Is your team match fit and ready for what comes next?
In every organisation there is a continual dance going on between culture and strategy. This is because of what I call “cultural readiness”.
Whether it’s reshaping your services, refocusing your work “upstream”, diversifying your income through commerce, shifting your model or restructuring your people, the response you will get to all these plans from the people affected, will depend on how ready they are to receive your message.
Specifically, cultural readiness is a description of how prepared your people are, to embrace the destination, to throw themselves into the process of change, and to successfully navigate the journey to its end.
One of my clients described this as the need for her organisation to start “getting the team match fit” in advance of the next phase of her strategy.
Getting the team match fit means putting in place four distinct things: clarity of the destination, of what “good” looks like and of what will need to change; their buy-in and intrinsic desire to make those changes; them having the competencies and capabilities they will need to succeed; and the focus, or the absence of distractions, without which nothing will get started.
Those four things operate in that precise order: clarity, will, skill, then focus. If the first ones aren’t in place, the last ones aren’t relevant.
The reason for the dance between strategy and culture is that a strategy can only stretch people so far in one round. If they’re not ready both emotionally and practically, if the will and skill aren’t in place, you’ll be fighting their fears every step of the way.
I’ve no shortage of personal examples I could share of client organisations who’ve had to spread their journey over more than one strategy cycle, simply to allow time for the culture and capabilities to evolve enough that other people, whether within or outside of the organisation, are ready to accept that more distant destination.
Sometimes that two-step dance is the sensible choice. Pragmatism in the present for a visionary change in the future. But it’s not the only option.
We can dramatically speed up the dance simply by anticipating the steps we will need to take, and starting now on getting the team match fit, ready for what’s to come.
Culture and capability take time to develop – even if we’re going external for some of the more technical skills, it takes time to find people, to bring them in, get them up to speed; for them to gel. But skills are just one aspect of readiness: mindset, behaviours, soft skills, beliefs, they’re all essential parts of the mix too, and those don’t shift overnight.
No professional sports player would wait for the qualifying rounds, before training to build the fitness, both physically and mentally, that they know they’re going to need in the tournament ahead.
I know it’s hard enough to find the time to even think about this stuff, but nevertheless, we have to recognise that the challenge for leaders is not just to think about the behaviours and skills our people need for the work that’s coming onto the desk right now or later this year.
We need to start getting the team match fit now, for work they will need to be doing in two- or three-years’ time, because that’s how long it might take to get them from here to there.
Adaptability, collaboration skills, conflict maturity, commercial acumen, curiosity, humility, resilience, the ability to understand and engage and influence other people. Whatever we’re going to need, we can start building now. And, if we want them to be ready when we need them, now is when we need to start.
So, take a moment. Think about these questions.
Do you know where your strategic journey is likely to take your organisation?
Do you know what that will require from the beliefs, behaviours and skills of your people?
And have you thought about how you can start accelerating that development from today, so they’re fully match-fit when the game gets going?