Business Leadership 8: Protect the Organization from Internal & External Threats

This continues our series on how leadership traits and roles help your business

As a leader, you protect your business from internal and external threats. Every organization experiences threats from competitors, government regulations, market changes, client whims, and obsolete product. Your business will also generate internal threats in production, marketing, employee apathy, or financing. While traditional SWOT analysis help you identify weaknesses within and threats from without your business, you made need more.

Protect Your Data

You must protect your personal and business data from outside threats. Identity theft remains a growing threat to American businesses. Your business accounts also need protection. Business accounts include:

• Checking accounts
• Employee records
• Client accounts
• Tax records

Several organizations offer data protection tips:

• Trend Micro shares Top 10 Tips to Keep Your Small Business Safe
• IT on Command  talks about Inside the Firewall
• Symantec shares a Small Business Protection Guide
• Michael Dougherty explains Securing Your Database
• IT Security Column provides Internal and External Security Threats for Business Today and their Solution

Protect Your Intellectual Properties

Richard Reed wrote an article called Besieged: Confronting Intellectual Property Threats. He said “Intellectual property is an organization’s most important asset. It includes its knowledge, its ideas and its identity. Companies that conduct business in today’s brand- and image- intensive marketplace must protect their own intellectual property and avoid infringing on the intellectual property assets of others.”

Intellectual property includes:

• Trade secrets
• Trademarks
• Privacy
• Product research and development

You can find additional ideas:

• CIO discusses Hacked: the Rising Threat of Intellectual Property Theft and What You Can Do about It
• The United Nations outlines New Threats to Intellectual Property Rights
• Carnegie Mellon explains Theft of Intellectual Property and Tips for Prevention

Protect Everything Else

Osmond Vitez, an eHow Contributor, wrote How to Establish Internal Control with no Material Weakness. He said “Internal controls are processes or activities that help prevent the abuse of a company’s business or financial resources.”

You can find additional ideas:

• QuickMBA: SWOT Analysis
• What Makes a Good Leader published SWOT Weakness Explained

Saturday we begin describing the leadership traits that inspire your employees and clients

Business Leadership 7: Ensure Access to Adequate Skills, Tools, & Resources

This continues our series on leadership roles and traits that will improve your business

Your employees will need access to adequate skills, tools, and resources to implement your vision. Failure to fulfill this role can prevent your vision from achieving reality. Failure to train your employees adequately eliminates their ability to perform. Scrimping on tools and resources too much strangles your progress. A major role of business leaders, which many forget, remains providing access to adequate skills, training, and resources.

Provide Adequate Skills

Deloitte wrote The Skills Gap in US Manufacturing

• 67% of respondents report a moderate to severe shortage of available, qualified workers
• 56% anticipating the shortage to grow worse in the next three to five years
• 5% of current jobs are unfilled due to a lack of qualified candidates
• Their efforts to develop the skills of current employees are falling short

Businesses, today, focus on hiring the skills rather than developing them. A lot of business owners hesitate to invest in their employees to develop the skills. They worry that their employees will:

• Take too long to learn the skills
• Take the new skills to a better job
• Not perform adequately on the job
• Not provide an adequate return on investment

You need to turn that trend around to grow your business. Take the long-term view and use up-to-date methods to get the skills they need.

Provide Adequate Tools and Resources

Zero Million states “Employee costs constitute the greatest expense in any service business. Not giving your employees adequate tools to do the job is penny wise and pound foolish…Attention to detail and providing adequate tools to do the job will eliminate a key source of employee frustration and increase employee productivity and satisfaction.”

Tools include:

• Adequate computers, local area networks, and operating systems
• Legal agreements
• Training to do the job and to prepare for future responsibilities
• Copiers, faxes, speedy Internet, and office equipment
• Office furnishings, break rooms, microwaves, and refrigerators
• Processes, procedures, and back-up support
• Help to properly serve all clients in the office

Thursday we examine how leaders protect the organization from internal & external threats

Business Leadership 6: VitalSmart’s Model for Changing Your Business

This continues our series on roles and traits of leadership for your business

You will want to change your business to align it with your clear vision. Your employees need to follow your vision and help with the changes. Our last post outlined John Carter’s 8-Steps for change. In addition to Kotter’s 8-steps, several other change theories exist. Today, we will review the change theories outlined by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Al Switzler, and Ron McMillan.

