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Leaders Letter Newsletter

Leaders Letter 132 – 22 Leadership Lessons From 2022

Dear Leaders, every year I write a dedicated newsletter from lessons to take the year closing. This year is no different, with 22 lessons and lessons to learn from. 

The 22 are from conversations with company leaders, department leads struggling or parts of AMA or talks I have given to companies through 2022. 

Where there are free frameworks or supporting guides I have linked, so do click through, download and apply internally.  

Bad Practises 

  1. PR Not Leadership: Leadership PR became a political tool both externally and internally, with very few coming out looking good. Especially helping their internal teams with mass layoffs.
    > Lesson to learn: If you have been told to use spin and PR, learn how to use and when to use otherwise it will blow up in your face. 
  2. Bad Leadership 101: Elon Musk highlighted what is wrong with outdated management ideas and approaches. Elon might have numerous fanboys, however, he really isn’t helping his or big tech cause(s).
    > Lesson to learn: Understand what is really needed within your business and provide updates directly to the company and the teams. Any big changes needed to be communicated internally, especially with firing and hiring. 
  3. Professional Ghosting: Ghosting is a real issue within business and many defaults to ghosting because they are not trained to deliver bad news.
    > Lesson to learn: People do not forget bad behaviours, especially from brands they interact with. Deliver bad news or if you have no update you should keep people updated. 
  4. Leadership training or development is not happening: Many are finding leadership is getting harder and without coaching and support it is going to become harder and you will then have more reliance on HR.
    > Lesson to learn: Invest in yourself and spent dedicated time slots where you develop and train. Hire a coach (either yourself or through the business) and develop as a professional and as a manager. 
  5. Over-communication is not smart: Most are not using templates and frameworks to help others improve and keep communication flowing in the right direction.
    > Lesson to learn: Help everyone be smarter, help the teams to develop frameworks and share across the business, stop bad meetings early and have detailed agendas to help everyone align.
    Request my group meeting template here 
  6. Lack Of Effective Planning: Many business leaders this year have fed back that their planning has not been and is not effective and often is ignored by April. Effective planning and understanding of what strategy is and is not, is imperative. Strategy is understanding what you are not going to do and packaging strategy so everyone understands and uses as the compass is the difference between a list of tactics and tick box exercises and a strategy that departments (and the teams) can build their annual plans into.
    > Lesson to learn: Whatever your planning cycle is truly understand your beliefs, the bets you will make from your informed beliefs and build into pillars so these act as important navigation points when people feel like they need to challenge these. 

Hybrid Working 

  1. Same Office Same Bad Environment: The office is a place where most didn’t redesign, change or make a place for collaboration – this has led to default to bad behaviours and many not wanting to go into the office. 
    > Lesson to learn: Improve your office environment to produce the best environment to work in for everyone, tailor your office design for library rules, collaboration stations or areas and remove the friction of meeting rooms create. 
  2. “Proximity Is Power”: Proximity bias is still a real issue for many, particularly for middle managers and untrained managers who did not enjoy forced working from home.  
    > Lesson to learn: Embrace hybrid work, understand the cadence you need to check in with your team members and ensure you fully commit to the 1:2:1’s and look to book in sessions where you as the leader can meet up in person. An organised or arranged coffee together or grab a lunch together in person will help rather than forcing people into the office.  
  3. Old Habits Don’t Die: Conditioning runs deep, old habits beat out new habits as it was easier to conform than inform and improve work 
    > Lesson to learn: Create a list of old habits and new habits and review them as a leadership team and say which are rewarded behaviours and that are bad behaviours. Call these out and create leadership principles to take ownership and hold the leadership team accountable. 
  4. Hybrid Work For Most: Hybrid is a work in progress and most did not drive change when embracing hybrid work, many reporting it doesn’t work for them. Whereas the real issue is when there is a divide between those who go into the office and those who don’t regularly, you create a tiered system, this has to be removed and difficult choices will have to be made by the leader to embrace hybrid work or look to place in the structure.  
    > Lesson to learn: Remove the “them vs us” with hybrid work, you either have to embrace it and create structure and guidelines or you reduce it down and have firmer companywide guidelines. Those who decide you are 3 in +2 or 4 in +1  you will likely see this impact you when hiring and especially in core areas like Engineering, Product and Marketing. 
  5. Real Time Everything: Real-time work and meetings are default hindering time to get work done. This has created busy as a badge of honour and stolen hours of time and working time from colleagues. Especially those with pressing deadlines.
    > Lesson to learn: Remove the demand for attention to every meeting, remove having to work in real-time and in person and move to async work that enables more thoughtful work and collaboration across schedules and time zones.  
  6. Async Is Not Happening: Asynchronous work has been ignored by the majority of companies. For years many companies have struggled to invest in training to help move people towards writing documentation to help those around them, aysnc work and creating documentation is often a very different operating system. Many have become so accustomed to having working meetings they struggle to work more effectively within documents and canvasses.
    > Lesson to learn: Really audit your time in meetings and work out how much time you are wasting in real-time status updates and trying to force working sessions into meetings, this can be done async and have documentation to improve future campaigns and refer back to. They also will have the opportunity to run before-action review and after-action reviews, constantly improving work and approach to work. 
  7. Playbookless: There is no template or playbook for many companies to copy-and-paste with hybrid or remote first work so it became the wild west for many companies. Companies need to own hybrid to make it work for them. Assign an owner and build into company culture
    > Lesson to learn: Build out playbooks and templates for your people and teams to roll out and introduce cross-functionally, without this many will see essential work streams take longer and negatively impact the business 

