Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, this is Jeff Amerine. I’m glad to be back.
Jeff Standridge:
Yes, sir. Good stuff.
Jeff Amerine:
What do we got this week?
Jeff Standridge:
Well, we’ve been talking about strategy. We’ve spent the last four weeks talking about strategy, everything from crafting a good quality strategic plan, a strategic growth plan. We talked about kind of the bad rap that strategy sometimes gets because it’s done badly. We’ve talked about assessing the external environment, whether that’s at the market level, the competitive level, or the individual employer associate level. We’ve talked about strategic communications. Now what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna wrap up this particular kind of five-week series by talking about the role of leadership in executing strategy, not only in building strategy, but also in executing strategy.
Jeff Amerine:
No, that sounds great. And we’ve both been at this a while as leaders and learning from good leaders and also seeing examples where maybe the leadership was off the mark. So take us through some of the critical aspects of leadership and executing strategy. What do you think?
Jeff Standridge:
Well, so first and foremost, you know, I think we have to have leaders who, if they’re not visionary themselves, and it’s, we’ve seen it, we’ve seen CEOs who are just not very visionary and not very compelling in the communication of a vision. And so if a leader is, has the self-awareness to understand that, and I hope that any executive leader invests a lot of time and money into building self-awareness, self- and situational-awareness, but really having a leader who can build vision and who can cast vision and can communicate that vision. And if they can’t do it themselves, surround themselves with a team of people who can help shore up those gaps, so to speak.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it all starts with the leader. They’ve got to have the ability to tie together what the strategy is and why it’s important and then have the people that work with them that are good on, on carrying it out because the leader can’t do it by themselves. I mean, their job is to cast the vision and remove the obstacles and then have the team that can actually execute on, on that vision.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, once that strategic plan is developed in terms of mission, vision, values, brand promise, etc. That leader, those leaders in the organization, I would say the executive team and the senior leaders in the organization, if they don’t commit it to heart, in other words, if they’re not able to refer to elements of that strategic plan in terms of Who are we, where are we going, and how we’re gonna get there. If they’re not able to do that consistently and effectively on demand, anytime they’re asked a question by their associate population, then they’re really not fulfilling their roles as leaders of the organization. They can’t pull it out of, say, oh, wait a minute, pull it out of the pocket and remind themselves. They really need to be able to commit to memory who they are, where they’re going, and how they’re going to get where they say they’re going as an organization. Because that then instills trust in the employee population that they really do know where the organization’s going and how they’re going to take it there.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, and what they say and their actions have got to be consistent with that as well. I mean, there’s there when the team sees actions that don’t appear to be consistent with the strategy, it brings it all into question. So so it’s a matter of living, living what they say and then setting the example as to why they’re totally bought into the strategy themselves.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s exactly right. The individual employee of an organization generally has an uncanny ability to sniff out inconsistencies in leadership messaging. And so the senior leaders of the organization have an absolute responsibility to not only commit to memory, as I said, but to create an unfailing degree of accountability to one another for walking the walk and talking the talk when it comes to that strategy.
Jeff Amerine:
Let’s give some examples, Jeff. What are some examples where we’ve seen the leader do a particularly good job living the culture and fulfilling the strategy that might be relevant to the audience?
Jeff Standridge:
I can tell you about a couple of examples of maybe that weren’t necessarily stellar. I can give some positive examples as well, but sometimes they’re not as enlightening as those others. So talk about living the culture and walking the walk. I can point to a corner office executive who every time he evaluated himself against the set of kind of core competencies for the organization, he gave himself maximum scores in every single one. And just didn’t have the strength of leadership to be vulnerable and to allow people to see that he wasn’t good at everything. Everyone knew it already.
Jeff Amerine:
Yep.
