Success in anything we do is almost always guaranteed by laying the right groundwork. As the respected inventor, thinker and statesman, Benjamin Franklin, famously said: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
This became starkly apparent to me when I attended a four-day strategy programme at Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts in 2019. The people who had taken the time to prepare for the course – read the required case studies, answered the questions and understood the nuances of complex decision-making processes – ultimately walked away with a far richer experience.
The Harvard course was interactive. What stood out for me was that the quality of the answers and input, correlated strongly with whether people had come to the programme prepared or not. This observation made me think about preparation in a business. Could we enhance the value of strategy formulation by encouraging a more thorough preparatory process?
When people attend strategy sessions, they are trying to improve their planning and decision-making processes in order to run more successful companies. After my time at Harvard I came to realise that if people were not arriving at their strategy sessions prepared, then they were effectively guessing what critical touch points their business faced. If you are in a session thinking about the critical moves your business needs to make for the first time, then the quality of your thinking, at that point, is never going to be nearly as heightened than if you took the time to apply your mind and draw up strategic points beforehand.
I had been mulling over this notion for a while when I was fortunate enough to travel to Australia to work with a world-renowned Australian coach, Brad Giles, who shared this vision of preparedness with me. Brad sends his clients a list of questions at least two weeks prior to their session. This gives his clients enough time to answer these questions in writing and give the issues at hand some in-depth thought.
This, again, highlighted the importance of being prepared. It means everyone involved in the strategy session will be much more structured in their thinking. Clients will have a more in depth understanding of their own business, have considered the critical issues, and brainstormed these ideas with the company leadership team. So, by time they get to the strategy session, their focus can be on the real issues, not just what they believe the key points to be.
A sound business strategy should be built on facts, not guesswork. These facts need to guide us to the issues that require studying and delving into. Only once we have done that, can coach and client work together to formulate a strategy that will take the client’s business from being good to great – to quote American author and business consultant, Jim Collins.
In short: The starting point for effective strategic planning has to be a thorough understanding on the part of the client in regards to their own business. That is why I ask my clients to tackle these five questions before they attend a strategy session:
This assessment gives the client a number of data points for their business, which in turn highlights where their business’s strengths and weaknesses lie, where they may find opportunities, or where risks might present themselves. Essentially these points guide us towards a classic SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. The SWOT analysis gives us a good overview of what is currently happening within the business.
The SWOT analysis will typically throw out about 20 questions that could potentially influence the company’s strategy. Unfortunately, you can’t tackle all of them in a single session, so these 20 questions have to be narrowed down to three critical questions that pertain most to the business at a particular point in time. That is the starting point.
The nature of these questions will depend on the particular phase in which the business finds itself. So, we may start by focusing on more fundamental questions such as: how to improve the business’s client base; how to generate greater efficiency from employees; or how to better manage budget and cash flow. However, as the business evolves, clients will move onto more complex issues that pertain to a more mature organisation such as: how to integrate company culture throughout a variety of merged businesses; or more industry specific questions like streamlining core business activities for better efficiencies and profit. Yes, these are complicated considerations, but with preparation, strategy sessions become more focused and are more likely to deliver answers which can take the business to the next level, no matter what stage of the growth life-cycle.
When it comes to coaching and strategy, it must be remembered that the process is not dissimilar to building a house. It takes time – months if not years – and every new step builds on a previous one. But everything, starts with a firm foundation.
What I cannot stress enough is that the coaching process requires business owners and their leadership teams to be willing to do the work in the background, to make sure that they are coming to their strategy sessions prepared. Coaches are only as good as their client’s allow them to be. Better preparation will ultimately ensure better coaching, and that ultimately spells success.
By Graham Mitchell: Business Coach at GROW.