Coaching 

  1. Confidence Low: Throughout my coaching, confidence is at an all-time low and many do not know what is going to work – this is something we can work on and have small wins to help rebuild. If you are a confidence low or dropped lately, find out what you can do to improve performance or ask for feedback on something you and your team have delivered that had a true impact 
    > Lesson to learn: Confidence changes throughout the year, especially towards the end of the year, work on positively influencing your own confidence and teams around you, and build up collective confidence with small wins and micro moments
  2. No Actual Strategy: Many Department leads do not know how to build a plan and connect it to the company goals. Many leads struggle to build a plan that sparks inspiration throughout the team, especially when pushed on why are we doing this. Build out your beliefs, bets and pillars, this will help your team to buy in and see a why when they are told performance is falling behind   
    > Lesson to learn: Not everything can be a strategy, not every department should have their own strategy, they should have their departmental and team plans that roll up into strategy not just a list of tactics
  3. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat: Many CEOs struggle with repeating the same x pillars to keep the teams on track, and many struggle to be confident in their plan that flows through the organisation 
    > Lesson to learn: Each year and every quarter create a schedule to replay and repeat your strategic pillars and why they are important. Don’t wait for quarterly events, be a little ad-hoc, vary the channel of comms to enforce the message. When you are bored of being bored about repeating these, know you have to change the words to make this stick. If the teams cannot repeat it and make a little joke about it you aren’t doing it enough. 

Culture  

  1. Bad Behaviours = Culture: Bad behaviours have crept back into the office and hybrid work, especially in working sessions that are disguised as meetings; with no or bad agendas, no explanation of why this is a meeting, what success looks like etc  
    > Lesson to learn: Remove bad behaviours and roll out change with meeting agendas, tell people why they are part of meetings and what type of session or meeting this is.
    Request access to my personal guide 
  2. Remember Culture Never Stops Evolving: Many are finding out that Culture is always on, always evolving, not a workstream that has to be managed, understood regularly and checked in on   
    > Lesson to learn: Have a culture community manager, ideally away from HR that is trusted and can feel the change happening and helps to shape and reshape culture. 
  3. Bad Tech = Bad Progress: Many are defaulting to old and bad technology and are force fitting to work in old ways not finding better software for hosting workshops etc 
    > Lesson to learn: Stop blaming old tech and bad tech choices for force-fitting old behaviours into existing tools. It is time to review your tools and toolkits and either invest or remove bad use cases and bring in better tools for the jobs to be done. 
  4. Burnout Happening Everywhere: Burnout is a continuing theme many are not addressing and refuse to get to the root cause. Most leaders experience this more often than they realise and the negative impact is huge.  
    Lesson to learn: Stop making burnout something people do not know exists and stop relying on mental health apps. Burnout is a much bigger theme within all businesses, be smarter and get ahead by building programs around the triggers.
    > Learn from Burnout Coach Anish Hallan on addressing why mental health cannot be a perk and ways to address it 
  5. Misselling Perks Business: “Perk-based culture” has died for almost all companies and many haven’t attempted to address this and actually reconsidered what company culture is and is not
    > Lesson to learn: Although perks are an important part of differentiating many companies, perks = culture ideology has to stop and stop from being pushed from the HR and management teams. Learn to grow your company culture, look at how you can be different and better and grow up as a business as the perks as culture movement is going to limit companies progression and stop internal hiring referrals  
  6. Time Is Being Stolen: Time is precious, we are told this from a young age, yet many are struggling with time management and many leaders have influenced those around them that sitting in meetings is work and a good use of time. Meeting Recovery Syndrome (MRS) also impacts how time is spent or wasted post-meetings. The ripple effect is much bigger than people realise. Your time is your time, learn to time block or remove bad recurring meetings, poorly planned working sessions and over-emphasis in real-time status updates that only add value to one of the people joining the meeting. This also happens when people believe slack or teams chat is work 
    > Lesson to learn: Remove your time being added into your calendar that doesn’t have agendas, remove recurring meetings that add no value to you and the business and reduce other people’s frustration when you are not caught up with performance as you have not prepared or looked at their updates. Hint: If you want a new years resolution, you should consider scoring every meeting and understand how useful it was for you and the attendees. 

