After 18 months of delivering virtual simulation-based Business Acumen programs to more than 5,000
What astounded me was the level of efficiency from the team of 4 representing four different functions within the business spread out over 3 different continents. When I talk about “efficiency”, I am referring to the ability of this one team of leaders to finish their learning experience, mainly a business simulation exercise where they were running their own business, in about 75% of the time allocated and with spectacular results. Most teams we work with run out of time because they don’t yet have the discipline to avoid analysis paralysis.
In all my years of conducting similar training programs, I have never seen anything like this. After the program was over, I set up an interview with the team to try to discover what made them so special and unique. What they shared are very valuable lessons of leadership development and business strategy execution.
Their overall message was that they had a core value of diversity and inclusion as their primary driver of decision making. When I explored, I learned the following from them:
Business Strategy – While setting their strategy of deep Customer Intimacy, they made sure everyone agreed and everyone on the team had experiences (both good and bad) with executing a customer intimacy strategy. By leveraging the diversity of thought, and including everyone’s experiences, they were able to efficiently choose and then execute their strategy.
Resource Management – Once their strategy was set, the team next set out to manage their most critical resources: time and cash. They established a team norm for how much time to spend and how to spend it; specifically, they followed the “Playing to Win” strategic framework and established 5 critical capabilities and that’s where they spent their time and cash. They also had a discipline not to spend time and cash on things that were of lesser importance. Again, they used the diversity of experiences to make their aligned decisions.
Comfort with Ambiguity – Early on in the process, the team met and discussed the possible challenges they faced in the simulation workshop. Two of the four team members shared they were comfortable with ambiguity and 2 said that they hated ambiguity. As a result, the two who felt comfortable in the ambiguous areas worked in those areas and reported back to the others their recommendation and decisions.
Listened to all Perspectives – Another foundational tenant of their approach was to insist on listening to all perspectives in their focused and targeted areas of capabilities. Instead of taking longer, they were able to get right to the heart of the issues, opportunities, and challenges and understand all perspectives before making key business decisions.
Processed Disagreements and Never Compromised – The most interesting observation was how the team processed disagreements as they leveraged their team diversity in decision-making. Again, they decided early on never to compromise on a key decision. Rather, they processed the disagreements, listened to all of the perspectives, and then came to total alignment on the decisions by advocating the relationship between the decision and the strategy. By the second year of the 5-year simulation, they were taking about half the time of the “norm” because their aligned decisions were simple adjustments because the team was aligned and the decisions logically followed their strategy.
In summary, there are five critical things you can do as leader to leverage diversity & inclusion to better manage time and accelerate business results: