Are You An Order-Taker? with Lisa Mitchell

“We tell ourselves the story that strategy is Big!  Complex!  Hard! Time-consuming!”
-Lisa Mitchell

Do you ever just give in to a client’s demands because you don’t want to be seen as “pushing back?”

Today’s episode is a solo one about your STRATEGIC VALUE as a Talent, HR or L&D professional.  And it’s about what gets in our way of being strategic.

I’d love to hear YOUR challenges with stakeholders who like to prescribe the solutions they want you to implement.  And if you’d like some help with your Talent Management or L&D strategy, please reach out.   You can send  me an email at lisa@greenappleconsulting.ca, or a message via Linkedin. 

In this episode of Talent Management Truths, you’ll discover:

• A great way to shift into strategic thinking and partnering, using what you already know
• The story we tell ourselves when avoiding strategic work
• A real example of a leader who resisted the urge to be an order taker in the name of customer service

Enjoy!

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Transcript

LM Ep 119

 [00:00:00] Welcome back to Talent Management Truths. I'm your host, Lisa Mitchell. Today is a mini solo episode about your strategic value as a talent, HR or l and d professional. It's about why you deserve a seat at the [00:01:00] proverbial table. Do you remember, you know, when you were a kid and you couldn't figure out why your parents couldn't just take you to Disney World every year, or maybe why?

Why couldn't your high school just put in a pop machine to save everyone from going to the plaza to buy stuff? Wouldn't that be so logical? I even remember being in my twenties, in my first corporate job and complaining with my friends about how the company didn't just like, why didn't they just upgrade our antiquated computer system?

I mean, they were profitable, right? So, you know, what's missing in all those memories? Well, there are examples of how I was limited in my understanding or why certain situations were the way they were and I didn't do anything about it at the time. My views were short term and based solely on my own experience and my opinions and, and also a whole whack of as assumptions.

But, you know, I don't feel bad about that because none of us come into this world as fully formed strategic geniuses. [00:02:00] Strategic thinking is a skill that has to be learned and honed through experience, and the good news is that it can be learned. Even so many of the people that I meet, clients, podcast guests, networking contacts, you know, leaders at all levels, many of them struggle with being strategic air quotes, or in creating strategy.

They, you know, procrastinate and avoid working on strategic projects. They find it a struggle to make time for strategy, and this is true even if they are producing strategic work here and there. So what gives, while sometimes it may be a lack of experience or perspective, as in my earlier examples, in my humble opinion, it's usually because we complexify the issue in our minds.

We tell ourselves the story, that strategy is big. It's complex, it's hard, it's time consuming. [00:03:00] So we might focus more on the reactionary stuff, the transactional stuff, the easier stuff, the quickest off the desk stuff. And that makes me so sad because what's at stake? Well, what's at stake is your reputation as a value added strategic partner in your organization.

And that's what we all want. What's at stake is being perceived as merely an order taker because it's easier to just respond quickly to stakeholders who bring us their problems and when they bring the preconceived solution that they want you to execute on. So you've, you probably recognize some of these, but those solution prescriptions can sound like, Hey, I need you to go fix this, please, and thanks, or train these people fast, or policy these people into submission, please.

Et cetera. You get the picture. Now, let me tell you a little bit about one of my recent clients. She's new to learning and development, she was [00:04:00] handling a different portfolio before and is very smart and driven. So, so the company's decided to take a chance on her and to grow her, her portfolio to include l and d.

And, you know, to their credit, they decided to make sure that she was well supported and set up for success. So they hired me, which is, which is very nice of them and for me. so I was hired to support her as a behind the scenes mentor and also help her, her very junior team to accelerate their knowledge of l and d and project management and to guide the creation of a three-year l and d strategy for the organization.

Well, almost as soon as we started working together, she brought a situation to me for assistance. An area of the business. It's a big retail operation, so an area of the business had approached her and explained that a particular department of the retailer was producing product inconsistently across stores.

So there were staff that weren't following operating procedures. And this ops director told my client that she needed to put that operating procedure on the [00:05:00] LMS as an e-learning module in order to fix the problem. So you can see we have the problem and the prescription. So my client was very prepared to do just that, and she wanted my input on how to best go about it.

