Communicating effective strategies and setting them into action takes more consideration than most leaders think. Otherwise, brainstorms can lead to disasters.

Many company leaders have had this experience: You hear an idea from one of your execs in the spirit of a brainstorm, nod your head, ask for more information, then acknowledge the idea as having potential. The next thing you know the exec (or your team) walks away thinking you have just provided a mandate. Or, you offer an idea in a similar brainstorm and, within days, actions in support of your “thinking out loud” are taking place.

There is urgency since you seemed to support said idea. Without your knowledge, your well-meaning team moves forward but with no cohesive strategy or consistent structure. This story is historically more likely to happen to a larger company. However, in recent years, there seems to be less difference with the leaders I coach. All of us are moving faster, urgency is everywhere and movement seems to be strategy enough -forget a defined outcome or specific results.

As leaders, we regularly make observations, raise a question or offer an “I wonder?” What’s the cost to our people, our customers and stockholders when support to raise awareness gets misunderstood and moves to action or no action? A shift or movement in some direction alone is not strategy; it’s just movement.

There are many ways to avoid this situation. First, be clear about your strategy. A leader prone to brainstorm or applaud others’ ideas can be a great motivator, but moving fast can undercut your effectiveness by accident, as in the example above.

Second, make sure the stars you surround yourself with know -without doubt -the difference between your process of brainstorming and the way you make a decision about direction or policy in the moment. Invite them to share their decision-making process with you and the team. Gaps show up often in this exercise. I find that mid-level managers -often executives -can’t really define their “go/no go” decision-making process.

In addition, clarity on the agenda at the beginning of a meeting is a great tool. Use the check-in to confirm that ideas in the meeting are simply ideas until actions are actually agreed upon.

Finally, reinforcement at the end of a meeting is a tool, a structural component of a meeting that can assure clarity about choices made or “made up.” It’s simply an acknowledgment of the ideas agreed upon as action steps and those not, assuring no misconceptions before all leave for the next meeting.

An Effective Strategy
Actions or habits that turn into strategy in the short term are not very effective. These actions can shatter morale. What starts as a brainstorm -an idea with no outcome attached or quarterly mandate -easily turns into drama. All your team knows is here comes another direction change in their work or focus.

All the customer knows is the experience has shifted. Both work team and customers pay the price. Before you as the leader even know that something’s changed, impact is already occurring. Anything close to an effective culture slips away.

There are a number of strategies that do work. Whether you’re looking at only transitional shift or transformational change, effective steps are very similar in my experience.

First, look at your culture -look in the company mirror. Do you like what you see? Acknowledging how you treat each other, how you want to treat each other and how it impacts your people and your customers pays big dividends. Accidents happen less often. Also, ask yourself if your firm is performance driven, if it moves fast enough and if it’s profitable enough or not.

What I love about learning organizations is that “good enough” simply isn’t. Course correction is constant, industry averages and best practices are not a goal. Improvement and the application of new learning is the goal. In my experience, performance in these types of organizations skyrockets. No matter how good the performance, the daily questions are how to do it better and what can I learn from others on my team.

If you’re happy with the current culture, ask yourself how it can be honored on a daily basis. If your culture can be improved, what or where does that improvement need to be focused?

Culture is not passive; culture is your performance. And maximizing performance is both a subtle and aggressive game. Can you hold on to ideas and habits that serve you and let go of habits that don’t?

Like life changes, shifting work performance takes daily work and knowing what your goal is. Change is not random reaction.

Look at any world-class athlete, or any of your competition. Ongoing movement forward is the only mandate. Random acts are not very effective and, clearly, sitting back and resting on what works is simply not enough.

This brings us to strategies. First, based on what you see in performance results, what can be learned? What strategies can be defined and acted on, not as a brainstorm in the moment, or half-baked ideas? An alternative is to applaud what works in the culture, what you hear from new people, new technology, core beliefs and values in the culture. What are effective strategies for incremental or radical change?

Morale need not be dead. Very few people in my experience wish to go to work and have a boring, ineffective day. Most, if not all, wish to be effective and seen as successful. How we choose to support this success is how to build what can be dynamic company results. This goal takes work, and a cohesive rather than piecemeal process. Structure supports strategy and performance.

Now go back to paragraph No. 1. The conversation in your office was meant as a strategic brainstorm, and got turned into action. The strategy of a brainstorm might have been OK in actuality; structure is where we stumble in most cases. Does my team know the difference between me brainstorming and in the immortal words of Jean-Luc Picard, “Go, make it so!”

You work hard to strategize new possibilities and put those strategies into place, spending a lot of money and time in the process. But, typically, what isn’t done is to assess the structure is to support the new strategy.

An alternative is to look at your meeting structure. A question like, “Is the structure in place supporting this strategy effectively?” is a great tickler to maintain your awareness in a change process.

Structure is as much how we report to each other as knowing to whom we report. It is clearly knowing to whom we delegate to be effective, and supporting that person or persons in their preparedness. Structure is how we follow-up or support the person effectively to whom we’re delegating. A lack of structure keeps performance stagnant or worse, and maintains the culture to be whatever it is. Then we wonder why a strategy doesn’t work.

I invite you to move as fast as you can, and at the same time, stay conscious in your choices and learning. There are few things more exciting than high performance. What could happen for you and your team -for each of us -if we begin to think of the way we do things here as being a performance-based business?

The shift from passive participants waiting with baited breath to do the wishes of the leader, to needing and stepping into active participants and active learners, provides some real sizzle to this writer. It will for you, too. FAD