Monday, January 23, 2012

Navigating Toward Your North Star

Leaders know the critical importance of a vision to guide them and their company to success. They expend enormous resources developing and acting on that vision within their management teams and driving their organization forward.
     The most successful leaders are also adept at sharing, communicating, and constantly nurturing that vision with their employees, ensuring that the entire company is focused on that same ideal, navigating always toward the same destination – in the direction of their “North Star,” if you will.
     An insightful blog, “What Wise Leaders Always Follow,” posted on the HBR (Harvard Business Review) Insight Center, provides practicable guidance to business leaders about identifying their own North Star and how to follow it.
     Author Prasad Kaipa, a senior fellow in the Center for Leadership, Innovation and Change at the Indian School of Business (Hyderabad, India), says that wise leaders “root themselves in a noble purpose, align it with a compelling vision, and then take action… That noble purpose becomes a North Star, giving direction when the path ahead is hazy, humility when arrogance announces false victory, and inspiration when the outlook seems bleak.”

Simplifying One’s Choices
Indeed, as Kaipa points out, “Though it is not always simple to find one’s North Star, once it appears, its guidance helps simplify one’s choices… It becomes their calling, and they service that calling willingly, happily, and infectiously.”
     The key word in that last sentence is “infectiously,” because in order to be compelling, a North Star must be infectious in its conciseness, while the leader that communicates it must endow it with real world meaning and enthusiasm.
     Employees and line managers sense their leader's passion, and it spreads in the same way that a political cause can suddenly catch fire when a politician succinctly verbalizes a guiding principle that people immediately understand, identify with and latch onto.
     Pres. John Kennedy’s admonition that “we choose to go to the moon” conveyed a common desire and, ultimately, a destiny. He gave the nation an ideal to aim for, something that the people could visualize and strive for. Everyone directly and indirectly involved in the space program instinctively sensed his or her role in reaching for Kennedy’s North Star – a destiny that, in fact, out-lived Kennedy. The nation rose to the challenge and succeeded. The citizenry was universally enthused and supportive.
     In the case of a business, the North Star is not a fixed, finite point in time or space, or a specific end in itself. Kaipa illustrates his essay by discussing at length the Aravind Eye Care System and the North Star that its founder, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswammy fixed on to start the company: “To eliminate needless blindness by providing appropriate, compassionate, high-quality eye care for all.”
     Kaipa says it was a “seemingly impossible dream.” To support it, the founder developed a simple set of principles:
  • Turn no one away regardless of ability to pay
  • Give everyone the same high quality care
  • Don’t be dependent on outside funding sources

Though he doesn’t say it outright, we can infer that Dr. Venkataswammy’s North Star and guiding principles inspired not only his employees, but also everyone it touched. There’s something powerful and empowering about being associated with a cause whose North Star is like that. Your North Star needn’t be so lofty or altruistic, but it should match your desires, affinities, abilities, and reach, including those of your employees.

Touching External Audiences
A compelling North Star and its infectiousness can also serve as an effective recruiting tool, attracting exactly the kinds of people who are inspired by it and thus eager to apply their skills and energies to help the organization attain it. Equally important, it attracts customers and builds brand loyalty.
     Communicating your North Star becomes an all-encompassing affair, reaching not just the internal audience but also customers, venders, and investors. People feel more connected to a business when they sense its guiding spirit and want to invest in it themselves, either by buying its products or stocks, or joining the effort as an employee.
     Perhaps Apple is the best contemporary example of a company that has identified its North Star and effectively communicated it to its internal and external audiences. Steve Jobs famously said he wanted to “put a dent in the universe” – a new age way of saying that he wanted Apple truly to change the way people lived their lives.
     I contend that Apple became successful because it – more especially, Steve Jobs – created and effectively communicated its North Star. More important, Apple established a pattern of breakthrough products and services that repeatedly validated its North Star. Each time it did so, it reinforced its core principles while increasing employee and customer loyalty – which is about as good it gets for a business.