Jeff Standridge:
He was good at some very specific things, but he was not so good at some very specific things as well. And rather than be vulnerable and authentic, and communicating that by the way he evaluated himself during the annual review process, it was really just kind of telling. And you could see that play out in his leadership of other people in the organization as well.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, I’ll give actually a specific example that we witnessed, which in a good way, and that would be the example of AptiG, which was an educational technology, marketing technology company, had a very strong leader there that went through three iterations at least of trying to make sure that their strategy was aligned with their culture. And it was very clear about who they hired and who they fired and how they felt about the culture. And what that resulted in was they became a market leader within that educational technology arena, better than any other company that was out there and had a really nice recapitalization or on even a better growth trajectory. But it was very clear that the senior leadership, the CEO and the COO were aligned and had lived that culture and that strategy all the way along. The market rewarded them, the venture capital and private equity people rewarded them. And most importantly, because we’re in a war for talent, the talent rewarded them because it was a place that everyone wanted to work.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, you know, I think, you know, it gets a lot of negative, I wouldn’t call it media, but social media a lot of times is the whole Chick-fil-A dynasty under Truett Cathy, you know. He was unwavering in his belief, in his faith, and in his belief, and how that played out within his organization. And, you know, For a number of years, Chick-fil-A was nothing more than a kiosk in a shopping mall that sold sandwiches, and that was it. But over the years, the dynasty that’s been built and the sheer degree, the degree of customer service that comes out of, you know, if you ever go over just down the street here at 12 noon, there are 20 cars in line, but I don’t know that I’ve ever spent more than 10 minutes in the drive-through line from stern to straddle from the time I actually pull into the line till I’m actually giving my order till I’m actually driving away with my with my order.
Jeff Amerine:
Very strong culture, and anyone that’s ever worked there in any kind of customer-facing role, you know, they’ve worked there because there’s certain aspects of the way they are that were informed by working there. I mean, the, the courtesy and customer first and, you know, how they, uh, how they talk to people, I think it’s a good sign of a strong culture implemented by a great leadership team with a good strategy.
Jeff Standridge:
You know, I had another leader at one time who knew, this leader was very visionary, particularly from a technical perspective. And he could envision things years in advance of them actually coming to the market. But he knew that he probably wasn’t the best to single-handedly cast that vision and communicate that vision across the organization. And so he used some very, very strong communicators around him to help him do that. And some of them were writers who could help write the communications, but others of those were orators, if you will, or leaders who were good at casting clear, compelling vision verbally, and he would leverage those as well. He would still do his part. But he knew enough, and he was self-aware enough to know that he needed to augment his own capabilities with the capabilities of a few other people as well to adequately communicate that vision and to hold each other accountable to the fulfillment of that vision.
Jeff Amerine:
You know, and there’s lots of different ways that you can assess both your strengths and the strengths of the organization. There’s things like the color code assessment, and there’s Myers-Briggs, and there are all those sorts of things. But a good starting point can also be the Growth DX. Talk a little bit about how our tool and the Growth DX can be helpful in this part in particular.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s a good point. So our Growth DX is a collection of best practices across seven different diagnostic domains. And it’s meant to be completed by the top leaders within an organization. The more, the better. Now, we don’t want to run it throughout the entire organization. But let’s say the top five to seven to 10 executives within an organization, any of those numbers are going to produce very high-quality results. But it really revolves around organizational effectiveness. Actually, the first one is around revenue velocity. So that is the quality of your sales, marketing, and messaging efforts. Then there’s organizational effectiveness, the quality of your planning processes, much of what we’ve talked about in the last four episodes prior to today. Operational effectiveness, how good are you at getting your products and services out the door, high-quality decisions in a timely manner. Leadership effectiveness, how well you embody the culture of the organization, your leadership practices. Innovation readiness, the degree to which you have thoughtful, well-planned innovation processes within the organization to drive improvements in the way you do work. Digital readiness, the degree to which you’re taking advantage of digital technologies and how they advance the actual execution of your business. And then finally, the seventh domain is the financial disciplines. To what degree are you actually measuring and managing the critical financial measures of your organization or financial variables of your organization? That’s the Growth DX. And so we really look forward to having folks from the podcast reach out to us, to ask us to give them the opportunity to take that Growth DX. We’d be glad to provide that to you and then schedule a follow-up debrief of that to help you understand. The other thing that it does is it not only provides a heat map for where you are particularly strong and maybe particularly weak against these best practices, but also provides some quantification of the potential financial opportunities that are locked up in your business by addressing one or more of those diagnostic domains. The Growth DX.
Jeff Amerine:
It’s a powerful tool.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, if you wanna learn more about the Growth DX, you can go to www.innovationjunkie.com/growthdx, and that’s David X-Ray. Growth DX as in growth diagnostic innovationjunkie.com/growthDX.
Jeff Amerine:
Good stuff.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, so we’ve actually wrapped up this discussion on strategy. The next series of episodes, four or five episodes, we haven’t quite gotten it completely architected out, but we know what the overarching theme is gonna be and it’s about profit growth. So if you wanna understand, you wanna learn more about how to drive tremendous profit growth within your organization, then you’re gonna wanna tune in to the next several episodes of the Innovation Junkies podcast. Thank you for joining today. We look forward to seeing you next time.
Jeff Amerine:
See you next time.