Their framework centers around helping people answer two questions 1) Is it worth it? (motivation) and 2) Am I able to do it? (ability). They accelerate change with support to both questions on three levels: personally, socially, and structurally.

Personal Support for Change

Your efforts should focus on helping each employee to answer “YES” to two major questions.

• Do I want to do it? Your workers should all answer “YES” if you aligned them to the vision you created. Their personal motivation increases the more aligned they become.
• Can I do it? Skill development and training helps your people to answer “YES” to this question confidently. The more they practice and verify their capability, the more confidence they feel.

Social Support for Change

Next, you want to set up processes that facilitate answering “YES” to these two questions.

• Are others encouraging me to do it? Establish processes so that co-workers, supervisors, and others consistently encourage workers to change?
• Are others helping me to do it? Build a core of workers who can implement the change and assign them to help others implement the change.

Structural Support for Change

Finally, you establish structural, procedural, and compensation incentives to generate “YES” to

• Is the environment right for me to do it?  Group meetings, bonuses, posters, and more can create environments conducive to change. Analyze what is preventing them from wanting to make the change.
• Does the environment support me doing it? Look for bottlenecks or barriers in your procedures that will inhibit the changes you want—and remove them.

Tuesday we discuss ensuring that workers have the skills, tools, & resources they need

Business Leadership 5: Implement Appropriate Change in Organizations

This continues our series on leadership roles and traits for your small-business

You will make changes in your organization to implement your vision. Your staff will accept the changes better when they share your vision. So, hopefully, you successfully help them obtain the same vision you created for the company. The clearer you and they see the vision, the better you will recognize the changes required to implement the vision. Today, we will review proven methods, outlined by John Kotter of Harvard, for implementing change in the organization.

Kotter’s Model for Making Change

John Kotter outlined eight steps to implementing change. Learn more by reading his books Our Iceberg is Melting and Leading Change. The text from Kotter’s web site:

1. Establish a sense of urgency: Examine market and competitive realities, and identify and discuss crises, potential crises, or major opportunities
2. Create a guiding coalition: Assemble a group with enough power to lead the change effort, and encourage the group to work as a team
3. Developing a change vision (sound familiar?): Create a vision to help direct the change effort, and develop strategies for achieving that vision
4. Communicating the vision for buy-in: Use every vehicle possible to communicate the new vision and strategies, and teach new behaviors by the example of the Guiding Coalition
5. Empowering Broad-based Action: Remove obstacles to change, change systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision, and encourage risk-taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions
6. Generating short-term wins: Plan for visible performance improvements, create those improvements, recognize and reward employees involved in the improvements
7. Never Letting Up: Use increased credibility to change systems, structures, and policies that don't fit the vision, also hire, promote, and develop employees who can implement the vision, and finally reinvigorate the process with new projects, themes, and change agents
8. Incorporating changes into the culture: Articulate the connections between the new behaviors and organizational success, and develop the means to ensure leadership development and succession

Kotter’s 8-steps are not the only outline to change. VitalSmarts also outlined a change pattern.

Saturday we review VitalSmarts six steps that allow you to change anything

Business Leadership 4: Empower People to Achieve the Vision

This continues our series exploring leadership roles and traits in small-business

Once leaders establish a clear vision for the business and align the staff to the vision, leaders must empower their staff to achieve the vision. Researchers and authors compiled principles, theories, and practices on empowering people. Empowered employees work with less supervision or control to accomplish what their managers want them to accomplish. On the other hand, employees that lack power ask more questions, need more handling, and frequently fail to act on the vision.

