We all get roles in an organization.

There is the “boss” role. They get to make large decisions about how to be organized, where to spend money and who to reward. There is the “marketing” role that gets to tell all types of stories to make us look good to customers. If we are making products, there are “developers” to turn requirements into a product that can be sold. And so on …

One role that is especially important is that of the “strategist.” Sometimes this is a distinct role occupied by one person or a strategy group. In other cases, it could be the boss or a marketing person that has this functional assignment. No matter what the embodiment, it is critical that the strategist execute well for the organization to prosper.

So how can you tell how your strategist is doing?

There are some 5 simple criteria that will answer that question. Grade your strategist in each category and you will be able to assess their performance. And remember that their performance may well impact you no matter what your role.

The vision is about a specific, explicit destination.

An organization wants to know where it is going and the strategist has a large part of the responsibility to explain that destination. It might be expressed in market terms (e.g., we want to be number 1 or 2 in every segment that we are in) or in impact (e.g., we want to make the world’s information available to everyone) or something else. Whatever it is, an effective strategist has to have a destination description. And the description has to be useful as a guide for those that must be supportive of the strategy. If you feel like the organization is wandering about, perhaps this description is missing (you don’t want to be an Alice).

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to
Alice: I don’t much care where.
The Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Alice: …so long as I get somewhere.
The Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.

Lewis Carroll Quotes: Alice in Wonderland

A learning disposition solidifies the strategy foundation.

A strategist is unlikely to already know everything necessary to formulate the strategy so they must master the identification, integration and interpretation of important information. Often this involves working with and through many specialties in and out of the organization. There may be product information, demographic trends, technology developments, competitor positions and many more things to consider when formulating a strategy. Successful strategists are especially curious and versatile. Conversely, low marks are deserved when a strategist demonstrates limited ability in incorporating information and is averse to learning. It is a combination of high intelligence and humility that empowers a strategist. Look to see how your strategist regularly tests the foundation of the strategy with what they learn.

A clear roadmap communicates the way.

There are good reasons to have a map. If it is doing its job, it pinpoints where you are and helps you understand the way to your destination. Without the map that you can examine and follow, the most attractive destinations remain pipe dreams. You can tell if a strategist is doing a good job if there is a map for the organization to follow. Check to see that there are appropriate versions for different audiences that explain what each needs to know. Also check to see if there are checkpoints along the way where the strategist realigns the organization by reminding them about the reasons for the strategy journey. Finally, test your strategist by asking to see the written version of the strategy. All too often when there are only verbal versions of the strategy your strategist’s thoughts are unclear or quickly shifting.

Persuasion puts the organization in motion.

Every organization has some inertia. This can be a good thing until it is important to move in another direction. And a strategist often needs to move the organization in a different direction. The ability to convince people within the company culture is essential. Good strategists as constantly determining how change happens and how to influence that change to support the strategy. They become change artists that look for supporting energy to help move the organization. Ineffective strategists fall back on lazy assertions that the elegant solution, beautifully expressed is enough to effect change. Look for the strategist’s approach to change, how they engage with the culture and how they recruit allies to help with change. These things will give a good indication if their persuasive skills will be enough to get the organization moving along the roadmap toward the vision.

Credibility is based on overcoming problems.

Every significant journey is likely to have challenges. Sometimes these challenges come from naysayers within the company. Maybe external conditions will alter important underlying assumptions. The execution of the strategy may become a problem if new processes or technologies must be mastered. And there are a thousand other possible problems. Here is the key for a successful strategist. They will assume that there will be problems. Their credibility will not rest on perfect strategy rather it will be founded on the proof that problems can be overcome in pursuit of the vision. Inexperienced or poor strategists will lose their nerve or abandon the vision prematurely. When they do this, the strategy will fail and their personal credibility will suffer.

So there it is. Assess your strategist and you will get a useful indication of where your company is headed. If they deserve good grades then you can deduce that their strategy might be sound. On the other hand, if their work merits low grades over a sustained period, then run for the hills.

If you are the strategist, think about how you might improve in each area. That is a topic for another day.

When I was growing up one of the highlights of the school year was the report card time. I was a good student so I looked forward to the time when my teacher “told” my parents that through the grades and comments on the report card.

