Do You Have the Clarity to Achieve Success in Frontier Markets?

Last week I shared the 3 secret requirements for creating a successful frontier market and today I’d like to look at the first one in greater depth. The elements of the model for are:

• Clarity: Knowing what you want to achieve
• Capability: Having the capacity to achieve it
• Commitment : Having the desire to achieve it

Lets take a deep-dive into the first C, Clarity. Even if you have the right resources and motivation to engage people, the organisation can move forward without aim and direction. As the Alice in Wonderland saying goes:

If you don’t know where you are going, every road will take you there.

To be successful, your road must not only head in the right direction but will also need to be well planned. This is how you do it.

1. Purpose and Strategy

The first step in getting Clarity for an organisation is to answer Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle:

Why do we exist, what do we do and how will we do this?

Simon says it’s important to establish the Why first since “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Similarly people don’t get out of bed to deliver world class work performance for what you do but because they want to be part of why you’re doing it. Obviously the Why you exist provides meaning to all your stakeholders.

The “How you do it” question is basically the strategy that you have to achieve this vision. It should answer three components:

• How do I grow?
• How do I compete?
• How do I want my customers to see me?

The last question is especially important because according to Dave Ulrich it defines your leadership brand – how you want your stakeholders to recognize you. For example, if I asked you what 3M stands for, most of you would immediately answer “innovation”. Similarly GE stands for leadership, Ritz-Carlton for personalized service, Lexus for quality and Wallmart for price. For your organisation, ask yourself:

What do you want to be known for?

And don’t stop there…it’s even more important to go to your key customers and ask them how they would like value added by your company.

2. Organisation

Of course if you’re clear about why you exist, how you will achieve this and what you want to be known for by your key customers, you then design, develop and constantly adapt your organisation and the capabilities needed to deliver the strategy. Remember the credo “structure follows strategy”? You now focus on your organization structure, clarity on roles and responsibilities within this structure, efficient and effective processes and your governance framework.

HR is the subject matter expert in this area and should clearly understand how each of the organisational levers (talent, structure and processes, culture and the companies leadership) can be tuned to deliver on this strategy.

To get there, it’s good to ask questions regarding organizations which are doing it right. For example:

• What are the criteria we should have for promoting talent if we want to build McKinsey like accountability in our company?
• What structure do we need to help employee’s to be innovative like the Google team?
• What cultural traits should I embed in the organisation to deliver customer services like Zappos?
• How do our leaders role model Wallmart type efficiency along with cost focus?

Getting this right is hard work and requires constant tinkering as you adapt your strategy to the changing circumstances.

3. Alignment

Studies from the Corporate Leadership Council have indicated that out of all performance levers the maximum impact is achieved when employees understand the

1. connection between their individual contribution and organisational strategy and
2. the importance of the employees job to the success of the organisation.

This requires each and every employee to understand the company’s purpose, its strategy and how each employee (can) contribute to this.

To test the alignment I often do the ‘alignment test’ with senior managers. In this employees are asked to write down the top 3 strategic priorities of the company. You would assume that at the executive management level leaders would get this answer correct – however, this is almost never true. Alignment of at least 80%, which is required in my view to classify a team or company as ‘aligned’ rarely happens. And with this in mind you then question, if the top leaders can’t get it right, how far away are the lowest ranks in the organizations from alignment?

Apart from getting all employees to know the company direction, it’s even more difficult to get them to behave in a way that supports how the company wants to be seen by their key customers. There are plenty of examples on this, from the famous “United Breaks Guitar” to Nick Murray’s story about his Porsche and of course my personal favourite banks where the intended focus on customer service is completely mitigated by the organisational demand for compliance. How can you provide customer service if you can only do something in one prescribed compliant manner?

That’s a whole lot of food for though for creating Clarity. However, as the first step in building a successful frontier market organisation it’s obviously important. Next week I’ll talk about how to gauge whether an organisation has the Capability to deliver its aspirations. Any thoughts/questions on Clarity? As always, would love to hear from you!

Photo Credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc