The "Messy" Path to Leadership

In Euclidean geometry, "The shortest path between two points is a straight line." You may know the concept, "the path of least resistance."

These ideas work well in many areas, but if you're navigating an upward career path toward executive leadership, you may be well advised to take a longer, messier path that comes with some challenges. Here's why:

• The distance between points A to B is short, and limiting. When you apply a linear approach to your career trajectory, you coast in your comfort zone. Let's say you started your career as a marketing intern, and through years of hard work you eventually land in a VP of Marketing position. But, your experience is mono-focused and limited only to marketing, possibly within the same company, so your next logical career step is Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) - that's it.
• The path of least resistance is also the path of least opportunity. Advancing toward executive leadership roles doesn't have to be difficult, but you must be willing to stretch outside your comfort zone to build experiences, gain exposure and broaden your sphere of influence. In doing so, you gain new skills, develop key relationships and add to your credibility as a value-added leader - all factors in creative new opportunities.

How to navigate the "messy" path to leadership
To effectively lead in today's challenging economy, executives need strategic insight and organizational awareness, coupled with critical skills like communication and relationship management. These qualities are developed through diverse career experiences that force you to move from one area of expertise to another - for example, from marketing to finance or operations.

Messy doesn't necessarily mean haphazard. You can be strategic and intentional about your non-linear approach to the C-suite when you:

• Clarify where you want to eventually end up. Where do you want to be in your career five to ten years from now? Knowing the end result you want to achieve helps you strategize opportunities that may be a good fit for your growth path.
• Identify success patterns. Most corporate CEOs have a non-linear career trajectory despite having a very specific sweet spot in a certain area. According to Forbes, 30 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have a foundation in finance, though few advanced to the C-suite directly from the area. Instead, CEOs have a range of experience in a variety of areas -- from finance and accounting to marketing and operations -- that gives them strategic insight and the ability to understand the financial implications of their decisions.
• Seek assignments that stretch you. Actively seek projects that elevate your diverse skills and align with your career goals. Look in areas outside your usual comfort zone. If you're in engineering, seek assignments in operations that might leverage your existing skills, but that also present learning opportunities and exposure to other departments.
• Build relationships. Conduct informational interviews with people in departments outside of your own. The intent is to both learn more about the areas of expertise that are new to you, and develop relationships with key people of influence within the organization.

While the path to the C-suite isn't always clearly marked, you can be assured that organizations place high value on leaders who can communicate a strategic vision and deliver results, and that can only happen when you have a breadth of experience and knowledge that comes from taking the messy, non-linear path to leadership.

Charmaine McClarie, executive coach and keynote speaker. Reprinted by permission of The McClarie Group. Charmaine McClarie has helped thousands of executives lead highly successful organizational and career transformations in a variety of Fortune 500 companies, including, Starbucks, Humana, Adobe, The GAP Inc., Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson and Tate & Lyle. Contact her at charmaine@mcclariegroup.com.

SWOT What?

A friend of mine wants me to review his SWOT analysis. His new company is looking into developing a regional strategy for expanding one of their market sectors. He was tasked with doing a SWOT analysis and presenting it to the Board of Directors.

Although he had done these analyses several times in the past, there was a new wrinkle—this was for a regional expansion and the factors under consideration were different. Identifying factors for analysis is one key to developing a relevant assessment.

A SWOT analysis is a tool used to assess the competitive nature of a firm by assessing four (4) attributes: strengths (S), weaknesses (W), opportunities in the marketplace (O) and threats (T). Strengths and weaknesses reflect the firm’s internal organization; while opportunities and threats are external factors that affect the firm’s success.

Strengths/Weaknesses may include factors such as:

Design or production efficiency
Experienced workforce
Use or utilization of BIM, IPD or alternative delivery
Market share in specific disciplines or markets
Capital position (bonding, financing, etc.)
Reputation
Management
Past performance
Leadership
Market leaders
Facilities
Recruitment/retention efforts
Research and analytical capabilities of the new market
Aging staff
Untrained or under trained staff


Opportunities/Threats may include factors such as:

Economics
Higher or lower labor costs
Weak market conditions
Changing demographics
Business taxes
Receptivity of out-of-state business climate
Undefined competition
Shortage of skilled/experienced employee base
Shortage of intellectual capital
Distribution of intellectual capital
Different regulations
Labor law
Union influences

While most firms are more than willing to do a SWOT analysis, another major key to its value is the candor of the assessment. It is easy to downplay threats in a new market, or overstate the opportunities “just over there.” A balanced perspective keenly sorts the information and then develops a strategy to address the threats and weaknesses. Be cautious of any analysis that presents an unbalanced perspective. More importantly, engage the perspectives of individuals from various levels of the organization in the analysis and in the strategy going forward.

