Coming Through Hard Times Stronger Than Ever

Jan 12, 2012

Harnessing the Power of Engaged People

There’s another excellent article in December 2011’s Harvard Business Review on harnessing the power of highly engaged people.

Professor of leadership, Douglas Ready, and PhD student, Emily Truelove, report on how companies like the beauty retailer Sephora, luxury hotel chain Four Seasons, and French food giant Danone, came through hard times stronger than ever.

In “The Power of Collective Ambition” report on their three year study of 45 companies, dozens of senior executive, manager, and CEO interviews, and workshops to construct a model summarizing why these companies defied conventional logic.

What emerged is “what we call collective ambition — a summary of how leaders and employees think about why they exist,what they hope to accomplish,how they will collaborate to achieve their ambition, and how their brand promise aligns with their core values.

These companies don’t fall into the trap of pursuing a single ambition, such as profits; instead, their employees collaborate to shape a collective ambition that supersedes individual goals and takes into account the key elements required to achieve and sustain excellence.”

 Collective Ambition

So what elements does a company’s collective ambition comprise? All seven must be carefully integrated.

1. Purpose: your company’s reason for being; the core mission of the enterprise.
2. Vision: the position or status your company aspires to achieve within a reasonable time frame.
3. Targets and milestones: the metrics you use to assess progress toward your vision.
4. Strategic and operational priorities: the actions you do or do not take in pursuit of your vision.
5. Brand promise: the commitments you make to stakeholders (customers, communities, investors, employees, regulators, and partners) concerning the experience the company will provide.
6. Core values: the guiding principles that dictate what you stand for as an organization, in good times and bad.
7. Leader behaviours: how leaders act on a daily basis as they seek to implement the company’s vision and strategic priorities, strive to fulfill the brand promise, and live up to the values.

The authors include this very insightful and useful seven scale quiz that flow from their study.

1.    “Does your company have a clear and meaningful statement of its core purpose — why it exists?

2.    Is your company’s vision compelling and aspirational yet achievable, motivating employees to contribute their very best?

3.    Has your leadership team gone through the hard work of identifying targets, milestones, and metrics that ground the vision in reality?

4.    Has your company ruthlessly prioritized the choices it will make to build the capabilities required to win on a sustainable basis?

5.    Does your company’s brand promise capture the experience you intend to deliver to stakeholders (customers, communities, investors, employees, and business partners)?

6.    Do your company’s articulated values represent what you stand for as an enterprise and as a group of people working together?

7.    Do senior leaders’ day-to-day behaviours reflect the leadership behaviors that you say are critically important to your company’s success?”

Katie Taylor, CEO of Four Seasons, summarizes how the company has thrived through one of the worst business slumps in decades:

"We have 34,000 employees who get up every morning thinking about how to serve our guests even better than the day before. So while all of this trouble is swirling around us, our brand promise of providing the most exceptional guest experience wherever and whenever you visit us is instilled in the hearts and minds of our dedicated employees. They are the ones who fulfill that promise day in and day out.”

From my 15 years consulting experience I would add two additional factors for consideration when building a peak performance culture: Alignment and Accountability. The challenge for every leader therefore is to master blending both task focus (exert my will) and collaborative orientation (exert their will) aspects of the role… in which every member of the organisation is a leader.

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