Global scientific manufacturer
Engaging wider leadership team to drive strategy execution via our ‘Strategy Safari’ technique
Back in 2003 this enterprise held a management meeting for its top 200 in the Arizona desert. It was one of the first large-scale leadership-level engagement interventions that we had designed and facilitated. The plot then was to engage the delegates in thinking outside the box to help the organization accelerate from a mid position in their sector to ‘top quartile’.
We used our Predator™ concept in which the delegates were cast in small teams either as Predators or Defenders; both charged with devising three or four breakthrough strategies with an emphasis on cross-business-unit collaboration – it being the case that clients wanted one relationship rather than many.
Back to the future and the organization is under ‘new management’ so to speak and progressing the transition started back then to create more of a one organization to make it easier for customers to deal with them and to benefit from multi product solutions; thereby to drive more business for the organization.
In preparation for bringing the wider management team together for the first time since 2003 we were asked to interview (off-the-record) about half of the wider global management (40-odd) prior to the leadership meeting in order to:
- Asses whether the group was behind the strategy and why and if not why not.
- Determine if the strategy was clear to people.
- Determine what level of inclusion in the execution they need in order for it to migrate from ‘head office’ to the business units – “make explicit the invitation to them to participate in decision-forming”.
- What ‘gateway’ decisions needed to be made by the exec group to enable the passage of the strategy.
- What they expected of the top team when they met.
- What success of the meeting would look like to them.
By so doing the executive group were able to assess the mindset in advance and adapt the meeting to ensure that expectations were either met or acknowledged but not met because they were out of scope.
We designed an Engage for Change Strategy Safari™ for the meeting in which the delegates in small groups were able to visit five key destinations on Safari. At each they found a member of the executive team as Safari Guide leading a conversation summarising the thinking behind the station, exploring the pre-meeting feedback and challenges and explaining what kind of input was most needed from the wider team to make it happen. The idea of Strategy Safari is to avoid grandstanding by senior figures and spectatorship by delegates. By careful choreography the entire group felt they were on a collective and non-hierarchical journey which prepared them for the unblocking exercise and execution-focused planning that followed.
We are now working with them on engaging world wide leadership in 2010 strategy execution.
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