Management in general needs more Excel and less PowerPoint.
That’s the assessment of Colin Price and Sharon Toye, authors of Accelerating Performance: How Organizations Can Mobilize, Execute, and Transform with Agility.
They offer a research-backed approach to driving transformation in a highly disruptive, constantly-changing world.
The book draws on an impressive combination of empirical research and decades of experience advising global companies. Price is an executive vice president and head of the leadership practice at Heidrick & Struggles. Toye is a partner in Heidrick & Struggles' London office and a member of the firm's Leadership Consulting Practice.
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The authors provided their insights from the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps. Heidrick & Struggles was a strategic partner at this year’s forum.
Rodger Dean Duncan: Most people know that “leadership by announcement” doesn’t work. What’s the best way to establish a strong, shared vision in an organization?
Colin Price: It starts with self-awareness and insight into how the company creates value. Then it’s down to finding the elusive sweet spot between incremental and bold. For example, when we spoke with MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, he described a vision of “a world without cash.” This helps him frame the challenge as beyond competing with traditional rivals—MasterCard must compete with cash and checks. This challenge has been a prime motivator for Banga’s millennial employees, who make up nearly half of the company, because they are excited by the bigger cause. Banga did two things well: he established a vision based on market opportunities and then found a way to connect it back to his employees’ passions.
Duncan: One of the ways to energize leadership, you say, is to “stop ‘sucking up’ accountability.” Please explain.
Price: An authoritarian spirit still clouds the minds of too many senior managers (20% of the leaders at a global electronics retailer are regarded as “command and control” types). Even if we disregard the extremes of this category—the bullies or micromanagers no one wants to work with—what’s left is a set of well-meaning leaders who, nevertheless, systematically weaken the business. They deprive the organization of the energy that comes from allowing people the opportunity to stretch their own leadership muscles.
Think of Home Depot. It initially thrived by not letting high-level managers suck up accountability. Big decisions around staffing, store layout, and even purchasing were left to local managers. In the first decade of the 21st century, Home Depot arguably lost its way as it experimented with a more controlling style. Subsequently, new leadership brought back the essence of the original spirit from the founding of Home Depot. This can be seen in the “experts in the aisles” one encounters at the stores—the sorts of people who would be clerks in some retail environments are given great latitude to serve customers.
Duncan: “List your priorities on one hand” is a practice you advocate. How can a leader resist the temptation to juggle dozens of plates at once?
Sharon Toye: It’s admittedly very hard. If you run a business unit, you’ll want to see every one of your managers get access to enough resources to progress every year. But companies rarely break out by being a little better in every part of the business—companies that reallocate their capital more rapidly are more likely to succeed. So the CEO must pick the biggest opportunities, then rally the team around developing them rapidly.
But even knowing that, most leaders never take the time to put pen to paper. Part of the solution is simply getting on with it: write down your top five priorities, ask your team to write down theirs, and then schedule the time to compare the lists and work through them together. It’s simple, yet often sparks very powerful conversations.
Duncan: A good way to build a strong team, you suggest, is to “celebrate net exporters of talent.” Give us an example of how that works.
Toye: Truly high-performing teams aren’t permanent fixtures in the organization. They change and adapt. Companies that are talent magnets encourage teams to form and disassemble easily and without ego—what matters to them is results. For team members this is hugely empowering; they are owners of the process and the outcomes they generate.
Leaders at Bain Capital in Europe told us they’re initially cautious when managers at a company they’ve bought suggest names for an important new initiative, because they assume those managers are, in fact, holding their best people in reserve. Over time, though, once management shows success and underscores the need to “export talent,” the right people get assigned to the most important opportunities.
Duncan: You say it’s important to “fail fast with confidence.” What does that look like in actual practice?
Price: We never want to kill our own projects. Therefore, it’s not nearly enough to recognize that we shouldn’t throw good money after bad. We need someone to watch our wallet. The best companies put processes in place to effectively do this—for example, by instituting a rotating “devil’s advocate” position in team meetings whose job is to question assumptions. Wharton’s George Day has a nice framework for failing fast that he calls “real, win, worth it.” This helps management teams programmatically ask themselves “Is the opportunity still real?” “Can we still win?” and “Is the expected return worth it?”
A company we studied used this approach to decide whether or not to expand production in the Chinese market for automobile tires. The opportunity looked great, and I’m sure their instincts were telling them to go for it, but after following the process above, the executives realized that the risks of global overcapacity were too real to ignore. They invested elsewhere, took a small loss, and avoided what proved to be a significant market collapse.
Duncan: To lead change and accelerate performance, you use a framework called META—short for Mobilize, Execute, and Transform with Agility. What led you to distill all your research into that particular approach?
Price: Management in general needs more Excel and less PowerPoint. That concept underpinned our approach—applying heavy-duty data techniques to understand what distinguishes elite organizations from the rest. So, among other things, we analyzed the performance of the Financial Times 500, drew on a survey of 20,000 global leaders, and investigated the performance of 3,000 teams. The upshot of these efforts—four years of work—was a list of 13 statistically validated drive factors that we are confident separate “accelerating” companies from “derailing” ones.
Rodger Dean Duncan is the author of CHANGE-friendly LEADERSHIP: How to Transform Good Intentions into Great Performance.