Jeff Thompson’s a Sense of Callings Empowers

Jeff Thompson and J. Stuart Bunderson wrote an award-winning article The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the Double-Edged Sword of Deeply Meaningful Work. They found that you can empower your employees by helping them:

• Sense their occupation as a calling
• Relate their occupational calling to the perceived meaningfulness of their work
• Perceive a social importance of their work and occupation to their calling
• Believe that faithful execution of one’s work is a moral duty
• Believe their work is a moral duty worthy of a sacrifice for their work
• Perceive that your business also has a morally related duty to the work

Susan Heathfield’s 10 Principles of Employee Empowerment

Susan M. Heathfield wrote Top 10 Principles of Employee Empowerment. Her article contains wonderful links to a score of additional references. She highlights

• Demonstrate that you value people
• Share leadership vision
• Share goals and direction
• Trust people
• Provide information for decision making
• Delegate authority and impact opportunities, not just more work
• Provide frequent feedback
• Solve problems
• Listen to learn and ask questions to provide guidance
• Help employees feel rewarded and recognized for empowered behavior

Entrepreneurs: How do You Empower Your Employees?

Kevin O’Driscoll lists the following ideas for VentureStreet:

• Share your vision and mission with your employees
• Maintain an employee handbook (aka Policies and Procedures Manual)
• Improve your communication skills
• Learn motivational factors
• Acknowledge people’s intelligence
• Catch people doing things right
• Be honest with everyone
• Establish conflict resolution procedures
• Educate on responsibilities and accountability

Thursday we will highlight how to implement change in your business

Business Leadership 3: Role of Aligning Others to the Business Vision

This continues our series explaining the leadership roles & traits for small-business owners

Once you, as a business owner, establish the clear vision for your business, you need to align everyone to that vision. Many owners think only of aligning their employees. You should also align vendors, suppliers, clients, cross-promoters, and the others in your public. The more people who share your vision the better.

Aligning People Instead of Organizing Staff

I really like how John P. Kotter described it in his article What Leaders Do in the Harvard Business Review “Unless many individuals line up and move together in the same direction, people will tend to fall allover one another. To executives who are overeducated in management and undereducated in leadership, the idea of getting people moving in the same direction appears to be an organizational problem. What leaders need to do, however, is not organize people, but align them” (p7)

Sam Walton, for example, ruthlessly aligned vendors and suppliers to his vision of “The lowest prices Anytime, Anywhere!”. His leadership on this key issue proved crucial to transforming Wal-Mart into his vision.

Aligning is a Communication Challenge

Kotter explains how to align by first comparing it to organizing. Then, he writes “Aligning is different:

• It is more of a communications challenge than a design problem.
• Aligning invariably involves talking to many more individuals than organizing does.
• The target population can involve not only a manager’s subordinates but also bosses, peers, staff, in other parts of the organization, as well as suppliers, government officials, and even customers
• Trying to get people to comprehend a vision of an alternative future is also a communications challenge…
• Alignment helps overcome this problem by empowering people in at least two ways:
  • When a clear sense of direction has been communicated throughout an organization, lower-level employees can initiate actions with the same degree of vulnerability
  • Because everyone is aiming at the same target, the probability is less that one person’s initiative will be stalled when it comes into conflict with someone else’s.”

Tuesday we will continue exploring the role of leadership in small-businesses

Business Leadership 2: Role of Leadership to Establish a Clear Vision

This continues our series on leaders roles and traits for owners of small-businesses

Small-business owners must fill several leadership roles. Most major leadership authors agree that establishing a clear vision for the business remains chief among the roles. Vision directs large companies to move in the same direction. In addition, vision stabilizes smaller companies. Small-business owners without vision can find their business tossing to and fro like a ship without a rudder.

Purpose of a Clear Vision

A business vision provides guidance in the midst of strategic decision making. The Women’s Business Momentum Center states “The purpose of a business vision and mission for that matter, is to

• Guide not only YOU but also your employees, your clients, your affiliates, your partners and your tribe of raving fans
• A great vision recruits people. 
• It excites them about what you are doing
• It compels them to ask ‘How can I get involved?’, ‘How can I help?’, and ‘How can I be a part of this?’”

Stephen R. Covey outlined the purpose of mission statement:

• “It focuses on what you want to be and do.
• It is your plan for success.
• It reaffirms who you are, puts your goals in focus, and moves your ideas into the real world.
• Your mission statement makes you the leader of your own life.
• You create your own destiny and secure the future you envision.”

