Build a strategy
Building a strategy starts with defining a vision. You need an end point before you can construct a method for moving your company forward.
“The vision is the defining platform,” Weiner says. “If you base it on the strengths of what you’re trying to achieve — for example, the strengths of the marketplace we have here — and you look at the strengths of your organization, where are you optimized and what do you need to build on, you create the outcome for the journey that you’re traveling as an organization.”
At Deloitte, Weiner wanted to begin by identifying the firm’s strength points when it came to serving the Philadelphia area. She and her leadership team mapped out specifically where they wanted Deloitte in terms of serving selected local industries. They also mapped out key services that they wanted Deloitte to become known for in the market.
“The return is really recognizing and yielding value to our clients, value in growth and development for our individuals, value to the community at large,” Weiner says. “When the vision is set and it’s understood and articulated, the strategy and the blueprint is outlined. But it innovates, adapts and changes, because you ultimately have a final goal that you’re focused on achieving.”
The strategy is ultimately your blueprint for future success. It gives you a reasonably detailed outline for where you need to go as a leadership team and as a company in general, but you let it become so rigid and fixed that there is not room for revision.
“If you don’t have the ability to respond to challenges to your strategy, the lack of adaptability will create failure more likely than not,” Weiner says.
The key to flexibility is rooted in having a culture of transparency throughout the organization. You need to promote open communication among your managers and executive team and ensure that they are communicating with employees in their respective areas of the company.
Through open communication, you can more quickly discover areas of your strategy that need shoring up, places in which you might need to revise your approach to serving a particular market, and you will keep your primary decision-makers informed of key metrics that will allow your leadership team to read and react sooner than they might have otherwise.
“You need to have the right touch points,” Weiner says. “You need to have the right benchmarks and be listening to your key people. You really need to keep your team around you and have them as your eyes and ears, to get their input on whether this organization is still applicable and well-crafted. If not, you need to focus on how you can tweak, change and adapt in order to meet the current circumstances. That’s not easy. You have to know what are your early warning indicators, are you looking at the right metrics, are you getting the correct information?”
At Deloitte, early warning indicators focus primarily on employee engagement and client satisfaction. Weiner and her team have constructed data metrics that focus on the softer skills of nurturing relationships.
“Those metrics give you an indication of whether you’re on track or not,” she says. “Then you drive a little bit deeper to understand success or failure and what are the factors that contribute to it. We measure those drivers pretty frequently.”
It’s not just a management matter. Weiner and her team want to focus all levels of Deloitte’s Philadelphia work force on the success and failure measurements.
“You need to engage all levels of the organization around those indicator lights,” Weiner says. “That means you need to have an infrastructure that collects data and reports it out. You want to mitigate failure points before they occur, and you do that by engaging at each level and what is an individual or group’s role in achieving success around those metrics.
“We could spend time just training people on having a competency to deliver, but they don’t understand the whole picture. So you need to focus them on their importance as part of a team. You need to engage everybody as a stakeholder, so that everybody shares in success and looks to what they can do if we’re not on track for success.”