Karen Compton, CPSM. Karen Compton is principal of A3K Consulting (Glendale, CA), a business development and strategic planning firm specializing in the architecture, engineering and construction industries. Ms. Compton is also the founder of Industry Speaks™, a web-based business-to-business portal that connects AEC firms with experienced consultants, provides peer reviews of consultants, reports on key industry trends, and publishes expert reviews of professional courses and books. Contact her at kcompton@a3kconsulting.com.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution

Developing a strategy is doable, but executing is difficult, say the authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution. The book’s objective is to help leaders execute their strategies, and to sort Wildly Important Goals (WIGs) - those things that are truly important - from the “whirlwind,” day-to-day tasks that are urgent but not necessarily important.
Read the full review on Industry Speaks.

New Laws Mean New Challenges and Opportunities

It happens every year. New laws, legislation, and policies are enacted on January 1, affecting the way we live, work, play, and pay. While most of us bemoan the event, I look forward to it with great anticipation, as every good business development professional should. No matter how we feel about a piece of legislation, we must always be ready to look at its ability to create an opportunity (or a hurdle) for our firm to address.

Let’s consider a Tale of Two States and examine cause and effect on the A/E/C industry when states seek to address illegal immigration. In June 2001, the Alabama enacted the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act. Among its numerous provisions, it blocked “landlords from renting property to illegal immigrants" and prohibited “illegal immigrants from receiving any public benefits at either the state or local level including publicly-owned colleges or universities and required high, middle, and elementary public school officials to ascertain whether students are illegal immigrants.” According to published reports, the law resulted in as much as a 30 percent decline in elementary school enrollment and a spike in residential vacancy rates as illegal immigrants fled Alabama for neighboring states. The ripple effect of this exodus was reported to have had an inverse impact on neighboring states such as Georgia.

Alabama’s actions followed those of Arizona, which had previously enacted Arizona Senate Bill 1070, Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act. While the provisions were equally as controversial, the effect was an increase in the construction of prison and detention facilities as Arizona sought to hold and potentially deport immigrants. In both cases, facility demand was impacted. What is the lesson we can take away from this tale?

As we begin our New Year and our business development planning for next the fiscal year, it is critically important that we, as business development professionals:

• Read and understand the planning, design and construction impact of state, local and federal legislative changes on our firms' design and construction forecasts;

• Complete scenario analyses that consider both positive and negative facility changes as a result of legislative change;

• Engage in discussions with decision makers, legislators and others to inform the direction and or trending that may present an opportunity or a challenge.

In this New Year, we can choose to respond to opportunities (i.e., RFPs) or to be ahead of them by developing a broader and deeper understanding of what is driving facility and infrastructure need.

Karen Compton, CPSM. Published in the February 2012 issue of A/E Marketing Journal. Karen Compton is principal of A3K Consulting (Glendale, CA), a business development and strategic planning firm specializing in the architecture, engineering and construction industries. Ms. Compton is also the founder of Industry Speaks™, a web-based business-to-business portal that connects AEC firms with experienced consultants, provides peer reviews of consultants, reports on key industry trends, and publishes expert reviews of professional courses and books. Contact her at kcompton@a3kconsulting.com.

The Road Well-Traveled (Is One With a Map)

My husband likes to take car trips. I hate them. I get sick. During our 20 years of marriage, I’ve had to learn how to take a road trip and not get sick. I’ve figured out that I need to know how long we’ll drive, when we will stop, when we’ll eat, and when I’ll get to sleep. If I don’t get to stretch, eat, or sleep, my husband can look forward to me being sick the entire time.

