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Do you listen to your team and get the “right” strategy?
We have added Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, by Liz Wiseman, to our Top Picks (Recommendations) Book List and would highly encourage you to read it.
You may wonder why we’ve classified this blog as Strategy and Focus. Well, that’s a good question. As we were reading the book, I (Tom) began to reminisce back to a strategic planning meeting where my successor and I had designed an agenda for the annual strategic planning session of our industry leadership team. Both of us believed quite strongly that there was no need to spend any time on one subject in particular. We added it to the agenda, but our plan was to spend just a few minutes on it. When the item came up during the meeting, we expressed our thoughts — and assumed everyone would then move on to the next matter on the agenda. To our surprise, a number of younger colleagues dug in and expressed their concern that this area needed more resources and attention, not less. For once, I was able to keep my defensiveness to myself and listen. Their points of view were compelling. They were right. Wow, we had missed it. So we changed our position and allocated more resources to this initiative.
Are you a multiplier or a diminisher with your team when you’re setting the direction of the company? What would your team say?
BTW, we often wonder how many times we did not “hear” our team, and ended up heading in the wrong direction.