language into your organization, and have the discussion. Why is strategic time, the number one key performance indicator that's going to determine our future success? We talked about that in a previous episode? What is the Infinity trap? How is it impacting us all? What are we not getting to is an organization that is keeping us on the hamster wheel and not creating breakthrough results? That the AI for impact is all about creating, having those discussions and getting the AHA hours? Yeah, we need to focus on this. The aim is for motivation, because getting the Insight is one thing but then I'll be really motivated to work on this. Does it really matter? What's in it for us? Again, after we kind of tell people they need to do this, because, you know, results, for example, might not actually motivate them as much as well, how's it going to free you up? What's gonna be more interesting, if you get to do this, again, if you might be taking people out of their comfort zone. So motivation might be a bit mitigated, I'm not sure I can do this thing I'm being asked for. I quite enjoyed doing these things. I'm good at them. Don't want to go there. So then the next question is actually mining motivation and we talked about various ways of doing that but it's actually really helping people understand what's in it for them intrinsically, what are how they're going to feel as a result of this? What's going to become possible if they do this and so motivation is the next area. Now once you've got insight and motivation, nailed, then there tends to be like, Okay, let's do something about it and then you move into the next part of the framework. So you've got prompt is the P of impact. prompt is very simply, when exactly am I meant to do this behavior that I'd say I'm going to do. So if you say, you know, what we want to create, we want to have a an hour a week where we all strategize or work on our top project, for example, the thing, which is not the short term emergency, the thing we really want to build coming in the coming weeks. Now, many, you could say, well, I'll just let people figure out when they want to do that in their week that's being flexible and agile manager, perhaps, but perhaps that's what you're already doing. It's not working. So in the spirit of doing something differently, why not? Why not come up with a, a cultural norm, a Monday mornings at nine o'clock, we don't do any calls with anybody. If a person wants to talk to you, they can have a conversation with me, your manager and I'll, I'll keep you safe, right, whatever but this is our time with a team Mondays at nine o'clock, we're all doing our strategic time and then at that 10 o'clock meeting, we all quickly check back in with each other and say how it went, what did we learn what went well? Did we get distracted, let's help each other, do that one hour of strategic time and get the benefit. Knowing that if you can probably saved one hour in your week, they'll probably get the idea and want to do more of it. So that's that's the prompt like okay, 9am goes off, you know, or it's the prompt, you know, might be individually after our team meeting or, or whatever it is, but you come up with a shared prompt. So you got insight, motivation, your prompt, and then it's availability. Right ability is can I actually do it? In other words, do I have resources do I have the ability to skills is anything I need to learn? Do I know what I'm going to do when I have that time, for example available? Do I know exactly what I'm going to focus on? I will coach with a client of a senior leader last week and we addressed that very question. You know what? I'm not quite sure I'm using my time properly. You know, when I've got strategic time carved out, I don't really know what to do with it. I get there and I'm like, not sure. So I said, okay, five minutes, go brainstorm. questions that you want to answer right now and your business, started writing a check back in five minutes. I said, do you want to speak? No, no, I'm in the zone. Give me another five minutes. So I gave him another five minutes and he ended up writing out his top 15 questions. How is the market shifting right now? What are our competitors working on? Didn't know the questions were but these kinds of things, right, bigger questions that he wants to focus on? What would be one way to upgrade our product? Boom, right? So these become the questions so that when you've got that half an hour spare you don't spend a half an hour thinking scratching your head about what should I think about, you pull out one of your list your questions, and you think about it, or you work on it. So ability is around really being clear. When you have that moment, you know what to do how to do it and you don't over commit, if we over commit on time, if we could find carve out three hours in our day, perhaps we should carve out 15 minutes, so that we can actually do it and then we can do more of if we've got time but it's better to get everybody doing 15 minutes regularly than trying to do an hour and failing regularly.