Thanks for reading again this year and I look forward to adding more value to your day every week.

Danny Denhard

Focus Frameworks to check out 

One Problem Two Solutions Framework – how to frame problems and pitch the solution and a backup solution 

Companywide Decision Document & Framework – how to explain decisions to the company and receive better questions on decisions made by leadership 

Get To Know Each Other Framework – struggling to get to truly know your team or colleagues, this will help set a base of questions and understand others’ triggers 

25 Meetings Recommendation – How to optimise and improve your meetings within your business 

Categories
Leaders Letter Newsletter

Leaders Letter 116 – Go Back To Basics

Dear leaders, you would be surprised how many businesses are struggling with who they are, what they should be offering and why they should be offering their product or services. 

In recent weeks, I have spoken to a number of CEOs and Marketing leads and they are at a crossroads, unsure if they are in the right market, messaging the right way and actually adding value. 

Something I recommend all businesses to go through is a super simple six-question process. 

This is something I typically run through right at the beginning of workshops but in this current climate and the number of fears people have, here are the six questions you will want to visit and gain alignment over. This is particularly useful if you are due a long-range planning meeting or you have your annual operating plan meeting coming up. 

You would have seen iterations of these questions in popular business canvas, something to keep in mind, canvas are completed and then forgotten about, this is why you should record the decision-making process and then summarise at the end of the session (importantly remember to add this to your decision document

(And yes, these are deliberately simple to make you think and revisit your core fundamental beliefs and you have to answer these questions in order 1 down to 6) 

  1. Problems: What are the top 3 problems you are actually solving? 
  2. Needs Solving: Why are these problems solving your customer’s needs? 
  3. Customers: Who are the target customers? 
  4. Selling Problem Solves: How are you actually selling the problems you’re solving? 
  5. Unique: What are you uniquely offering? 
  6. Find: How are customers going to find or discover you? 

Something to keep in mind, these questions are deliberately simple questions to focus business leads, the more simple the questions are, the better the answers tend to be, the trick with this exercise is to ensure it fits on one a3 piece of paper and the document to act as a compass moving forward. 

So this week, your action plan: plan this session with your leadership team and even give the 6 questions a go and see where you land, if you cannot answer these questions I would suggest you really drive this session forward as quickly as possible (if not everyone can answer this the same way you have a real alignment issue)

Thanks and have a great week ahead, 

Danny Denhard

Essential Reading For The Week Ahead

Categories
hybrid office Leadership Strategy

Free AOP and LRP Resources 

A dedicated list of free AOP and LRP resources from Focus.

Site data is a great indicator of what is happening in the market and how management teams are operating. From the focus data, it is clear to see what phase many companies are operating at and what activities they are undertaking. 

It is clear many businesses are in long-range planning or revisiting their annual company-wide strategy. 

Below are the most popular and most useful free resources to help you with your AOP’s (annual operating plan) and LRP’s (long-range planning).

