Imagine that you are a company leader who enjoys doing pioneering work that can help to shape a positive future. You recognise, however, that it is vital to focus on both today’s business and tomorrow’s business.
Bearing this in mind, it can be useful to encourage your people to focus on the following themes.
Today’s Business
You need to have superb operators who are good at managing today’s business. They need to be able:
To keep running today’s business successfully;
To continue to deliver great work for the customers;
To, if possible, continue to develop more business with these customers.
It is good if these people can run the engine of the business without you getting too involved. They must maintain high quality work, however, and deliver the goods.
Tomorrow’s Business
If you have a pioneering approach, you may get positive energy from focusing on tomorrow’s business. This may mean that you may aim:
To continue working with your pacesetting customers – those who ahead of the game – and focus how you can help them to tackle their future challenges and achieve their future goals;
To focus on the potential innovations and events in your chosen field that may affect your company and our potential customers;
To implement these ideas by running pilot programmes that deliver success;
To, when appropriate, have these new business approaches taken over and run by people who can make them part of the present business offering.
Many leaders love to focus on these areas. They may aim to do pioneering projects with customers that produce tangible results and success stories.
As mentioned earlier, such leaders may also need to have a good operations team that delivers today’s business. This will help to reassure the leader and release them to do pioneering work.
Such an operations team may also need to learn how to manage some aspects of the leader’s inputs. One manager explained this in the following way.
“We have an inspiring leader. There can be times, however, when it can be challenging to manage their enthusiasm for new ideas.
“We know that when they return from a conference or a long flight, they may rush into the office and want to change what we are doing regarding today’s business.
“Sometimes these ideas can help to add to what we are doing. But there are other times when these can be overwhelming. They can disrupt the good things we are already delivering for today’s clients.
“The leader’s ideas may be great, but sometimes these may be more appropriate to shaping tomorrow’s business.
“We have therefore tried to find ways to, when appropriate, develop the new ideas in a safe space – such as by doing a pilot – rather than by tearing up what we are doing that is delivering good service and profits.”
“Again, working with the leader can be inspiring but sometimes it can also be challenging. We have had to learn ways to buy time and, if appropriate, integrate some of the new ideas into the present business.”
Imagine that you are a leader who wants: a) to encourage people to manage today’s business; b) to ensure that you and – if appropriate – a few other people to focus on shaping tomorrow’s business.
Different leaders take these steps in different ways. The leader of one team I worked with invited their people to do exercises on these themes.
The following section describes how to they implemented this approach.
The leader began by setting the scene before inviting people to focus on these themes. Here is a summary of what they said when introducing the session.
Today’s Business And
Tomorrow’s Business
Today I would like to involve you in focusing how we can deliver and develop both today’s business and tomorrow’s business. This can help us to shape a positive future.
Before we do that, here is a reminder of the team’s picture of success. This gives you a picture of: a) the company’s goals; b) the benefits; c) the strategies we aim to follow; d) the things we have achieved so far this year.
Let’s now focus on the future. As you know, we need to keep doing superb work to deliver today’s business:
To keep building on our strengths, tackling areas for improvement and following our strategies for achieving the goals;
To keep doing superb work, encouraging each other and providing great service to both our external and internal customers;
To keep delivering today’s business, developing tomorrow’s business and doing our best to achieve ongoing success.
Today’s Business
I want the operations team – and any others who wish to join it – to brainstorm and then produce practical suggestions we can follow: a) to keep delivering today’s business; b) to maybe develop and get even more work from these customers. Here is the exercise.
Tomorrow’s Business
As you know, it is vital for us to also be proactive in order to develop and then deliver tomorrow’s business. This includes practical steps we can take:
To continue working with our pacesetting customers – those who ahead of the game – and how we can help them to tackle their future challenges and achieve their future goals;
To focus on the potential innovations and events in our chosen field that may affect us and our potential customers;
To focus on the specific things we can do to help our company and our customers future success.
I and several other people will brainstorm and then produce practical suggestions we can follow to develop and maybe aim to begin to deliver tomorrow’s business. Here is the exercise on this theme.
The two groups did the exercises, brainstormed ideas and settled on several practical suggestions. They presented these back to the whole team where the ideas were discussed.
The leader then explained the next steps. This would involve clarifying the specific ideas to be implemented and translating these into clear action plans.
This step would also involve having mission holders who would ensure that the ideas got implemented. This would be a vital step in delivering the goods.
Good teams make sure they have mission holders. Here are some of the characteristics demonstrated by such people.
The leader then described the action planning process in more detail. They explained this in the following way.
Thank you for your ideas. Looking at these, I would now like to work with you on making action plans for delivering today’s business and tomorrow’s business. When doing this we will take the following steps.
First, I would like the operations team to focus on the specific steps you can take to deliver and, when possible, develop today’s business.
This also involves having mission holders who will take responsibility for making the plans happen. The mission holders will have my full backing. They will be given the required support and empowered to create task forces of volunteers who are prepared to implement the action plans.
Second, I and several others will focus on the specific steps we can take to develop and deliver tomorrow’s business. This will also involve having mission holders who will take responsibility for making the plans happen.
The leader then set some parameters regarding making the action plans. They described:
The key themes they definitely wanted people to focus on when producing action plans;
The freedom that people had to, if they wished, add other themes when producing the action plans;
The specific kind of action plans they wanted people to produce and making sure they had mission holders for each theme.
The leader said they would be available if, for example, the people focusing on today’s business wanted to come to them to ask any questions for information.
People moved into their respective groups. They did the work and then presented back their action plans. Here is the framework they used.
The leader followed up by having meetings with each of the mission holders. These sessions covered the following areas:
The specific support the mission holders needed to implement the plans successfully;
The specific ways the mission holders would proactively keep the leader informed about the progress being made towards achieving success;
The specific other topics the mission holders wanted to discuss that could help them and their task forces to achieve success.
The teams implemented the ideas, got some quick successes and achieved many of the goals. They then followed a similar process every six months to help the company to achieve ongoing success.
Imagine you lead a team. If appropriate, how could you follow elements of this approach in your own way? If you wish, try tackling the exercise on this theme. This invites you to complete the following sentences.
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