Davina Stanley
Yes, yes. No, that just small amount of success to get some momentum happening. Yep. Beautiful. Beautiful. Okay, so giving people the ability and the different things around that to make that happen. Consequences. You've got some you've got some carrot and stick?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, well, consequences is again, it kind of relates back to, it could be characteristic, but it's actually about like this, just double check, does this really matter? Now we've really defined what it is. What are we expecting? If we do this? What are we actually expecting? And what are we expecting? What happens if we don't do this? Does it really matter? Because if the if we look at it and go, You know what, no one's no one's really going to notice this. It's not really going to have any consequence. Outside, then perhaps we haven't got the quite the behavior quite right. Yeah. So an example would be, let's say you come up with, you know what, I just need to spend time reading about my industry. So I can become more strategic Well, sounds like a good idea. If you're not spending any time looking at industry trends, it's pretty good idea to do that but that by itself doesn't generate necessarily consequences. For example, now, you could argue, yeah, if I do this, I'll be able to do other things but it doesn't give you quite the sense of I really must do this. Whereas if you said, You know what I want to be able to, like, present to on the to my board, on the strategic pivots that we need to make over the next five years, then suddenly, that reading is serving a purpose, I'm now reading in order to understand what the pivots are going to be for that. So I can now on my board presentation, they suddenly have started up the consequences. Presentation now, right? And therefore, I'm focusing on that. So the consequences really is does it matter? Is it going to actually move the needle, this behavior that I'm trying to build? Finally, timeline? Again, you might have all sorts of behaviors when we see we need to do them. We're motivated to them, but I will do it next quarter. We're a bit busy right now. It's not the moment timeline speaks to the question is, do we want to do it now? Are we starting today? Or are we not that convinced we want to delay it? And so getting clear, when do we when it is done by right? When do we actually want to look back and say we've done this, we've implemented this behavior, we've made this thing happen and that kind of really forces you to get to get practical. So the impact framework is really simple insight, motivation, Trump's ability consequences timeline, you just look at with like, do I have insight? Yes, motivation? Yes, prompting you to go through the list until you start to feel a bit wobbly and then you focus there and in the book, where I really talk about is what are the conversations to have with your team at each of those stages because this is not you just imposing things coming down from the mountain with what your team needs to do. It's about creating the insight moments, creating the shared a sense of ownership by having the discussion shins with your team.

Davina Stanley
Yes, beautiful, beautiful, and really tightening it. So you do deliver impact around the things that do really matter, of course, being the key things. So, the Starbucks story, the 72 hour rule and impact, I think are three really, really helpful strategies there and do you want to add anything else about environmental does that give people enough of a snapshot? Do you think, to tie it all together?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, I mean, environment is a, you know, it's a huge issue, right? Changing culture, changing the way your team operates and in some ways, you know, you could write a whole book about that there are other books on change management, and all the things else but what I've tried to do here is to give a few ideas around, how do you start to move forward with the conversations within your team to create that systemic change and just want to look at the things to change, if you were to move, implement those behaviors, it will change everything. So just if your team actually had a habit of coming back each week, talking about what their number one improvement project was, for example, just that activity, would perhaps create a focus on it that you don't currently have. So these don't have to be huge, changing the whole way we work it's often very simply a one degree shift because imagine a boat, if you make a one degree shift in your course, by the end of by the, by the time you've travelled over across the ocean, you will have completely different parts done. So I've been looking for a couple of those easy but important shifts that we propose is going to change the dynamic of the team.

Davina Stanley
Yeah, beautiful, wonderful. Look, I think that's been really, really useful for people. So perhaps we should pull this one to a close now, and think about next time, we've got one more episode on this topic, where you're going to bring a whole lot of things together around how to make time for strategy. So if people are interested in getting a bit more information about this book, go to makingtimeforstrategy.com and otherwise, we look forward to coming back again very soon, with some more ideas on this topic but thanks so much, Richard.

Richard Medcalf
Bye, bye.