Resource Link
(Click below to jump to the free resource)
Use Case / Why To Use
Annual Playbook Template For Company-Wide SuccessA free template to use to create your one company-wide strategy
The Difference Between Mission, Vision, Strategy & TacticsThe explainer behind why you need to understand the difference between mission, vision, strategy and tactics (and why you should concentrate on the flow of information)
The Focus Corporate Speak Bingo CardThe corporate buzzwords we overuse (this is extremely popular for LRP and creates fun moments when LRP are notoriously tense)
The Lessons From “Why Coinbase Shut Down Woke Activism”Lessons from Coinbase’s deliberate move to remove external political factors and focus on work. Great to understand if you want a top-down company culture or flowing culture
Andy Jassy’s Masterpiece MemoAmazon CEO’s comms masterpiece, a framework of how to use written communications to your whole company. 
Should Companies Remove Chat Apps Like Teams And Slack?A resource to help you understand if you removing instant messengers and chat apps like Teams and Slack will drive positive change within your business and remove the busy badge of honour
Hybrid Work GuideA free detailed hybrid work guide, 35 pages of actionable tips and tricks to make hybrid work for your business
Decision DocumentHow to improve communication within your organisation with an asynchronous document explaining key decisions and how the decisions were made and importantly why. 
Rethink The Leader – Manager – Coach – Mentor – Operator DynamicAn exercise to understand the different dynamics and a way to rethink if you need more managers or actually need to look for more coaches and external mentors
Free Internal Get To Know Each Other Profile TemplateSomething all businesses struggle with is getting to know colleagues and ways to formalise getting to know each other. This template is popular for new and promoted managers 
How To Fix A Toxic CultureSays exactly what it does on the tin, a guide on how to fix toxic and bad company culture

If you are looking to receive the best frameworks and insights on leadership, company performance and company culture, sign up below:

Categories
Company Culture

Operation Revive COIN – Coinbase Top Down Culture Issues

Over the last two weeks, Coinbase has been on a mission to address the well-publicised Coinbase cultural issues.

Most recently Coinbase CEO and founder Brian Armstrong’s appeared on the Good Time Show (with backers a16z appearing), where he attempted to address the coinbase culture, suggesting they were focusing on a work-driven mission.

Top Down Culture In Action Or Challenge Culture? ⚠️

Over the past week, (June 10th) Brian attempted to address a long thread on YCombinator News (aka Hacker News) with his thoughts on why Operation Revive COIN is a dumb idea.

Operation Revive COIN is a vote of no confidence in the COO Emilie Choi, Chief Product Officer Surojit Chatterjee, and Chief People Officer LJ Brock by the Coinbase teams.

The Complaint Filed

Petition to Remove COO Emilie Choi, Chief Product Officer Surojit Chatterjee, and Chief People Officer LJ Brock in a Vote of No Confidence

Summary: We the employees at Coinbase believe that the executive team has recently been making decisions that are not in the best interests of the Company, its employees, and its shareholders. COO Emilie Choi, CPO Surojit Chatterjee, and Chief People Officer LJ Brock have been the most prominent executives who have been executing plans and ideas that have led to questionable results and negative value. Some of these include the following: 

  1. The failure of the Coinbase NFT platform
  2. The over-prioritization of certain products, which has led to a lack of focus on other important issues like infrastructure
  3. Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture
  4. Aggressively hiring for thousands of roles, despite the fact that it is an unsustainable plan and is contrary to the wisdom of the crypto industry 
  5. Not being able to output any higher or better quality products and services despite aggressively hiring more employees
  6. Rescinding offers to new employees despite promising them that their offers would not be rescinded two weeks earlier, leading to a massive negative reception from the public and the industry at-large
  7. The failure to communicate important ideas and plans to the rest of the company, such as the possibility of lay-offs and the plan to fix many technical debts 
  8. A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer

**
**

Their actions have hurt multiple parties: 

  1. The employees, who have to deal with the unrealistic demands from said executives and the damage they have caused on a day-to-day basis
  2. The shareholders, who have seen their stock price continually fall, especially from the high of $420 at the beginning of the IPO and the middle range of $250 throughout the summer of 2021
  3. The company itself, whose plummeting stock value and bad workplace management led to low morale and the threats of losing top talent 
  4. The company’s reputation to the public, where people are less likely to view Coinbase as a trustworthy and reliable crypto exchange to do business with

Because of these factors, we believe that Coinbase should immediately find replacements for LJ Brock, Surojit Chatterjee, and Emilie Choi. We hope to find people who have had experience in the crypto space and can run such a company more responsibly. 

Signed,

Aired In Public, Addressed On Twitter

Brian rightly points out it is on him as the CEO and many other valid points on his twitter thread.

Leaders Lead is always what you are trained but is this time for the management team to own collectively? Yes!

The biggest issue here: the three of the most powerful and influential leaders to ask to be removed publically identifies a huge distrust problem.

The issue here is his leadership is obviously creating fractions for his management team and then disconnecting with the middle managers and causing issues that are not being reported back in management meetings.