Friday, January 6, 2012

A Military View of Communications

In the context of combat, far from home base with all hell breaking loose, there is nothing more critical than good communications. Well, that and lots of ammunition. But even so, without reliable, consistent communications, you’ll never have enough ammo.
      The parallel in business is that you may be able to throw a lot of money and people at challenges or a crisis, but without effective communications, it won’t make a lot of difference. That’s why the words of wisdom from retired four-star General Stanley McChrystal ring so true in a terrific interview* in Inc. magazine.
      Gen. McChrystal was commander of the Joint Special Operations Command in Afghanistan during its peak period of engagement. He is also a third-generation West Point graduate – a soldier’s soldier, as the expression goes.
      My naïve image of such a man is one of rigid hierarchy, someone who lives and breathes “chain of command,” with little patience for the softer part of operations – i.e., the people side of the equation. So I was pleasantly surprised to read in this brief interview his strong belief in the importance in building relationships as a precursor to establishing effective communications before a crisis hits.

Relationships at the Core
He talked about the value of the physical communications links – telephones and the Internet, for instance – but said that relationships are most important, which he explains as “having people you know and trust that you can communicate effectively with so you can get a clear understanding of the situation and you can begin to craft a credible response.”
      In other words, the cultivation and maintenance of relationships is the key to effective communications, which in turn is central to being able to successfully respond to the challenges everyone faces, in both war and everyday business.
      Not only is it unwise to await the crisis to begin the effort to build relationships and establish firm communications links, but to wait is to guarantee failure. Especially in the context of a crisis – be it on the battlefield or in the office – the lack of a foundation of established relationships and the trust they embody means that communications will be chaotic and worthless.
      As I’ve pointed out here numerous times, a guiding vision or mission is the single most effective way to build those relationships in an organization, to unite people around a shared sense of purpose, everyone striving for the same ultimate result. The same is true in a military context.

“Commander’s Intent”
Gen. McChrystal shares that philosophy, though he uses a different term. “We develop something called ‘commander’s intent’ to put in clear words what it is we really mean … designed to explain, in the commander’s own voice, what it is we were going to do, why we thought that was important, how it fit in to the bigger context of what we were trying to do, and then what might be successful.”
      I’ve rarely read a better, more succinct description and purpose of “vision” than that.
      As though reading my mind, he went on to say that, in business, “commander’s intent … might be ‘vision’… It would explain to people, here’s what we’re trying to do, and if things aren’t exactly as you expected them to be, this is still the end result. If you empower each employee with that kind of context and understanding, they get what we call ‘shared consciousness and purpose.’ They suddenly understand what it is they are trying to do in what environment, and what the organization is trying to accomplish.”
      Beautifully said. 
      People within a business who fully understand and work toward a vision will always encounter stumbles and barriers along the way. The strategy they so carefully worked out may not unfold exactly as they had planned. But they still keep their eyes on the desired end results, as laid out in the vision.
      There’s an old expression about war strategy and planning: as soon as the fighting breaks out, the first thing to get tossed aside is the battle plan. Chaos rules, but the end goal remains unchanged.
      When people are working toward a common vision, the way they communicate and the words they use to communicate come more naturally. There is less guessing as to another person’s meaning and intent since they all know where they’re going and their communications are built on the trust inherent in established relationships.
      In a military context, say in Afghanistan, if the commander’s intent is secure the Helmand province for the local citizens desirous of peace, then the strategy and component tactics toward that end make sense. The officers within the chain of command continually reemphasize that desired end result, making it relevant for better understanding among their troops. As they then move forward as a unit, securing one town at a time battling the local Taliban forces, in the face of chaos and mayhem of battle force their plans change on the fly.
      We face our own Taliban every day in business – albeit, not mortally dangerous. When we’re able to stay focused on the vision that drives our organization, we’re able to communicate our intents clearly to our teammates to surmount the daily struggles and setbacks, better able to help meet the ultimate goals of the organization.

*Thanks and a tip of the hat to Mary Schaefer for bringing the Gen. McChrystal interview to my attention.