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Strategic Coaching
for
Improved Performance - 2
• How can I best influence Key Stakeholders?
- Stakeholders own the environment in which an organisation lives
and breathes. They can make it easy or difficult for you, but as
a Chief Executive you really have no alternative but to influence
them in order to maximise your own room for manoeuvre. John Bryson
in his clear thinking book "Strategic Planning for non-profit making
organisations" emphasises this point strongly:
“the key to success for public and
non-profit organisations ... is the satisfaction of Key Stakeholders”
Each of the Stakeholders relevant to the operation of your organisation
will have positions, interests and needs which will guide their
relationship to your organisation and its objectives whether or
not you ask them to. Working with key Stakeholders to identify these
positions, interests and needs can be a very powerful way of exposing
both conflict and areas of potential cooperation. Certainly creating
a strategic environment in which your business objectives are communicated,
understood and linked to those of your key Stakeholders can help
you make an effective strategic step change.
• How can I make a strategic step change?
- Step changes are clever because they allow the Chief Executive
to move over the current performance problem to a future state which
key Stakeholders and the organisation themselves has identified
as a problem. Rather than spending all their time clearing the log
jams, Chief Executives can move up river and find out how the logs
are getting in there! It allows Chief Executives to move from spending
their time “balancing the books” (a Chief Operating Officer
role), to establishing the demand management systems the absence
of which is causing the books to be imbalanced in the first place,
(a strategic function). Or again, instead of acting individually,
across a health economy, acting together to achieve desired strategic
changes.
“...the one of greatest benefit to
me was the recent “12,000 Miles Service”. The team found
it immensely helpful and I got from it what I needed as Director,
including the crucial answer to a personal challenge around my extent
of engagement around the team”
So, strategic coaching moves organisations and
their leaders from where they are and don’t want to be, to
where they want to go. The coaching process helps them identify
the role for themselves and their organisation in achieving that
change and the changed behaviours and relationships which will be
required in order to make a successful step change into the future.
These individual steps to change are not in themselves complicated
but every one of them is a complex problem which in the hurly burly
of the day-to-day running of big organisations tend to be simply
too much to face. Strategic coaching certainly can make a difference
to this by making a real contribution to the management of change
over the longer term. Dick Stockford is a Business Coach and Director
of Strategic Postioning Ltd.