These issues are highlighting a real disconnect between the managers and the “leaders” within Coinbase.

In addition, the agreement of mission-focused work and delivering on cultural promises is obviously not being translated well from the c-suite to VP to team level.

Question To Ask Externally

This does raise the question when you and many others believe in the promoted performance-based culture and work-focused culture, where do you go to voice these concerns especially when you have likely raised these internally and have been dismissed.

Can ‘challenge culture‘ work in an environment like this?

When issues go unaddressed it creates internal and departmental conflicts and creates combative them vs us environments.

Many company cultures and subcultures are overly reliant on the business leader to acknowledge, discuss internally and then share their approach externally as a listed company.

Pattern sends alarm bells and signals there is potentially a leadership issue. When having to address in public and address open internal issues.

Will The Headcount Reduction Going To Highlight The Biggest Issue?

On the 14th of June, Coinbase announced 18% reduction in headcount, with three main factors referenced in the shared email on the coinbase blog:

(1) Economic conditions are changing rapidly
(2) Managing our costs is critical in down markets
(3) We grew too quickly (suggestions of over 5000 employees).

It is unclear which exact areas of coinbase were impacted, it is likely the COO, CPO and Chief People Officer were not included despite the ongoing issues.

Will this headcount reduction reduce fractions or highlight the issues more clearly? Most likely highlighting the ongoing issues and potentially increasing the bad company culture bubbling up to the top of the external news cycle.

Any PR Is Not Good PR

In the previous podcast discussions and addressing external factors coming into the workplace, Brian mentioned how well that it played out after a month or so with top-quality talent wanting to join.

Right now this is coming back to bite Brian and his business performance. Externally pointing fingers by teams rarely works, however, this really does demonstrate a need for critical discussions.

With company culture being recognised as an essential factor of successful businesses, will this count against Coinbase leadership? The quick answer for sure, especially with crypto’s recent performance, the volatility within the web3 space.

This fight in public opens Coinbase and the business up to showing the bigger and ongoing issues internally, namely the trust of the leadership team and those who have joined and delivered weaker products leading to poor performance.

The CEO in any business has to live and die by the sword especially ones with continued rumblings and continued people-related issues.

In the coming weeks, we will likely hear less about the internal issues with Coinbase, listed companies often have a way to reduce the external reporting, however, with so many stories and known issues this is unlikely to go away and it could be another story where business “leaders” on the c-suite exit the business to plaster over these issues.

Social media will be a hard place for the Coinbase leadership team as many will air their truths, especially after the large headcount reduction.

Is this unique in the business world in 2022? – no, however, this is a theme Coinbase is setting for others – yes. It is going to be a case study in years to come on how to or how not to handle internal issues when you are lorded as a leading light by some powerful figures and identified for what leadership is not anymore.

Want more?

If you want to understand the coinbase founders’ beliefs on culture and woke culture this is an interesting interview with Lex Fridman.

Resources To Improve Company Culture

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Leaders Letter Newsletter

Leaders Letter 104 – If I Were To Take Over The Company Tomorrow What Would I Do? 

Dear Leaders, this week a lesson and an exercise from one of the names you should know but might not. 

I recently read a long profile of Tobi (Tobias) Lütke and it really made me consider what makes a great leader within mature businesses making a difference. 

Tobi is the CEO and founder of Shopify, he is widely recognised as one of the most influential and important CEO’s of modern-day business. 

Tobi is famous for asking the five whys and wanting to understand each component of the engine to truly understand the topic and help to shape his business future. 

Tobi is well known for having a saying
if I were to take over the company tomorrow, what would I do?” 

Simple but effective right. 

Remember — sometimes the most simple question and comments are the most impactful. 

Exercise To Try: I often say to founders and management teams, go up a level and ask themselves if we had to restart what we would change tomorrow, next week and next month. 

I like to consider this question as a quickfire question to ask leaders within your business and then a deep pondering to address in asynchronous work. A working document (slides in my typical use case) and ensure everyone has a chance to think, draft and create an action plan they would take forward. 

What would you change within your company if you took over tomorrow? 

What elements are truly broken and need instant attention. Prioritisation will be the hardest part of this, nonetheless, it is an essential exercise. 

This works with bigger themes like company culture, long term strategy and checking in on your mission and vision for the company.

Sketch / Design Over Tables: Something I drive forward in sessions like this is imagery, whether hand sketched or created within your favourite editing tool because you put in more effect and more thought into making it understandable for colleagues. 