Peter Drucker wrote

• "Mission and Philosophy is the key starting point in business.
• A business is not defined by its name, statutes, or articles of incorporation.
• It is defined by the business mission.
• Only a clear definition of the mission and purpose of the organization makes possible clear and realistic business objectives."

Methods for Establishing a Clear Vision

Several authors share methods for establishing clear visions:

• Stephen R. Covey discussed beginning with the end in mind
• Jim Collins shares the
  • Level 5 Leaders
  • Big hairy audacious goal (BHAG)
  • Vivid description
• Michael Gerber calls it the primary aim
• Clayton Christensen asks How Will You Measure Your Life?

Saturday we continue our series by analyzing how leaders rally the staff to the vision 

Business Leadership 1: Overview

Today we begin a series outlining leadership traits and characteristics for small-businesses

Business owners provide leadership to the business. Most books on leadership focus on corporate, executive, and director level leadership. Yes, chief level leaders impact corporations and large-to-mid size businesses. Yet, the impact of small-business owners probably overshadows theirs. The size of the business allows owners to work closer to their employees. Consequently, they exercise greater influence their employees and the processes of the business. In this series we will examine the role of leadership in very small-businesses and the traits of successful leaders.

Role of Leadership

A myriad of definitions of leadership exist. I include a list of them on my web site.  

Business Dictionary defines leadership “1. The activity of leading a group of people or an organization, or the ability to do this.

In its essence, leadership in an organizational role involves (1) establishing a clear vision, (2) sharing that vision with others so that they will follow willingly, (3) providing the information, knowledge, and methods to realize that vision, and (4) coordinating and balancing the conflicting interests of all members or stakeholders. A leader comes to the forefront in case of crisis, and is able to think and act in creative ways in difficult situations. Unlike management, leadership flows from the core of a personality and cannot be taught, although it may be learned and may be enhanced through coaching or mentoring.”

Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/leadership.html#ixzz23Ck7Z3DT

Overview of Our Series

During the next few weeks we will examine various roles and traits of leadership. They will include, but will not be limited to:

• Role of Leadership
  • Establish a clear vision
  • Align others to a common vision
  • Empower people to achieve the vision
  • Implement appropriate change within the organization
  • Ensure employee access to skills, tools, & resources required to succeed
  • Protect and defend the organization from internal and external threats
• Traits of Successful Leaders
  • Creative and symbolic visionary
  • Effective influencer
  • Confident, optimistic, and strong pillar
  • Empowering motivator
  • Facilitating mediator
  • Moral and ethical compass
  • Change agent

Wednesday we will continue our examination of leadership by discussing instilling vision

Business Strategy 15: Leadership Roles to Make Strategic Planning Work

This concludes our series on John M. Bryson’s Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations

Bryson writes “There is no substitute for effective leadership when it comes to planning. Strategic planning is simply a set of concepts, procedures, and tools designed to help executives, managers, and others think, act, and learn strategically on behalf of their organizations and organization’s stakeholders.” (p297)

Best & Worst of Strategic Plans

Bryson cautions “At its best, strategic planning helps leaders pursue virtuous ends in desirable ways so that value is created and the common good is advanced.

At its worst, strategic planning drives out strategic thought, action, and learning; makes it more difficult for leaders to do their job; and keeps organizations from meeting their mandates, fulfilling their missions, and creating value. Whether strategic planning  helps or hurts depends on how leaders at all organizational use it—or misuse it.” (p297)

Leadership Tasks in Strategic Planning

Bryson instructs “Carrying out the following interconnected leadership tasks is important if strategic planning and implementation are to be effective:

• Understanding the context
• Understanding the people involved, including oneself
• Sponsoring the process
• Championing the process
• Facilitating the process
• Fostering collective leadership
• Using dialogue and discussion to create a meaningful process, clarify mandates
• Making and implementing policy decisions
• Enforcing norms, settling disputes, and managing residual conflicts
• Putting it all together” (p298)

Putting It All Together

Bryson summarizes “The tasks of leadership for strategic planning are complex and many. Unless the organization is very small, no single person or group can perform them all. Effective strategic planning is a collective phenomenon, typically involving sponsors, champions, facilitators, teams, tasks forces, and others in various ways at various times.

