Ken Whitton - Strategy Coach
Are you responsible for developing strategy for your organisation and wondering how best to proceed?Or maybe you’re stuck on a particular strategic issue and can’t see the way through it?
Are you looking to enhance your leadership skills by improving your capability in strategic thinking?
Are the members of your management team too functionally focused when you want them to take a more integrated, strategic perspective of the company?
All of the above?
Before you call in the consultants, or book yourself on a management development programme, save yourself a lot of time and money and give me a call. As a strategy coach, I work with managers on how to think strategically and how to approach and resolve strategic issues. Coaching is the most direct, the quickest, and the most cost-effective way of addressing all the above issues.
Courses or Consultants?
There is plenty of advice around on strategy. Thousands of managers have taken an MBA or have read one of the many books on strategy. For specific strategic issues, an army of consultants stands ready.
Yet many managers are still left frustrated. The books and courses provide a neat packaging of the models and tools of strategy, but the real business situations that confront managers never seem to fall neatly into these frameworks.
And when the consultants are called in, their working too often seems a “black box”. Since the company’s own managers have usually been excluded from the process of analysis and debate that led to the recommendations being forged, they struggle to accept them, or to implement the strategy appropriately even if the consultants’ broad argument is understood.
Teach a man to fish…
I have worked for 20 years with individuals and organisations trying to develop and implement strategy: as external strategy consultant, as internal Strategy Director, as a trainer on management development programmes and as executive coach to CEOs and other senior directors of major companies. I can also claim to have a good grasp of the theory – I came top of my MBA class at INSEAD, Europe’s leading business school.
My experience has convinced me that the only way to help managers develop strategies that are truly understood and bought into by the whole organisation, and hence are carried through successfully, is to work alongside these managers throughout the process of strategy development and deployment.
That is, the best role for the strategy adviser is one of coach, rather than teacher (of theory, leaving all the practical to the “student”) or consultant (doing it for the manager, but usually leaving little depth of understanding or learning of techniques).
The coaching process helps a manager or management team develop not just their strategy, but their capability in strategic thinking. This is a misunderstood term. In many instances, it is taken to be synonymous with “strategic analysis” – using the tools and techniques that the strategy industry has developed over the years – 5-force analysis, value chains and all the rest.
Bringing Strategy Alive
But strategic thinking is a creative process. It requires as much intuition and judgement as it does logic and analysis. It requires the ability to sense the patterns in a mass of complex data, to see the wood amongst the trees, to appreciate the complex interaction of disparate forces. It is about synthesis, not just analysis.
And the standard strategy frameworks do not even begin to take account of other important factors – the political situation of the manager, the personalities of the people he leads, the culture of the organisation, the style and aspirations of the leader herself. Yet all these factors are legitimate inputs into strategy formulation and significantly affect the way in which the strategy must be communicated and promulgated.
Being able to factor these political, emotional and other non-rational considerations into a commercial business decision, alongside the logical numerical analysis, and come up with a creative yet practical solution – that is true strategic thinking.
I believe that strategic thinking is a transferable skill, from a knowledgeable and experienced coach to a committed manager and/or management team, over time, working on real business issues.
The outcome is both a richer, better-articulated and more effective strategy – not bad for starters – and leaders with an enhanced appreciation of the thinking styles and management behaviours required to develop, communicate and implement genuinely strategic improvements to their business.
If you’d like to discuss further, please ring me on ++44-1494-757272 or email me at info@kenwhitton.co.uk.
