Invite various perspectives
Allen’s first action was calling together a task force to vet his vision and determine how it would play out across the company. To do that, he pulled from research he’d already done.
When you start listening to your company — whether it’s to familiarize yourself as an incoming leader or just to keep a continual watch — you’re not only learning how units operate and where they’re headed, but you also identify who’s leading the pack.
“The first thing I did was to better understand the business units outside of those that I [had been] running. I did spend a significant amount of time with executives in their individual businesses to understand their strategy models and their individual plans within those business units,” Allen says. “I also wanted to understand their individual commitments to the firm, how long they intended to be engaged in the role they were in, the energy levels they had, their desire to play on my team.”
Those conversations pointed him in the direction employees saw for the firm and revealed who would take it there.
Specifically, look for energetic people with a commanding knowledge of their business unit. Those are the thought leaders who will bring the best input to the collaboration.
“It’s a process of gathering individual data points, marketplace perceptions, understanding the skill sets of the people,” Allen says.
Make sure you’re looking in all corners of the business — and beyond. Allen’s task force included people from various business units, the chief people officer, chief operating officer, previous CEO and a retired partner from a Big Four auditing firm.
“It was a diverse group, and that was part of the intention,” Allen says. “It was made up of those in a leadership position in the firm, past leadership, leadership from an outside firm to give us an outside perspective with a business knowledge.”
As tempting as it might be, you should pass up the seat at the head of the table. Don’t just hand it to one of your executives, either, because with an executive-level title comes a certain amount of influence. If you want your team to be a conglomeration of best ideas from various perspectives rather than a top-down initiative, you need to give control to someone further down the totem pole.
“I asked one of our young partners to lead the strategic task force, not one of the senior management, because he wouldn’t overinfluence others during the process,” Allen says. “He would be the one that was gaining and building consensus, not leading the thinking going into it.
“I could have led that strategic task force and I could have driven it the way that I wanted to drive it, but that would have not necessarily had the buy-in from others on that committee. And quite frankly, I’m not sure we would have gotten all the thoughts out that we needed to get out to get where we needed to go.”
To help facilitate open idea-sharing, communicate your expectations at the start.
“We set the stage upfront that everyone needed to check their hat at the door, that people needed to leave their personal priorities outside of the discussion,” he says. “We were working to develop a strategy for the firm, not for individual units or individual people. The only way you could get to the right decision was to make sure that people were open and felt freely about communicating and disagreeing.”
Keeping the focus on the common goal means keeping it fresh in everyone’s minds Your vision should be part of each discussion.
“Keep it in front of them at the beginning of every meeting,” says Allen, whose team met monthly. “Every session, go back to the vision. Restate the vision and work off of the key elements of the vision.”
But the vision should be more than a mantra you repeat; it should be the foundation of your agenda.
“We took the key elements of the vision and broke them down and then assigned folks from the task force to develop the strategic plan for those elements,” Allen says.
Then, as people bring strategies back to the table, continue to weigh them against the vision.
“There was a point where we could have gotten off track,” Allen says. “There was an issue that came up that was more tactical than it was strategic. Pretty quickly, we had a discussion as to whether or not if we went down that path it would take us off of the main objective.”