Yes, a table is often the easiest (and you will rarely hear me tell you not to create a simple as possible table with the right columns and rows), however, a table doesn’t enable you and your colleagues to demonstrate the connective element of pen on paper or really thinking about the steps and flow.

Make It A Priority: I recommend you take this question quarterly, if you have quarterly business reviews (QBR’s) and in long-range planning (LRP’s). 

Moving forward into Q3 and H2, make this a question you have to ask yourself and then those around you. 

Thanks and best of luck in answering this simple but driving question.

Danny Denhard

Learn From Other Business Leaders

Categories
Strategy

How To Present Annual Strategy & Leadership Vision

Every business has a variation of creating strategy and creating a vision for the company, everyone does this slightly differently, particularly in the hybrid work era.

The Rules Of Vision 

As previously written in the company vision cheatsheet, the vision is a ten-year top level achievable driver for the company, vision is what you will strive to become from successful strategic steps. 

You can revisit your Vision every 3 years. More revisiting means it is not a vision it is a tactics based strategy. 

Vision should be set by leadership and the supporting panel.

With the many options available in today’s work environment, there are a few steps to ensure you take to ensure the strategy or vision lands well.  

A/ You have to make the presenter comfortable, they have to know their content and be able to feel like they have landed their message the best way they can
 
B/ Ask for specific feedback and questions in set time frames to ensure you have covered those who have attended and those who were absent.

C/ Set guidelines of what is negotiable and timelines to review and drive these steps forward. 

A company vision is a great step and long term compass, however, the likelihood is the team needs to know they are co-pilots and there are steps they can drive forward with. 

The Most Effective Way To Land The Presentation 

Pre Record: 

  • I recommend pre-recording the video of the presentation (that way stick to a time schedule – 10-30 minute max) and taking the Q&A in real-time. 
  • Consider how you can add (cc) captions for those who may have disabilities
  • You can now embed videos within videos across PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides and Canva 
  • Ensure all links or reference points are linked to and available (HBR articles, big reports and articles are often behind paywalled and inaccessible) 
  • Allows team members to download the presentation deck to review after the presentation
  • You can also ensure the presentation is something people can watch back (for those who cannot attend or on annual leave etc)  

Call To Actions

  • Leverage the forms of tech available now and ensure you encourage engagement and CTA’s 
  • Leverage QR codes and links to create an open discussion. 

Connective Chairperson 

Consider a chairperson to ensure it is a true Q&A format with the “leader” and the team and then people can ask follow up questions and is managed away from the founder or CEO presenting. This step is important as they chairperson will be the bridge between the founder and the staff members. 

Tip: Something that works well is keeping a couple of pre-planned or “pre-approved” questions as many don’t want to be the first to ask a question and can spark conversation or create ideas in the team’s head.  

Tools To Leverage: 

  • Slido is easy to organise Q&A and can gain votes on questions. This covers introverts, extroverts and ambiverts. 
  • Chat Apps – If you use slack or teams you can leverage the anonymous bot and settings to ask questions or give feedback. 
  • Forms – Google forms can work but fails with threaded conversations. Microsoft forms are an option too however they can be
  • Spreadsheets – Some use Google Sheets or Excel to 
  • Consider votes – 
  • If you have a company wiki or internal knowledge centre ensure you record the event and post the presentation and Q&A to ensure it is accessible to all. 

Ensure Clarity

Many smaller companies and startups enjoy the open approach and ability to add specific emojis to reach or show support, however, these emojis and reactions are hard to interrupt and very often any follow up is not anonymous leading to some frustrations. 

Departments & Future Teamwork

Your company culture is a crucial element to consider and keep front of mind, especially when presenting a company strategy that many have not been involved in or if you have changed the company vision you will be painting a picture that could seem like a huge shift, businesses struggle with big change without a detailed plan they are can add into.  

Remember Vision & Strategy Are Very Different  

Vision and strategy are very different streams of work, it is imperative to ensure these two streams are clearly defined and the audience knows the difference and clearly shows how the strategy rolls up into a broader vision. 

No connection will cause a disconnect and ripple through the business. 

Timeframe 

Always offer 24 hours for those who like to digest the information and then come back to ask questions, this often enables smarter discussions and follow up workstreams. 

If you have not presented in this style before, expect it to land well quickly or be something many feel they will require time to digest and then come back with questions. 

Best of luck presenting your company vision and supporting company-wide strategy and remember to ask for feedback and insights to improve for the follow-up sessions. 