My reaction to a car trip without a schedule is a great analogy of what it’s like to run a practice without a Strategic Plan. The employees are the ones who end up sick (and tired), the partners are the ones who want to stop, and the owner is the one who gets no sleep. Why should your firm have a Strategic Plan? You wouldn’t get in a car and take a road trip without a map, so why run a practice without a plan?

A Strategic Plan is a valuable tool that maps your practice’s journey from present to future. It defines new opportunities and new markets, and it honestly addresses challenges and opportunities in management, operations, service delivery, sales and leadership. Without a Strategic Plan, you end up wherever the wind may take you.

Here are three important rules for developing an effective Strategic Plan:

• Be honest. Strategic Planning, done well, examines all of your practice’s functional areas and develops plans, tactics, and strategies to achieve long and short-term business goals. It will fail if the participants are less than honest with themselves and others about the firm’s opportunities and challenges. Ask for honest comments and observations, and receive them without judgment or criticism. While all points of view can’t be reflected in a focused strategic plan, all must be heard in order to have buy-in to the final plan.

• Focus on the journey, not the destination. The value in Strategic Planning is not in the document that you produce. It is in the dialogue, discourse, and consensus that builds toward the direction you are headed. Don’t spend nine months trying to write the perfect document. Instead, spend two days mapping out the best journey based upon a clear destination (i.e., buy, sell, develop leadership, add markets, add services, eliminate services, etc.).

• Define accountability. The best plan means nothing unless there is accountability. Don’t leave the table without defining accountability and actions for various components of the plan. This is often difficult, but without it, passengers along for the trip are likely to get sick—sick of promises not kept and goals not achieved.

Today’s competitive firms are strategic, thoughtful, and deliberate. Gone are the days where “winging it” could get you on the right road to your destination. Today, winging it is likely to send you coasting down an uneven side road, while others who have planned their trip enjoy a road well-traveled.

Karen Compton, CPSM. Published in the November 2012 issue of Professional Services Management Journal. Karen Compton is principal of A3K Consulting (Glendale, CA), a business development and strategic planning firm specializing in the architecture, engineering and construction industries. Ms. Compton is also the founder of Industry Speaks™, a web-based business-to-business portal that connects AEC firms with experienced consultants, provides peer reviews of consultants, reports on key industry trends, and publishes expert reviews of professional courses and books. Contact her at kcompton@a3kconsulting.com.

Strategically Position Your Firm to Get More Work

Most firms are actually very good at answering all of the questions clients pose in their RFPs.  Unfortunately, that isn’t enough to win proposals on a consistent basis.  You must go two steps further In order to do that.  First, you need to clearly identify the critical, make-it-hard-to-sleep-at-night challenges facing the client for the project at hand.  Then, you must demonstrate how you are going to address those scary challenges differently and better than anyone else.  That hugely effective strategy is built upon strategic positioning.

As you address each of the RFP questions, you need to connect your answer to the bigger picture, which is pounding home how you are going to solve the client’s problems.  (Are you starting to notice a theme here?)  You also need to keep in mind how each of your competitors is likely to answer that same question.  What strengths of theirs will they tout?  What weaknesses of yours will they try to exploit?  Most importantly, how can you answer this question in a way that demonstrates how you will address the critical challenges better than anyone else?  Keep in mind it isn’t even enough to simply address those challenges.  You need to address them in a way that is different and better than everyone else.

You can’t strategically position your firm, of course, if you don’t know all you possibly can about each of your competitors.  (Too many firms don’t even know who their competitors are as they pursue proposal opportunities.)  It is also critical to start with a clear-eyed assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your own firm—through your client’s eyes, not your own.  Then do the same kind of brutally honest assessment for each of your competitors.  Know their strengths and weaknesses almost as well as you know your own.  These assessments take real courage and honesty.  Most firms with whom I have worked have an impression of their own firm and the competition that is not at all consistent with what their clients see.

That is the start of strategic positioning.  In future blogs, I will discuss what to do with this knowledge and how to strategically position your firm in a variety of competitive scenarios.  Here is some homework to do in the meantime:  Consider Apple and Southwest Airlines.  How do these strategic geniuses position themselves against their competition?

Ken Tichacek, Founding Principal 

Think Like Your Clients LLC