She was and is very eager to help. She's extremely customer focused. But what had she forgotten to do? Well, she, she forgot to put on her good old strategy glasses. You know, I'm being silly, but the ones with the strategic lens. She was accepting the problem and the prescribed solution at face value. Uh oh.

I mean, that's a no-no. When you want to be valued as a strategic partner. And you know, sometimes you don't even know what you're doing right. Or that you're doing this rather, you know, we simply wanna give the client what they think they want. I'm sure you relate. I certainly relate because I started out doing the same thing early in my, in my training career.

But what happened was [00:06:00] I didn't like seeing these fixes that I had implemented, not actually making a lick a difference over the long term. You know, the fixes were just band-aids and they, they never actually addressed the root cause. Plus, we have to remember that we, you are the experts in HR or training, not your client, and that's why they need you.

So be the experts, be the internal consultant. Going back to my client's situation, I said to her. You know, this sounds like we don't have the full picture. I think we need to approach this strategically. And, you know, she immediately agreed and then she said, but I have nowhere. I have no idea where to start.

Like, what, where, where do we go from here? So I asked her, all right, if I were an alien, which perhaps I am, but if I were an alien from outer space who just landed here and asked you to define strategic thinking for me, how would you describe [00:07:00] it? So she thought for a moment and then she started throwing out a few adjectives, visionary, long-term, holistic, analytical, curious.

Now, listeners, you might be adding a few of your own, which is great. Well take those adjectives and allow me to share a really cool trick with you when you need to be strategic. Take those dis descriptive adjectives and turn them into questions that you can ask your client. For example, let's take long term.

I might ask a client, so in the long term, what's the impact you want to see or what will be different compared to now? Let's look at, the word holistic. If we take that one, I might turn it into a question that sounds like, you know, if we look at this problem holistically from all angles, what are some other reasons the employees are not performing well?

I. So, you know, you're probably listening to this and going, oh yeah, [00:08:00] I've asked those questions before, but sometimes, oh, I could have and I didn't, and I don't know why. I mean, it, it's funny because you all know how to define strategic thinking. So it's just, it's just about how do we put it into action where we get stuck.

So, it's so funny 'cause often we, we know what to do, but we tell ourselves, we, we don't. So going back to my client from, from that conversation, she and I created some really great needs and analysis questions using strategic thinking. And then from there, she and her team went out and asked a lot of questions.

They talked with a few department managers, head office support staff for that area, operations directors, and some actual department employees. So what did they find was the root cause for the inconsistent and poor performance? Well, some stores had SOPs, standard operating procedures that were out of date, and some didn't know where the SOPs were.

Others had managers who encouraged staff to be creative and to quote, think outside [00:09:00] the SOP box. And in all cases, new hires did not receive any focus time for training. None. There were no dedicated training hours for them to learn their jobs, whether in a classroom or on a computer. They learned purely by doing, sometimes with a colleague or manager, demonstrating first if they were lucky.

Fast forward a month and you know, we worked a bit more on, on creating a, You know, a proposal in terms of what we recommended they do on their end and what, you know, my client's team could do now as sort of like low hanging fruit. So, you know, after that happened, she came back and she shared with me, I.

I love this, that as a result of our work to assess needs related to this very training request, there will be $700,000 worth of budget for new associate training in their stores after years of sink or swim onboarding. Very impressive. So instead of taking the training request at face value, IE, please go [00:10:00] fix these people's performance for us, we dug into what the root cause of the poor performance and inconsistency really was.

That's not being an or order taker, that is being strategic, that is adding value, real value to the organization with a direct impact on employee experience and ultimately customer satisfaction. So if you're avoiding something, putting pressure on yourself to somehow magically be more strategic and thinking it's more complex than it has to be.

Here's some tough love and some tips. Define strategic thinking. Again, write it down. Allow your descriptive words to inspire great questions, to help both you and your internal clients get clarity about a problem so that you can collaborate to solve it for good. So be that expert, be that internal consultant.

I had love to hear your challenges with with stakeholders who like to prescribe the solutions they want you to implement. [00:11:00] And if you'd like some help with your talent management or l and d strategy, please reach out. You can send me an email, lisa@greenappleconsulting.ca or a message on LinkedIn. I'd love to chat and if you found this episode valuable, please pretty please leave me a five star review with comments so others can find the show.

Have a great rest of your day and thank you for listening.