At work, the closest thing to a report card for an employee is the usually the annual review. If you live in a corporate environment, you know the drill. You show up for the meeting, the manager tells you the bottom (financial) line and then proceeds to list what you have done well or poorly.

This process may or may not be an effective one. The review checklist is often the standard one created by the HR department. Sometimes managers complete the review simply to check it off the list of their duties. At other times, an employee may invest very little into the process and miss the chance to get meaningful feedback. The whole process can be perceived as an optional, perfunctory exercise with little benefit.

There are times when a report card (and all that it implies) is not optional.

A competitive intelligence (CI) report card is such a case. It is an indication of impending failure if a competitive intelligence professional does not get a report regularly on his or her performance. Why? Because a CI function depends on the relationships with and value to senior management. When either the relationship or recognized value is waning, then corrective action must be taken. (Or, you need to look for a new job.)

So how do you get a report card from senior management?

It is probably too much to expect most senior managers to spend time creating a formal report card for you. If you are regularly communicating with them, you will get many signals that express their satisfaction (or lack thereof) with what you doing. A report card is simply one way to stimulate this conversation. And it’s up to you (not them) to get this process started.

You have to create a report card for them to use.

This works well because senior managers are used to evaluating people and their performance according to set guidelines. Since there probably isn’t a competitive intelligence specific set of guidelines you will have to create a template to use.

Keep it simple and focus on value.

The template should be one page or less. It should cover multiple categories. It should be understandable but not too restrictive. Finally, it should be used to highlight exceptional (good and bad) so that meaningful conversations can then happen about those areas. Here is an example. Note that the box to the left of each bullet is the place for a “grade” given by the senior manager.

Use the report card for long term planning and education.

A virtue of a getting a mark is that you can measure your progress over time. I have used “low” marks to help me define my plans for the future. For instance, I initiated regular CI reviews when I received feedback that the organizational communication about CI topics was too infrequent.

Another less obvious use of the report card is that it gives you a vehicle to expand a manager’s perception of CI. Perhaps they never considered that tradeshow intelligence was important. When they see it on your report card they might question what you mean and how it might help them. This is a great time to talk about how CI can be more valuable to them.

The grades that you receive don’t matter.

Well, actually they do. You won’t long survive if you consistently receive poor grades or if you receive good grades only for the less important (as defined by senior management) categories.

However, if the discussion about grades is regular, if your relationship with senior management is deepened and if “low” marks are used for improvement, you will win in the end. Report cards will become your friend and senior management will thank you.

And, by the way, that annual review cycle will also likely be a rewarding time for you as well.

A former colleague at Texas Instruments responded to my “PowerPoint Woke Me Up” blog entry by saying that sometimes the most effective communication is that done on a whiteboard with other people. As I thought about that I realized that he was exactly right (at least it matched my experience).

The vast majority of information is not written down.

It is communicated verbally or nonverbally between individuals. We are conditioned as social animals to use this method most frequently. The advantage is that it is often quick. The disadvantage is the intended message can easily get lost somewhere between the speaker’s words and the listener’s interpretation.

Meanwhile, many businesses are great fans of PowerPoint. Someone somewhere carefully (or sloppily) crafts a message that is presented. Much of the time there is one active presenter and multiple passive listeners. This can work but sadly it often doesn’t because the listeners are not engaged when they accept that the presenter is responsible for the communication.

There is a better way.

Why not draw pictures together?

Pictures are powerful ways to represent information. Much better than phrases on a PowerPoint slide, pictures can show relationships, sequences and other interactions. And when they are created by multiple people together, they can embody the collective wisdom of the group. If this is done appropriately, the resulting picture includes both the understandings and agreements among the people. How powerful is that!

The Grove Consultants International is a company that teaches graphical facilitation. The concepts are simple to grasp. Significantly, they all are aimed at graphically documenting what is most important. This works for topics like strategy, visions, value propositions, industry overviews and other similar things. The facilitation skills include the use of templates, creatively drawing to represent concepts and coordinating the discussions.

Here is an example where a Grove template was used to create an industry overview.