Essential Strategy Resources

Categories
Leaders Letter Newsletter

Leaders Letter 100 – 10 Lessons From 100 Leaders’ Letters

Dear leaders, it is the 100th leadership newsletter I am sending out, it is the 100-week streak, where I share lessons on company culture, ideas on leadership and frameworks to help improve your people and performance leadership. 

Today I wanted to share 10 lessons your feedback, questions and requests to collaborate. Here are the ten most popular alongside supporting content to help you make a difference to your career and those around you. 

  1. Leadership is getting harder 
    1. 7 great leadership traits 
    2. 21 leadership lessons
    3. Write your team a handwritten letter
  2. Management is getting harder but getting more rewarding 
    1. Record micro-moments to celebrate as a team
    2. Questions to ask to improve people’s performance 
    3. Three ways to connect with your department
  3. Many leaders were not taught the difference between strategy and tactics 
    1. Strategy is like baking a cake
    2. Strategy cheatsheet
    3. What mission, vision, strategy and tactics actually are
  4. Creating a long term vision is hard 
    1. What is company vision
    2. Why some people have vision and others don’t
    3. The future of business is community 
  5. Hybrid is hard work and many are unprepared 
    1. Hybrid work guide 
    2. Google’s Hybrid Manifesto – its ok manifesto 
    3. How to remove proximity bias (how to beat the managing in person is best)
  6. The great resignation is the great awaking for many middle to senior leaders 
    1. The 3p’s keys to winning business in 2022 and beyond 
    2. The 3 stages of your business, what it was, what it is and what it is going to be 
    3. Have you stepped too far away from your customer’s problems?
    4. Why it is ok to be on the fence for your company
  7. Meetings are taking over 60% of managements time 
    1. 25 proven recommendations to improve meetings 
    2. Would a Bill Gates get away week work for you
    3. Time to audit your calendar
  8. Communication is hard to gain any traction 
    1. Andy Jassy’s communication masterclass
    2. The first and last ten seconds is vital to winning communications
    3. How to kill constant internal noise and gain cut through
  9. Company culture is not given enough of a focus and is only ever an agenda item 
    1. Improve company culture with department principles 
    2. The 4f framework – Feel, Fascinate, Future, Flourish  
    3. Create management pods to connect leaders to company culture
  10. Team management is a struggle, especially in Hybrid or remote-first companies 
  1. Always re-onboard your teams to the office
  2. A simple game to connect with your team
  3. The hand over and hand back process

Have a great week and you can get in contact at any point by emailing me directly. 

Thanks,

Danny Denhard

BTW I am taking on a limited number of clients, do you need a coach? 

Other great helpful resources 

Be Inspired By Others 

Jeff Bezos’s business lessons 

7 business rules from Elon Musk

Stripe’s communication masterclass

Think Differently 

Time for a performance panel

Annual strategy playbook template

Two up two across framework for career development

Categories
Leaders Letter Newsletter

Leaders Letter 97 – Your Infected Moat Is An Internal Disease

Dear Leaders, Over the last decade, a moat (business moat / economic moat) is what every business has been searching for and attempting to build. Believe it or not, it is a lot harder than most executives think. 

“A company's moat refers to its ability to maintain the competitive advantages that are expected to help it fend off competition and maintain profitability into the future.” - Source

As someone who has been an operator on the Product, Marketing and Growth sides, I have heard and used moat hundreds of times. 

In a recent coffee catch up, a couple of industry friends and I discussed an important area that goes unspoken, and what I dubbed “the infected moat”.

When the believed competitive advantage blinds your company-wide strategy, it infects your internal messaging and affects your company so much it starts to hinder the business performance and your company culture

Misleading and blinding your people is one of the most damaging aspects of company culture and can cause decay to the foundation of the business. 

You stop building, you rely on optimising the final steps of the funnel and you reduce your budgets and hiring based on infected beliefs and data. 

One of the most common infected moats is believing you have network size or quality of data which means you have the best product in the market. 

You rely too heavily on your data, you rely too heavily on the algorithms and you become a Blackberry (vs Apple), Yahoo (vs Google) and most recently an Instagram (vs TikTok).  

This comes down to the management of the company, the misunderstanding of the influence of the brand, the power of the product and the state of the market or a blind obsession with competitors versus being informed by your customers and competitors. 

Something I recommended is to audit your business, audit your product, audit your marketing, audit your growth activities and go deeper than reviewing just top-level insights and competitors’ actions. 