Over the course of a strategy change cycle, leaders of many different kinds must put together the elements we have described in a way that organizational effectiveness is enhanced—thereby making some important part of the world outside the organization noticeably better.” (p316)

In Conclusion

Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations applies to your small-business. I suggest you consult it.

Tuesday we begin a new series highlighting leadership skills and traits for small businesses

Business Strategy 14: Summary & Review of the Strategic Change Cycle

This continues our series applying John M. Bryson’s strategic change cycle to your business

Bryson summarizes the Strategic Change Cycle in Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations “These ten steps should lead to actions, results, evaluations, and learning. It must be emphasized that actions, results, evaluative judgments, and learning should emerge at each step in the process. In other words, implementation and evaluation should not wait until the ‘end’ of the process but should be an integral and ongoing part of the process.” (p34)

Recombining the 10 Steps

The 10 steps outlined in Bryson’s book and my last several posts include:

• “Initiate and agree on a strategic planning process
• Identify organizational mandates
• Clarify organizational mission and values
• Assess the external and internal environments to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
• Identify the strategic issues facing the organization
• Formulate strategies to manage the issues
• Review and adopt the strategies or strategic plan
• Establish an effective organizational vision
• Develop an effective implementation process
• Reassess the strategies and the strategic planning process” (p33)

Strategic Management Process

“The Strategy Change Cycle becomes a strategic management process—and not just a strategic planning process—to the extent that is is used to link planning and implementation and to manage an organization in a strategic way on an ongoing basis.” (p31)

Does Not Follow the Numerical Order

We outlined the ten steps of the process in numerical order. Bryson reminds us, however, that the process does not necessarily flow smoothly in numerical order. Bryson continues

• “In addition, the process often does not start with step 1 but instead starts with some other step and then cycles back to step 1.
• The steps are not steps precisely but rather occasions for deliberation, decisions, and actions within a continuous flow of strategic thinking, acting, and learning; knowledge exploration and exploitation, and strategy formulation and implementation.
• Mintzberg asserts that ‘all real strategic behavior has to combine deliberate control with emergent learning’.
• The Strategy Change Cycle is designed to promote just his kind of strategic behavior.” (p 61)

Saturday concludes series on strategy plan cycle reviewing a few of Bryson’s cautions

Business Strategy 13: Step 10 Reassess Strategies & the Strategic Planning Process

This continues our series on John M. Bryson’s strategic change cycle for your business

Bryson wrote Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations in which he wrote “Once the implementation process has been under way for some time, the organization should review the strategies and the strategic planning process, as a prelude to a new round of strategic planning. Much of the work of this phase may occur as part of the ongoing implementation process.” (p51)

Purpose of Reassessing Strategies & Planning Processes

Bryson continues “The organization should focus on

• Successful strategies, asking whether they should be maintained, replaced  by other strategies, or terminated.
• Unsuccessful strategies should be replaced or terminated.
• The strategic planning process also should be examined, its strengths and weaknesses noted, and modifications suggested to improve the next round of strategic planning.” (p51)

Process of Reassessing Strategies

General Guidelines

• Stay focused on what is important
• Focus on signs of indicators of success and failure
• Review the issue framings used to guide strategy formulation in the first place
• Use existing review opportunities, or create new ones
• Create a review group
• Challenge institutional and organizational rules that favor undesirable inertia
• Remember that organizations usually have greater staying power than their strategies
• Stay fresh

Strategy Change or Succession Guidelines

The following steps will help you establish a strategic change or succession:

• Alter existing arrangements to facilitate a move to new strategies
• Challenge existing meanings and estrange people from them to create new meanings
• Strategy succession may be more difficult than the adoption of the existing strategy because the existing strategy is now likely to have a coalition of supporters
• Implementers and beneficiaries of existing strategies are likely to be more concerned with implementing strategy than with innovating it
• Rely on key decision makers, implementers and beneficiaries to make major strategy changes
• Consider a move either to split aspects of the strategy or to consolidate strategies in order to achieve strategy succession
• Consider building a new system without dismantling the old system
• Invest in relevant competencies and build new competencies