Pictures sometimes are a means to an end such as a specific decision. I have found that Sam Kaner’s book “Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making” is an excellent resource to help a leader understand how to reach a decision. Kaner’s techniques work well with the graphical facilitation techniques used by Grove.

Another excellent example of the powerful impact of drawing a picture together can come from a project retrospective. Norm Kerth’s book “Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews” is a valuable resource to describe how “looking back to move forward” is critical. His website at http://www.retrospectives.com/ explains the prime directive for retrospectives and more.

One of the exercises in a retrospective is the project timeline. A long piece of butcher block paper is tacked to a wall. Then, all members of the team the document the project by adding their recollections to the timeline. The ups and downs, deliveries, significant meetings, personal events, etc., are all added to the group picture. When everyone is finished, the whole team examines the completed picture to answer four questions.

• What did we do well, that if we don’t discuss we might forget?
• What did we learn?
• What should we do differently next time?
• What still puzzles us?

The actual format of the retrospective timeline is less important than the fact that the team creates it together. Here is an example from http://www.thekua.com/rant/category/retrospective-exercises/.

The impact of this exercise can be profound. Team members can literally see the entire project and what others considered important. They can understand more about what frustrated them, the problems that they faced together and overcame and the things that led to disappointments. Later, when they have digested the personal messages, they can use the picture to extract lessons and explain to others what went on and why. (Esther Derby is a great resource for teaching others how to conduct retrospectives. Esther and Diana Larsen have written “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great” to show how to architect, design and run retrospectives.)

Maybe the pictures we create together aren’t as pretty as the PowerPoint masterpieces. Maybe they cannot be fit into the company template. And maybe they don’t have transitions, animations, embedded videos and other special effects which would impress Hollywood producers.

But what they do have is the powerful message created, owned and understood by a team.

Later, if you feel like it, you can always make a version for PowerPoint (with the approved company template). <g>

Anyone that has worked on strategy issues for any length of time has faced criticisms. Sometimes these criticisms are meaningful disagreements about the conclusions of the strategy processes. At other times, there are expressed and unexpressed criticisms of the strategists and the kind of work that they do.

One criticism is that strategists (especially those with a long term perspective) are not sufficiently coupled to the near term requirements to produce measurable business results. Often this criticism comes from those that are charged with and measured by those results. They can perceive that the strategist is unconcerned with what is most important to their livelihood.

The strategist’s counter argument is that they are greatly concerned about the company’s results and that concern is what drives their efforts to discover, define and communicate the “next big thing”.  Interestingly, the near term focus of others can be viewed as shortsighted and petty.

Of course, both views have some merit and are played out every day in organizations. The competition for resources and the right to make decisions for the business encourage the clash in perspectives. In my experience, there is no way to avoid such competition. It has become more apparent to me that rather than having the elimination of the conflict as a goal, the more useful approach is to harness the energies of both groups to produce a superior solution.

My specific interest is from the strategist’s viewpoint. It seems to me that there are several imperatives for a successful strategist to thrive in the inevitable tussles within the organization.

Here are my 7 rules.

1. The strategy effort must have the support of decision making managers of the business. Strategy cannot long prosper if it is treated or executed like a minor function.

2. The strategy must accurately reflect the thinking of the leaders of the organization. After all, it is their ultimate responsibility to deliver results.

3. The strategy process must be transparent so as to encourage meaningful debate. All stakeholders must understand how and when they can contribute to the strategy.

4. The strategist must be skilled at communicating the strategy to all levels of the organization and to the external audiences that are affected. The best strategy that is poorly communicated will be crippled from its beginning.

5. The strategist must effectively and appropriately involve those with near term focuses so that their concerns are integrated in the resultant strategies. A lack of contributory ownership has doomed many a strategy when it came time to execute the strategy.

6. There must be an on-going effort to measure the value of the strategy. Eventually this is profit, revenue, market share and the like. However, there are other measures such as organizational alignment, rapid competitive responses, well developed marketing communications, etc., that can be driven from effective strategies in advance of quantitative results.

7. The strategy effort must have a defined budget much as many firms allocate a percentage of revenue to R&D efforts. The budget and reporting structure must be separate from that of the near term focused activities. Without the separation, it is often tempting to minimize the strategy efforts to maximize near term results (which may sacrifice long term competitiveness).