How to accelerate strategic capabilities  

The challenge

Andie is the operations director of a large public organization undergoing a major restructuring of its products and services. The organization is simultaneously grappling with serious uncertainty around funding. Under pressure to design and build a set of new strategic roadmaps in this ambiguous context, Andie faces the additional challenge of managing a group of teams that have struggled to break free from silos in the past and that tend to jostle for influence within the organization. To break through deadlocks and better align these teams around strategy building, Andie has decided to go all in on “agility,” a solution that has worked well for Andie personally in the past. Andie believes that by insisting that team leaders be more agile in their processes and practices, the bulk of the issues they face will find their resolution. While Andie feels passionate about agile teamwork as a solution, team leaders, however, have failed to respond with enthusiasm, and the silos have remained.

Andie is struggling to find a better solution. Feeling stressed about the lack of enthusiasm and traction in team meetings and deeply worried about the continuing external uncertainties facing these teams and the organization, Andie requests support from an executive coach.

The coaching journey

Initially, exploratory conversations with the coach reveal that as a manager, Andie sometimes struggles to relinquish control. Adamant that a focus on agility training will provide the solution, Andie finds it genuinely hard to consider other approaches or perspectives. A deeper discussion with the coach points to a paradox this has created for the team. Andie’s need for control has, in fact, deepened the silos, as team leaders have learned to come to Andie with problems and concerns and wait for Andie to resolve them. Instead of working together or finding ways to collaborate, team leaders have come to see the solution as reporting issues to Andie and waiting for decisions. Andie has effectively become a bottleneck to agility.

Talking openly and in a safe space with the coach, Andie’s coach gives candid and important feedback about Andie’s (self-confessed) tendency to “maneuver” team leaders by encouraging (unhealthy) competition between teams, for instance, or setting financial targets without fully articulating the strategic objectives that underlie them. Andie now begins to see that a lack of clear communication — multilateral communication with and between the team leaders — is working against them and that success metrics need to extend beyond financial results to include things like enhanced collaboration and shared ownership for outcomes. Andie’s instinct for agility might be able to see that a lack of clear communication — and communicating with them more openly, makes them unlikely to make this a reality.