Thursday we summarize and pull the entire strategic planning process together

Business Strategy 12: Step 9 Develop an Effective Implementation Process

This continues our series about John M. Bryson’s strategic planning cycle

“Just creating a strategic plan is not enough. The changes called for by the adopted strategies must be incorporated throughout the system for these strategies to be brought to life and for real value to be created for the organization and its stakeholders. Thinking strategically about implementation and developing an effective implementation plan are important tasks on the road to realizing the strategies.” (John M. Bryson, Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organization, p 50)

Purpose of an Effective Implementation Process

“If strategies and an implementation plan have been developed for a single organization, particularly a small one, or if the planning is for an inter-organizational network or community, this step may need to be incorporated into step 7, strategy formulation.”

“Action plans should detail the following:

• Implementation roles and responsibilities of oversight bodies, organizational teams or task forces, and individuals
• Expected results and specific objectives and milestones
• Specific action steps and relevant details
• Schedules
• Resource requirements and sources
• A communication process
• Review, monitoring, and midcourse correction procedures
• Accountability procedures” (p 51)

Process for Developing an Effective Implementation Process

The following guidelines may help (p 249-255)

1. “Consciously and deliberately plan and manage implementation in a strategic way”
2. “Develop implementation strategy documents and action plans”
3. “Try for changes that can be introduced easily and rapidly”
4. “Use a program and project management approach”
5. “Build in enough people, time, attention, money, administrative and support services, and other resources to ensure successful implementation”
6. “Link new strategic initiatives with ongoing operations”
7. “Work quickly to avoid unnecessary or undesirable competition with new priorities”
8. “Focus on maintaining or developing a coalition of implementers, advocates, and interest groups intent on effective implementation of the strategies and willing to protect them”
9. “Be sure executive and administrative policies and actions facilitate rather than impede implementation”
10. “Think carefully about how residual disputes will be resolved and underlying norms enforced”
11. “Major changes, and even many minor ones, entail changes in the organization’s culture”
12. “Emphasize learning”
13. “Hang in there!”

Tuesday we will discuss how to reassess strategies and the strategic planning process

Business Strategy 11: Step 8 Establish an Effective Organizational Vision

This continues our series about how John M. Bryson’s strategic change cycle can help your business

“In this step the organization develops a  description of what it should look like once it has successfully implemented its strategies and achieved its full potential. This description is the organization’s vision of success.” (John M. Bryson, Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations p49)

Purpose of an Effective Organizational Vision

Bryson writes “Such descriptions may include the organization’s

• Mission
• Values and philosophies
• Basic strategies
• Performance criteria
• Important decision rules
• Ethical standards it expects of all employees” (p49)

In addition,

• “This description, to the extent it is widely  circulated and discussed within the organization informs organizational members about what is expected of them without constant managerial oversight.
• Members are freed to act on their own initiative on the organization’s behalf to an extent not otherwise possible.
• The results should be a mobilization of members’ energy toward pursuing the organization’s purposes and a reduced need for direct supervision.” (ibid)

Process for Developing the Vision

Bryson provides guidelines to help you formulate a vision of success (p 234-236):

1. “Remember that in most cases a vision of success is not necessary to improve organizational effectiveness”
2. “Wait until the organization goes through one or more cycles of strategic planning before trying to develop a vision”
3. “Include in the vision the desired outcomes listed above”
4. “Ensure that the vision grows out of past decisions and actions as much as possible”
5. “Remember that a vision of success should be inspirational”
6. “Remember that an effective vision of success will embody the appropriate degree of tension to prompt effective organizational change”
7. “Consider starting the construction of a vision of success by having strategic planning team members draft visions (or at least relatively detailed outlines) individually”
8. “Use a normative process to review the vision of success”
9. “Be aware that consensus on the vision statement among key decision makers is highly desirable by may not be absolutely necessary”
10. “Arrange for the vision of success to be widely disseminated and discussed”

Saturday we analyze step 9 review an effective implementation process for your changes