Don’t allow your moat to become infected, impact your people and performance and don’t develop a blind spot that is of your own doing. 

This week focus on reviewing your moat, auditing it and planning to evolve. 

Thanks and have a great week,

Danny Denhard

Essential Strategy Reading

Categories
Leaders Letter Newsletter

Leaders Letter 95 – Time For A Performance Panel

Good morning leaders, a quick pondering for you today. 

After speaking at a conference pre-pandemic, I was asked if I could join a panel discussion around how to improve business performance. My “role” was from a Growth perspective as there was already a CEO and a COO on the panel and the original panellist couldn’t make the event. 

A theme of questions arose from the attendees, what do you do to improve performance or receive fresh ideas and perspectives when performance maybe stagnates. 

The others on the panel provided good answers and offered ways to trust internal staff and double down on what got them there. 

I recommended something different.

A performance panel

The panel is not too dissimilar to what you likely have internally, a group of people who analyse and discuss performance, review the data and make recommendations on the next set of actions. 

My difference, you introduce formal external advisors to your panel. 

Why? 

  • Not stuck to doing it way its always done 
  • Not restricted by knowing details of the roadmap constraints
  • Help with getting out of the weeds 
  • External intel, often knowing what others are struggling with and if there are changes your internal team are unfamiliar with 
  • Less panic = less stress. Calmer environment to review and attack potential issues 
  • New ideas – fresh approaches often help 
  • If you are a department lead you spend too much fighting on behalf of your team, external assistance and expertise will greatly help support or guide 

This can work across the board, it can work from adding Operations, Marketing, Growth, Product, Technical, HR and company culture representatives.  

You will have to onboard the panellists, you will have to brief them well and allow access, the formal agreements can work like non-executive directors and can be formalised to a few days per month. 

For the existing department leads, ensure they are prepared to share insights, they are comfortable in asking for help, curious about what is recommended, and take some time to build the connection and trust, this will be key when they look to roll out the recommendations of your panellists. 

This week consider how you could improve not only performance when there is a dip but company-wide performance when there are opportunities to grow, hire smarter and develop departmental plans and your company-wide strategy with external advisors. 

Thanks,

Danny Denhard

Categories
Strategy

The Mission, Vision, 5x Principles, Strategy, Departmental Plans, Tactics Cheatsheet  

The one word that confuses so many companies is strategy, what strategy is and is not and who sets strategy, plans and tactics.

In one of the most popular and most shared leaders newsletter, WTF is strategy we shared how you build strategy, simply: you have one company-wide strategy, departmental plans rolling up into the strategy and then tactical layers underneath.

Simple right?

Well, it should be, however, with so many demands to have longer plans and missions to complete, here is a free breakdown and cheatsheet to build the right framework for your company’s strategy journey.

The Mission, Vision, 5x Principles, Strategy, Departmental Plans, Tactics Cheatsheet  

Mission

The incompletable mission your company is on. The biggest of achievements.

Missions can be revisited every five to ten years or in big times of world change.
Set by leadership (founder + board)

Vision

The ten-year vision for the company, vision is what you will strive to become.

Vision is to be revisited every 3 years. 
Set by leadership and supporting panel

5x Principles

The guiding principles to make decisions. If there is confusion or your strategy is going off course, your principles make decisions easier and guide you into the vision and the mission.

These principles should be re-visited each year but stay the majority the same to keep the company on track
Set by leadership and supporting panel

Annual Strategy

The annual company-wide strategy, the things you are going to do and the things you definitely will not be doing. It should fit on one page and everyone in the business should be able to tell you what it is and what success looks like.

The annual strategy should be re-visited but rarely ever change significantly.
Set by leadership

Departmental Plan

No company should have departmental strategies, your department plans have to roll into the annual strategy. Your plans have to be cross-functional and understand the overlap and how you work together with other departments to make the company successful. If there are no cross-functional elements to part of the plan, you have to revisit.

Departmental plans can evolve and change but when they do it has to be known across the business.
Revisit the plans every month, these unlikely should significantly change quarterly
Set by the department (lead+) and their panel    

Tactics

These are the number of activities you will take, including the channels and the levers the teams are going to pull to roll up into the plan, that rolls up into the annual company-wide strategy.

Tactics can change regularly, fortnightly/bi-weekly to quarterly. The more you change, the more you will struggle to keep everyone updated and believe in long terms plans.
Set by tactical discipline team

Supporting Resources